TSO Concertmaster Emma McGrath on good leadership, owning your mistakes and 'showing off' on stage

Good leadership includes owning mistakes

As Concertmaster and as a teacher, Emma encourages others not to give in to the damaging self-talk that she knows can easily come with talent and ambition.

‘We're human, and what we do is precarious. We're always out there on the tightrope. And we're a bunch of perfectionists. So getting people to believe in themselves and believe that everything's going to be okay is really important,’ she says.

While her role as Concertmaster requires her to make countless decisions around technique on behalf of the orchestra and to make them with confidence, Emma says it is equally important to acknowledge when she gets it wrong.

‘I think that good leadership is not dying on that hill of your decisions needing to be right,’ she says.

‘I try and wake up in the morning and think of people I've been inspired by, and I hope that I can be inspiring for others, by the way I act and through my commitment to the job and to music.’

‘We all have bad days, we all have times when we say “Oh, I could have done that better”. But if you own your mistakes, and you're willing to be vulnerable, and you're also willing to challenge people and yourself, then I feel like that can be really inspiring,’ Emma says.

A little fun competition on stage

It would take a very eagle-eyed concertgoer to pick up on all the silent communication that goes on between Emma as Concertmaster and her fellow musicians. It could be a slight nod to the flute section or an eyebrow raise to the timpanist.

But the rapport between players can often be felt, particularly during more light-hearted movements.

‘If you're sitting close, you may pick up on some of those subtle interactions. Sometimes there will be an in-joke between me and my stand partner Ji Won (TSO Associate Concertmaster Ji Won Kim). We might be showing off with each other a little bit,’ Emma reveals.

‘We can see each other out of the corner of our eyes so we might play a section in a really difficult way just to show off and then we’ll look at each other and be like, “Nice”. Of course that would only be in a fun movement, not in a really serious piece,’ she adds.

An on-stage memory, when music transcended everything

In the course of our interview, Emma reveals (as an aside) that she can recall every solo she's ever performed with an orchestra, going back to her earliest teen years.

‘Memory is an interesting thing isn’t it?’ she says. ‘Sometimes it’s hard to punch something into your memory because it’s something you don’t want to remember, like a history exam you didn’t really care about. But when you’re on stage in a frock and you’ve got the violin in your hand and you’re playing with an orchestra, you care about that a lot, so it stays in your memory.’

For someone who remembers every solo she has performed around the world, an obvious question is whether Emma has a favourite on-stage memory.

‘Oh, my goodness, that's hard!’ she says.

After thinking for a few moments, Emma describes a concert at Edinburgh’s Greyfriars Kirk in her early 20s in which she performed Sibelius’s notoriously difficult violin concerto.

‘The first movement starts with a lovely, romantic theme and then all of a sudden it launches into this massive cadenza that's insanely hard and lasts for ages and I remember standing there in the lead up to this solo feeling pretty nervous and intimidated,’ Emma says.

‘And there was this teenage girl sitting in the front row who just leant back and made this big yawning noise. You could tell she'd been brought there by her parents. And I thought, “Ah, I guess this doesn't really matter”.’

After the concert, Emma received a note from an audience member describing her performance as an ‘out of body experience’.

‘And that was lovely because I felt it too, that moment when the music transcends everything. Once I got over that teenager being bored, my perspective shifted and it was probably the most free and relaxed performance I’d ever done,’ she says.