London Times gives Nicola Benedetti top praise in recent solo recitals
Nicola Benedetti celebrates the music of dance through the ages in three pioneering works for solo violin at the Barbican (Photo Credit: Mark Alla)
Nicola Benedetti review — a transfixing solo recital by a dazzling virtuoso
By Rebecca Franks
The Times
September 24, 2021
“Le concert, c’est moi!” Liszt declared when he invented the solo recital. But the great showman had a piano at his disposal, designed to play melody, harmony and accompaniment. It’s a tougher job for a violinist. Nicola Benedetti made 90 minutes, alone, on a stage more usually filled with entire orchestras, look easy.
Standing in a large spotlight, she became dazzling virtuoso, folk fiddler, spinner of melody, thoughtful accompanist — not to mention compere, page-turner and technical support when her electronic page-turning pedal gave up. Dance linked Benedetti’s programme, although you would have been hard pushed to tap your toes at some points. These were dances pushed to extremes: functional baroque forms turned into profound art, rustic dances transformed with rhythmic games, Celtic folk melded with jazz and blues.
The night began with Bach, always a touchstone for solo recitals, and the most famous of his six violin sonatas and partitas, the No 2 in D minor. Is this partita a pinnacle of pure musical abstraction, a composer exploring the limits of the violin, or perhaps even a memorial for the death of Bach’s wife? Here it became a world of many voices, of eloquent conversations unfolding between musical lines. And when it came to the final, demanding ciaccona, Benedetti showed how music written on one stave for one instrument contains, as Brahms put it, “the deepest thoughts and the most powerful feelings”.
If Bach took us to inner realms, Ysaÿe’s Fifth Sonata turned to the outside world. Benedetti stilled the mood into one of hushed beauty in the depiction of dawn, before the music burst into rustling, whirring life. The “Danse rustique” includes a dance tune in tricksy quintuple metre, but it’s nothing compared to the complexities of Wynton Marsalis’s appealing 2015 Fiddle Dance Suite, its five movements reordered here with the composer’s approval.
Drawing on reels, jigs, strathspeys, hoedowns, spirituals, ragtime and the blues, the music buzzes with energy and is filled with finger-twisting (and foot-stamping) demands. Benedetti evoked entire groups of players, yet it was the pared-back moments that felt most meaningful. Then, she could let her violin truly sing.
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Classical music review: Nicola Benedetti at the Old College Quad, Edinburgh
By Simon Thompson
The Times
August 18, 2021
★★★★★
I haven’t asked her, but I’d stake money on the idea that, if the star violinist Nicola Benedetti felt butterflies in her tummy about any of the concerts in her Edinburgh International Festival residency, it was this one.
That’s not necessarily because it’s more virtuosic than her others: it’s because it’s so exposed. This concert was her alone on stage for an hour, with nothing but a violin for company, playing some of the most fiendishly challenging works in the violin literature. The technical obstacles are forbidding enough, but the real challenge for any violinist in this music is to find the beauty lurking behind the bravura.
Barring the odd post-concerto encore, none of it is repertoire I’d heard her in before. So I’m fairly in awe of the way she not only managed it, but carried it off with dazzling aplomb. For an hour the Old College Quad audience sat spellbound by a display of focused virtuosity that was so extraordinary it shouldn’t have been possible. Yet there it was, before our very eyes, and with it musical insights of such poetry and depth that these works proved their worth far beyond being mere showpieces.
At the programme’s centre sat the towering Chaconne that ends Bach’s Second Partita, a work so monumental that musicians tend to speak of it with bowed heads and hushed voices. Benedetti played its 15 minutes of drama as though she was opening up a whole world of human emotion. By turns grief-stricken and radiant, its double-stopped chords, tremulous arpeggios and dazzling runs sounded gripping, even more so coming after Heinrich Biber’s bewitching Passacaglia, an edifice of melancholy built on only four repeating notes.
The two Paganini Caprices that followed exist primarily for showy bravura, but Benedetti dispatched them with as much mastery as she demonstrated in Bach and Biber’s spiritual masterworks, albeit with a good many more fireworks.
She then created a tone poem out of Ysaÿe’s Fifth Sonata, the splendour of Ysaÿe’s sunrise growing in waves of arpeggios, before the concluding country dance that contained a cheeky hint of lopsided chaos. This was not just impressive, but awesome.
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