"HE THOUGHT IT WAS ALL OVER - AND IT VERY NEARLY WAS"
Interview By Christopher Wood

 

 

Six months ago, 20-year-old cellist Guy Johnston wasn't expecting to be the soloist in the opening concert of this year's Proms. The crucial email from his agent arrived in January. "It said: 'Guy, think about this very carefully. On 20 July, 2001, you have been invited...' – this was just another email: I get a few that say 'you've been invited' – '... to play in the opening night of the Proms under the direction of Leonard Slatkin' – oh yes, I've heard of him – 'in Elgar's Cello Concerto'."

 

At which point the penny dropped. "I thought, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Albert Hall, the Elgar, television ... oh my God."

 

Things have happened very quickly for Johnston since his triumph in the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition last year. "This year has seen such a dramatic change in my life," he says. "Everything I could have dreamt of has happened. This is, in a sense, the hardest time as far as pressure goes. There's an expectation. As Magnus, my brother, keeps telling me, 'When you go and play, don't think about anybody, just think of the music and you can't go wrong. Don't allow exterior pressures to get to you.' I think they're very wise words."

 

Johnston's capacity for coolness under pressure was tested to the limit during the Young Musician final when a cello string snapped. Panic was not on the agenda. "The only thing I thought when I got back on was, I've got to build this whole opening up again. It's a hard opening and I was glad to get it out of the way when the string snapped and I had to do it all over again."

 

Despite his obvious affinity for the instrument, Johnston came to the cello as much out of practical considerations as a love for its sound. Born almost entirely blind in his right eye, he found it easier to play an instrument which enabled him to see his fingers and the music at the same time, something more difficult to do on the violin.

 

Initial musical training was as a chorister at King's College, Cambridge, where the cello took a back seat: only during his final year was he allowed to drop Latin classes in order to practise. Further studies followed at Chetham's School in Manchester, after which Johnston enrolled at Eastman School of Music in America, where he still studies. Extra-curricular activities at Eastman include soccer, as they call it there, which nearly curtailed Johnston's playing career last year when a goalpost collapsed and landed on his hand. His whole arm was in plaster for weeks, and in the Blue Peter Prom last season he played "The Swan" from The Carnival of the Animals using only three fingers.

 

To say Johnston's family is musical is something of an understatement. According to Guy's mother Jill, who with her husband runs a music school in Harpenden and organises summer music courses across the UK, all four children are as gifted as Guy. Magnus was a string finalist in the 1998 Young Musician of the Year, Brittany also plays the violin, and Rupert plays the horn, in spite of brain damage sustained in an horrific car accident four years ago. Not that Jill Johnston takes any credit for musical genes. "I believe if you put 90 per cent of children in the environment ours have had, they would turn out the same," she says – an environment that included compulsory attendance at their parents' summer music courses to avoid having to find babysitters.

 

Helping Johnston to launch the Proms this year is a Stradivarius worth a six-figure sum, which he has on loan from the Royal Academy of Music. It's an ideal instrument on which to tackle the nation's favourite cello concerto.

 

All Guy Johnston has to do now is make sure that he comes up to the public's enormous expectations. "I don't know what it is that keeps me going," he says. "I try and block out all the hype and the stuff that surrounds playing. The main thing is I get a buzz from being up on stage, even the big occasions, hard as they are to get through. It'll be such a huge relief whatever happens. All the emotion that builds up will make it a special evening somehow."