Monthly Archives: November 2017

Review: James Ehnes plays Bach

30 Thursday Nov 2017

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Bach

JSB

The Birmingham Post isn’t always able to post online everything that I’ve written for its print edition, so – after a suitable time lag (ideally you should go out and buy the paper) – I’ll be posting my recent reviews here. As per the print edition, they’re all fairly concise – just 250 words. This is of a performance at the Barber Institute on Wednesday 15 November 2017.

Ah, Bach. That’s what The Bluffer’s Guide to Music suggests you say if you’re ever stumped for opinions on old JS. He’s the greatest composer in Western music, you see. Everybody says so. And if it’s your job to have opinions on classical music, and you’re a Bachsceptic – you don’t care for fugues, say, or your enthusiasm for Lutheran dogma wears thin after the first hundred cantatas – you learn to keep that to yourself. What’s that, a whole evening of unaccompanied violin music? Ah, Bach!

That said, if any violinist could convince a doubter, it’d be James Ehnes – a virtuoso of golden tone and old-school brilliance, who never lets either ego or (commanding) intelligence get between him and the composer. He cut a smart if unassuming figure as he walked out at the Barber Institute. And then; well, the first thing you noticed was his sound – rich, firm, lustrous and layered. He’s generous with vibrato: there wasn’t a single coarse sound. From the very first notes of the B minor Partita, his violin sang.

But it danced, too. For every movement like the Fugue of the A minor Sonata – a study in controlled tension – there was something like the whirling verve that he brought to the finales of the A minor and C major Sonatas. Ehnes never imposed himself: the character here sprang from Bach, and it was unstinting, with the translucent sound Ehnes found for the A minor Sonata giving way to a solar radiance in the C major Sonata’s massive fugue. And every note felt honest. I’ve never seen a Barber Institute audience give a standing ovation before – and given the quality of so many of the Barber’s recitals, that’s saying something. Especially from a Bachsceptic.

Review: I Fagiolini at Birmingham Town Hall

21 Tuesday Nov 2017

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605

Rainy day in Venice

 The Birmingham Post isn’t always able to post online everything that I’ve written for its print edition, so – after a suitable time lag (ideally you should go out and buy the paper) – I’ll be posting my recent reviews here. As per the print edition, they’re all fairly concise – just 250 words. This is of a performance at Birmingham Town Hall on Thursday 9 November 2017.

“The Other Vespers” was the title of this concert by I Fagiolini, and it was a bit of a tease. I Fagiolini approach everything with a twinkle in their eye, and the photos in the programme showed them in Italy, larking about on Vespa scooters (get it?) and generally enjoying la dolce vita. The point was that this wasn’t the famous Monteverdi Vespers of 1610: but a sequence of sacred music by various Italian baroque masters that Monteverdi is known (or plausibly assumed) to have directed in Venice some decades later.

Cue baroque music on a truly luxurious scale. The eight singers of I Fagiolini under Robert Hollingworth were accompanied by a continuo of chamber organ plus various sizes of theorbo, as well as two violins and the six-strong English Cornett and Sackbut Ensemble. Together, the sound they made was refulgent, and glowed rather than dazzled: in works like Gabrieli’s 14-part Magnificat, the harmonies built and shimmered like clouds of incense.

Elsewhere, the ensemble was used more sparingly, and there were some delightful discoveries: an Ave Verum by Palestrina had a warbling solo cornetto (just one) added by the Milanese vocalist Bovicelli – a sound halfway between a cor anglais and a duck-call. Instrumental items, including a marvellously florid violin sonata by Uccellini were interspersed with the sacred numbers.

But everything, sacred or profane, was informed by the same sense of playful inventiveness. It danced, as well as sang, and singers and instrumentalists alike improvised and ornamented their melodies. And if (to modern ears) it felt slightly anticlimactic to end with a solo item – Monteverdi’s Salve, O Regina, sung with languishing sweetness – it was a useful reminder that the real stars here were the composers.