Vincent Vogel: If I weren’t a musician …

In this section, we introduce our readers to members of the orchestra and their extra-musical passions. Today it is the turn of the timpanist Vincent Vogel, who loves to catch waves.

Do you know Kelly Slater? Never heard of him? Do you know what’s meant by the phrase “goofy foot”? No? Then you presumably don’t have the foggiest idea what this is all about. But don’t worry: until I met Vincent Vogel, I felt exactly the same. But one thing at a time.

I’m a little late arriving for my meeting with Vincent Vogel in the canteen at the Berlin Philharmonie on a warm day in May. The twenty-eight-year-old from Vienna is wearing jeans, a white T-shirt and sneakers, looking more like a sportsman than an orchestral musician. “My passion for surfing has a lot to do with the coronavirus pandemic,” Vincent Vogel begins our conversation. When the pandemic broke out in the spring of 2020 and the first lockdown was ordered, he had just taken up his new post as principal timpanist with the Halle Staatskapelle and was reduced at a stroke to a life of inaction. He bought a ticket and in order to escape from all of the contingencies and distancing rules of the outbreak he fled to Lanzarote, where it was more or less by chance that he started to surf. The world has now become a different place for him.

“Surfing didn’t come naturally to me,” says Vincent Vogel with a smile, “because as a child the mere thought of water was enough to give me a panic attack. But now I can swim fairly well.” As practised by Vincent Vogel, surfing has nothing to do with wind-surfing. He doesn’t need a sail to move over the water with the help of the wind but uses only a surfboard on which he rides the generally high waves. “The technique isn’t hard to learn,” he explains, “but it’s much more important to face up to your fears. When you see a two-metre-high wave building up and then breaking in front of you, this does something to you.” Surfing has a lot to do with self-control, he goes on: there comes a moment when you need to have perfect control over your body. It’s the same with a set of timpani. “You have to wait and then be there at exactly the right moment: this is what a timpanist must be able to do.”

Surfing is a hobby that can’t be satisfactorily pursued in Germany because the waves in the Baltic and the North Sea are paltry when compared to the swell that you find on the islands of Hawaii, where surfing originated. In Europe, the excitement builds up on France’s Atlantic coast each autumn, when Victor Vogel sets off in his Volkswagen van in a southerly direction and waits for the perfect wave. As so often, his mobile phone proves to be an indispensable help because, days in advance, an app allows him to predict waves that are only just forming far out at sea. He is often in the water for up to three hours at a time, whereas the actual ride lasts half a minute at the most. Something else that is important with surfing is the position of your feet on the board. If your right foot is further out in front, then this is the “goofy foot” mentioned earlier.

Most of your time is spent waiting, explains Vincent Vogel, who has been a member of the Berliner Philharmoniker since August 2022. “But when the wave comes, the feeling is simply indescribable.” And afterwards? “The best wave of your life is still out there,” says Kelly Slater, one of the greatest surfers of all time. Vincent Vogel nods. The best wave of his own life, too, is still out there.