everything but bored

Ahead of his July recital with pianist Susie, the Bulgarian-born cellist talks to Libby Summers about practising karaoke-style, stepping away from the stage, and why he wants his audience to feel anything at all, as long as it is not boredom.

Michael Petrov grew up in a family of musicians in Sofia, performed on Bulgarian radio and television as a child, and trained at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. His path since then has been anything but a straight line, and that, it turns out, is exactly what makes him such good company in conversation.

Audiences see the finished performance, but rarely the journey behind it. What happens when you are learning a new work?

I have got better at this over my development as a musician. What I focus on most now is how to teach my body what it should do. No matter what level of musician you are, whatever talent or experience you have, your body is still stupid. It needs to learn the muscle memory. So my main focus is: how can I learn this in the best way possible, so that I never have to unlearn it and take a different direction?
I have gone completely the opposite way with things like fingerings and bowings. I used to never write any down, and now I am meticulous about writing down the best current working version and sticking only to that. If I ever discover a better one, I am scrambling for a rubber before I forget.
Interpretation is a whole other issue. I am a strong believer in listening to recordings. People frown upon it, because there is this belief that your interpretation should be unstained, as if you had never heard the piece before. But copying is the greatest form of flattery. You should listen to as many of your respected, and disrespected, colleagues as you can, hear all the possibilities, and make your own.
One problem for a string player is that you often lack a piano partner until very late in the process. Sometimes the first time you play a piece with the piano is the day before the concert, which is always stressful. So I do what I call karaoke: I put a mute on the cello, put on noise-cancelling headphones and play along to a recording. I can barely hear what I am doing, I am just moving my fingers. On paper these look like amateur processes, but I am not ashamed of them at all.

I do something similar myself, playing along to recordings when preparing orchestral parts.

It is so useful, because you identify the places where you are falling behind, or rushing, or simply not together. If it keeps happening in the same spot, it forces you to open the score and see what is actually going on there. It is a long process to build for oneself, and it is very individual for everyone.

Many musicians talk about telling a story through music. What story, or emotion, do you hope the Stamford audience will take away from your forthcoming concert?

Hopefully many stories. Music is a medium you cannot see and cannot touch, so it becomes whatever your own story is. It is perfectly plausible that every single audience member takes away a different one. My aim is simply to tell my own, and they can interpret it as they like, as long as I am telling a story at all times.
There is such a thing as autopilot playing, which one tries to avoid. Sometimes the wrong mindset creeps into a concert. You are having an off day and all you can focus on is technique, which is completely anti-art. Then you are not telling a story at all, and you are hoping the composition itself evokes one. My aim is that the audience goes away with something. Happy, moved, offended. Everything but bored.

To move on to your own story: what is the most unexpected part of your journey as a musician?

I have been very lucky. Coming from a family of musicians, I was always pushed to do it. It was never a choice, never a question of whether you liked the instrument or felt like practising today. From a very early age you were given the brief, and those were the rules. But within that, they were very caring.
I was a big fish in a small pond at the music school in Sofia, so I performed a lot, mostly as a soloist with orchestras. From early on I was on radio and television, getting used to cameras and people listening, being in the public eye on a smaller scale. Not that being on Radio 3 in my adult life is not as terrifying as it always will be, but at least I know what to expect.
Moving to the UK was different. I struggled with the lack of stardom at first, because stardom was all I knew. People here were given opportunities based on their age, for example, which I could not understand. It was a real culture shock. But eventually I went off to music college, where I had a really supportive teacher, and the Guildhall tailored my college experience to me, which was a privilege. I was kept out of orchestral projects, nurtured, and given career opportunities. Up until Covid I was pretty much flying.
Then everyone had to adapt and change, and there was a period of wilderness up until starting to work with you, really, which has given me a sense of community and light at the end of the tunnel. Though the tunnel was not all bad. In the time away from a full-time music career I managed to buy a house, learn to drive and build a beautiful family, which I love. If somebody came along and said, do you want to lead the LSO, my first thought now would be: when do I see my family? Rather than: sign me up.
Between working with you, the two concerts I will have given by the end of July, the shop and the competition, it feels like a very positive step. This is still an untapped part of the UK. There are some nice festivals around, but I think we can build something quite serious here.

It sounds as though the culture shock of moving to the UK in some ways prepared you for changing direction during Covid. And that life outside the musician's world has enriched you in unexpected ways that feed back into your playing.

