We were lucky to catch up with Irina Solinas recently and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Irina, we’re so appreciative of you taking the time to share your nuggets of wisdom with our community. One of the topics we think is most important for folks looking to level up their lives is building up their self-confidence and self-esteem. Can you share how you developed your confidence?
Good question! I think it is the most important internal battle for an artist to face: to be recognized and thus recognize yourself as an artist, or to convince the audience because one has painstakingly built up a self-conviction? To each his own path, I don’t think there is a right or a wrong one.
Despite several years of experience and study, my self-confidence has only now begun to pay off; it was from when I first felt that as an artist I had something to say and that my message reached straight to the heart without needing to be understood with the mind only by an elite group of people. When you reached straight to the heart you can feel it in the body, like a chill, a vital wave that goes through the room where you are playing and…everything becomes one for a moment.
Music can be like a portkey, an opportunity to be connected through something profound, intimate and immensely bigger than ourselves. Hearing this for me has been the balm to calm performance anxiety, the unexpected desire for the perfect performance. This balm still needs to be applied from time to time!
Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
Long story short… I started playing the cello at the age of ten, after a few years of unpleasant, shrill sounds on the violin. I graduated in Milan and became first cello in the Italian youth orchestra.
In 2011, while I was in the midst of a career in classical music, my mother died in an accident. I turned twenty-nine on the day of her funeral and lost, in a single day, all the strength and passion to face the challenges of the stage. I gave up my career and with it my childhood dreams.
My greatest good fortune was to devote myself to natural medicine to heal myself, I learned about the art of yoga, massage and Zero balancing (between hospeopathy and craniosacral). Not only that…I began to delve into the philosophy and religions of holistic disciplines and became, after a few years of intense study, a professional yoga teacher and therapist.
In 2016 I decide to return to my hometown to face the biggest “monsters” related to my roots. In rebuilding memories and friendship relationships, I find what I missed most: my cello. Thanks to my oldest friend, in a single day I regained my passion and joy. I was no longer looking for classical music and perfection, so far away after not playing for years, but I wanted to learn to play without sheet music…improvising!
I start studying the art of improvisation and a year later I win a scholarship to go to America to study with the Silkroad Ensemble. The beginning of a new dream, made of encounters, cultures, colors, scents, different languages.
Returning to Italy I decide to invest in my own project with the approval of the network of amazing international musicians, and just as it is taking shape and substance, a worldwide pandemic breaks out. I am left without strength, economic and moral. As I take care to maintain a balance, an anger begins to grow that slowly extinguishes the fire of passion. Again.
It is said that in order to learn to live one must die at least twice…and perhaps that is indeed the case! Mother Nature comes to my rescue this time: ECOTONOS, my solo project, is born. Music that is improvised live on natural environments collected during my soundcapturing trips. In this project I also play the viola da gamba which has amazing healing power and also I gather the experience of other local artists to improvise not only with dance, pictorial and visual arts, but also dialogue with anthropologists and biologists.
I deeply believe in the expression “we are nature” and that the climate crisis goes hand in hand with an existential crisis. Nature and culture can merge through universal arts such as music.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
Resilience Life and Death dance
Friendship
Reading and being curious, traveling. Building and destroying one’s beliefs many times. Develop one’s habits in such a way as to be independent of place, other people, external conditions. Love diversity and welcome unexpected events and difficulties as lessons. Do not push away sadness and anger, but go in search of the tools needed to deal with and transform these force fields.
What is the number one obstacle or challenge you are currently facing and what are you doing to try to resolve or overcome this challenge?
Right now I am recovering my economic independence lost during the pandemic, so I am working as a spa therapist. I wear a uniform and work eight hours as an employee at a relais chateaux in the Gran Paradiso National Park. I’m gathering my strength before my next jump (because this time I don’t want “die”) so, while I’m away from the city, I’m learning more and more about myself and enjoying the profound beauty of my early 40s!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.irinasolinas.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/irinasolinas/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/irinasolinas/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/irinasolinas
Image Credits
Davide Santi
