10 June 2010
A string and a prayer by Rod Biss (featured in The Listener, June 12-18 2010)
Baroque music master Elizabeth Wallfisch’s spellbinding collaboration with eight young New Zealanders.
Oh, to be a string player. After sitting in on Elizabeth Wallfisch rehearsing the Wallfisch Band and then hearing their final performance, that’s what I want to be. And what’s more, it’s Vivaldi I’ll be playing. Yes, Vivaldi, who has for too long been the boring musical wallpaper of the National Bank’s TV adverts. As for Locatelli, until now he’s been merely a name in a history book. Not any more; I’m now a signed-up member of the Wallfisch/Vivaldi/Locatelli/string-playing fan club.
The Wallfisch Band is an innovative combination of four top international baroque musicians – Wallfisch playing the violin, Jaap ter Linden the cello, Raquel Massadas the viola and Albert-Jan Roelofs the harpsichord – with young musicians from the country they are touring.
In New Zealand’s case, the authenticity-driven musicians already becoming established in this specialist field of performance came from all over the country: violinists Miranda Hutton and Fiona Haughton from Auckland; violinist Lara Hall from Hamilton; violinist James Andrewes from Dunedin; and from Wellington, violinist Kate Goodbehere, cellist Emma Goodbehere, viola player Shelley Wilkinson and double bassist Richard Hardie.
Overseas, Wallfisch’s concept for the band has been growing for several years, but for Chamber Music New Zealand it’s a new idea it has embraced enthusiastically. Several of the Kiwi musicians were brought back from Europe and the United States to take part; quite apart from the new awareness of Vivaldi and Locatelli the concerts may have generated for audiences, the experience for these musicians will have a lasting effect on the baroque music movement in New Zealand.
A Wallfisch rehearsal is much more than just shaping up a performance; it’s a music appreciation course, a lesson in composition and definitely an entertainment. She’s a born teacher who gets her message across by demonstrating, singing, moving and laughing – and with a love of non-musical descriptions for what she wants to hear. The hushed opening chords of the very first piece they rehearse, Locatelli’s Concerto in F à immitazione de Corni da Caccia, “must sound like the mist rising off the harbour this morning”. The Vivaldi concerto in A minor is “full of Eastern promise – it’s sort of belly dancing music, really”; then, more prosaically, she explains “it doesn’t need to get heavy, ever!” And what do you do about bad notes that don’t sound good? “Don’t worry about them, it’s the good notes we want to hear – it’s like bringing up children.”
She explains the many repetitions that are an essential part of the concerto form as though she were on MasterChef: “It’s like making a croissant: you roll out the dough, put the butter in the middle and fold all the corners in carefully. And then you have to roll it all out again, fold the corners in again, and when it comes out of the oven it is this perfect shape.”
But it’s all to a very serious end. She shapes every phrase, every note, feeds in masses of expression, and by taking care over where every note is leading she heightens the logic of what one is listening to. And, of course, she does worry about the “bad” notes and spends time seeing they are right, while at the same time wanting players to “trust their instincts” and also listen to each other.
The violins are played without chin-rests, the cellos are held between the knees without any spike digging into the floor, the strings are mainly gut, vibrato is kept to a minimum, and the tuning is different, too – more focused on the key of the piece rather than the “equal temperament” of modern instruments. It all looks and sounds authentic to me.
Is she aiming to get back to what Vivaldi might have heard? “No one really knows [what Vivaldi heard]. One can only respond to the music and let it speak for itself.” Which is what they do. Watching the delight on these professional string players’ faces as they perform Vivaldi and Locatelli, you know they are in direct contact with the composer.
After a week of rehearsing, the band takes off for a four-centre concert tour of Wellington, Napier, Hamilton and Auckland. They are now a band with a unity of purpose, playing Vivaldi’s dashing allegros with remarkable precision; the sweetness of the gut strings is very evident, the softest of solos floats out to the back of the hall. The resonance of Auckland Town Hall, where I hear them, suits this sort of music perfectly; it’s a small but exact sound in which every detail is clear.
The programme of four Locatelli concertos alternating with three by Vivaldi shows the difference between them – Locatelli finding outside inspiration, Vivaldi more interested in purely musical matters. Yet they were both using the same harmonic language, devising melodies from the same scales, arpeggios and string patterns, and writing in the same concerto form that essentially looks for interplay between a soloist or a small group of soloists and the larger orchestra. Both Vivaldi and Locatelli were violin virtuosos themselves, so they knew how to write effectively for the instrument, and the element of virtuosity is ever present.
The concert opened with the Locatelli concerto à immitazione de Corni da Caccia, which, as its title suggests, describes a day’s hunting, with the misty dawn chords, the violins called on to imitate hunting horns and the jig-like rhythms of cantering horses.
The Vivaldi concertos of the programme all called for different solo groups. The first for two violins and two cellos brought the superb cello playing of ter Linden to the fore for the first time with his pupil Goodbehere beside him. The concerto for solo violin featured Wallfisch as soloist, and in the concerto for two violins New Zealander Miranda Hutton was beside her.
The Locatelli concertos in the second half, both for solo violin, were surely written with himself in mind as soloist. The first, titled Il pianto d’Arianna, tells of Ariadne abandoned by Theseus, with the solo violin in the role of Ariadne calling for all the expressive powers of the instrument.
Locatelli “could charm a canary off its perch in a swoon of pleasure” was a contemporary description of his playing. In other words, Wallfisch told us, the solo part of the programme’s last concerto is fiendishly difficult and was clearly intended to give Locatelli a chance to show off his incredible skills of both lyricism – heard in the slow movement – and fiery display in the last movement, where there is an extended cadenza consisting of all the pyrotechnics, runs and arpeggios with which violinists like to show off. When Wallfisch performs the piece, there is a pause in mid-cadenza, she sighs audibly, then smiles at the audience in a conspiratorial, pray-for-me way that recent visitor Hilary Hahn would never have condoned, and takes off in the remains of the no-holds-barred cadenza; canary-songs, high notes, low notes, runs, broken chords – everything Locatelli could devise.
What a way to end a Venetian Carnival concert. But there had to be an encore, so the Wallfisch Band sent us home peacefully with the “mist-like” Locatelli chords that had opened the concert.