I think it really does, and in many ways I do not regret the journey of changing career during Covid. I knew I should feel fine about it, but emotionally I really was not, because I had been programmed with tunnel vision towards a big solo cello career. All you do all day is practise, rehearse, or be surrounded by it. There were times in my life when I would get up on Christmas Day, do three hours of practice and feel really good about it. Then suddenly a week or two had passed without the instrument, and that was the longest I had ever been away from it. Six months on, I genuinely wondered whether I would come back to the cello and find I could not even hold it any more.
My first concert back was probably two years later, in Perivale, and it was more of a test for myself: could I get back to a level I was satisfied with? I learned a great deal from it about how to get back in shape, to the point where I now know the formula. I am quite happy not to practise for four months and then return to complete fitness as a performer for a concert. And honestly, I feel I am playing better than I used to. It is not taboo any more. Plenty of musicians have other jobs, simply because of what the industry is like.

It has been a similar story for so many musicians, with Covid and then Brexit. Touring in Europe is now close to impossible and opportunities have shrunk. What would you like to see change?

If I am bluntly honest, if the pay were even barely acceptable, that would be a good start. And I am comfortable speaking for the entire musical community here: none of us went into this to get rich. The dream is simply to make ends meet by doing what has always been our calling. It is a mindset shift. The government needs to recognise that this matters and then find the funding for it. I do not think it is a question of the money not existing. The question is that the will does not exist. In France you receive a base salary for being a freelance musician. That is light years ahead of what we have here. Art is very important. It is going to be the last thing to go, after all the white-collar jobs go.

You will be performing with Susie again in July. What makes a musical partnership work, and what do you particularly enjoy about playing together?

We got along extremely well. This will be our second time playing together, and she is an extremely capable musician who is also very thoughtful and open. She is a great listener, both on and off the stage. In rehearsal we would often veer off into long chats about other things, which is always enjoyable.
What makes a good partnership, assuming both musicians are capable enough players, is hard to describe. I was going to say open-mindedness, but I have had very closed-minded colleagues and we have had great partnerships. I suppose it all comes from listening while playing, not so much while conversing, though that is a big added bonus with Susie. When I play with her, I feel she listens, and I think she feels the same. That has to be the key. In a good chamber group, and a duo is a chamber group of two, you must always aim to listen to the other person more than to yourself, to hear the whole rather than the part, and to hear how you fit into that whole. Susie understands this, consciously or subconsciously, and it does not really matter which. And she is good fun. She has a sense of humour and does not take herself too seriously. I thoroughly enjoyed the first time we played, and I am very happy to be playing together again.

Outside of music, what are you passionate about? Do those interests ever find their way into your performance?

I am terrible with hobbies, purely because of the Eastern European mentality. You do not really get time for a hobby. The things I have enjoyed outside music are gaming and football, though I follow football far less religiously than I used to. My commute to the music school in Bulgaria was a fifteen-minute tram journey, so every day I would stop by a newsagent, buy the sports paper and read it on the tram to school. You cannot do that here, because now we have smartphones.
I do look at sportspeople in relation to how we work as musicians. Earlier I mentioned repetition and muscle memory, which is not talked about anywhere near enough. I do not mean automatic repetition either. It is an active, tailored and very concentrated process, and I think athletes do the same thing: they analyse every repeated action, every small aspect of it, to the best of their abilities. Gaming I am less sure how to translate, but I think it builds reflexes.

One last question. What is something people often misunderstand about life as a professional musician?
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How hard it is, and how rough it is out there. There is a lot of travelling, a lot of the wrong conditions, a lot of cold places to perform in and broken pianos to perform with. It is not all fun and games. Say you had a hundred concerts in a year: maybe two or three would be genuinely enjoyable from every single aspect. There is a lot of grafting, and it demands a very particular set of skills.
Now that I do not perform as much, I often daydream about it. How nice it would be to travel again with my trio boys and giggle on public transport. We only remember the good things. We forget the frustrating moments, sitting there thinking: why am I here? I wish I could be anywhere else.
And it is not only playing and practising. It is the networking and running your own business, which I am sure I was horrible at. Very rarely do people get both sides right, and there is a lot of luck involved: being in the right place at the right time, who your mates are, your connections. It is an all-encompassing existence in which it is really hard to have a family, really hard to be normal. You do not get your corporate thirty days of holiday a year, nowhere near, and you do not get paid. It is an all-in sacrifice to do it full time, now more than ever. But as I always say, the way things are going, people will be able to focus more on the arts. Art is so important, and it always will be.