Isabelle Watson
Higher Degree by Research Candidate
Elder Conservatorium of Music
Faculty of Arts, Business, Law and Economics
Originally from Brisbane, Isabelle Watson is a violinist and researcher creating music in both mainstream and historically-informed performance styles. Issie has gained a breadth of orchestral experience in recent years. In 2024, she was a trainee with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, and in 2023, she was Principal Second Violin in Queensland Youth Symphony, performing on international stages including the Musikverein (Vienna), Laeiszhalle (Hamberg) and Esplanade Concert Hall (Singapore). She has played with the Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra as an Emerging Artist, and was concertmaster of their youth orchestra program, Young Mannheim Symphonists, from 2022 to 2024.
Solo and chamber music is also very important to her, and during her Bachelor of Music (Honours) studies at the University of Queensland, she was the winner of the Pollett String Prize and 4MBS Musica Viva Chamber Music Prize. Issie is indebted to her teachers and mentors Rachael Beesley, Ben Dollman, Elizabeth Layton, Adam Chalabi, and Natsuko Yoshimoto.
Issie is currently pursuing a Master of Philosophy at Elder Conservatorium. Her practice-led research experiments with nineteenth-century performance style in Robert Schumann's violin sonatas on modern instruments. In 2024, she was the recipient of the Elder Conservatorium Prize for Excellence in Postgraduate Research for a presentation she gave at the Musicological Society of South Australia Research Day.
My practice-led research in the field of nineteenth-century violin performance practices aims to both close the gap between knowledge and practice as well as develop a broader expressive palette for more creative and flexible interpretations of canonic repertoire. While period instruments are undoubtedly important to historical performance, enabling access to idiosyncratic sound colours that have since been smoothed over by their modern equivalents, they do not guarantee performances in a historical style. Therefore, in the spirit of twenty-first century inclusive relativism, experiments with romantic performance style on modern instruments privileges a flexible and sentimental way of playing, featuring unnotated expressive devices such as portamento and rhythmic flexibility, over the tools at hand.
In a case study of Robert Schumann's violin sonatas, I am drawing upon early twentieth-century recordings, pedagogical treatises, instructive texts, and nineteenth-century annotated performance editions from the Nineteenth-Century German 'Classical' Violin School to stimulate novel interpretations of these canonic but misunderstood late works in romantic performance style.
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