The BBC Music Magazine Interview
James Naughtie meets Canadian violinist James Ehnes
When you’re speaking to a string player, it pays dividends to talk to them about their instrument – the one that travels with them everywhere. I’m talking to the Canadian violinist James Ehnes who’s around 100 miles north of Ottawa in the snow, which his children, Florida-born, are seeing for the first time. (I’m in Edinburgh, which isn’t quite as cold.) But when he talks about his violin, it’s all warmth.
Antonio Stradivari built Ehnes’s violin in 1715 in the middle of his so-called ‘golden’ period in Cremona, and the instrument’s owners include the turn-of-the-20thcentury Belgian virtuoso Martin Pierre Marsick. ‘I find that it pushes me every day to be a little bit more expressive and my technique a little bit cleaner,’ says Ehnes. ‘But it’s not an instrument that particularly rewards any sort of antiseptic play. I mean, I think that it has in it all the depth of body and grit that one might look for.’ I suggest that sometimes it must feel as if it’s trying to take charge, and that after nearly 300 years it’s still revealing its secrets to him. ‘What really separates the great instruments from the good ones is their range – they’re the ones that engage your personality.’
It’s all about allowing the player to make the sound that he or she wants, he suggests. And it’s the instruments that have the range to make that possible that are the ones that inspire: ‘There’s nothing more sad than being bored with your instrument.’
Ehnes has established himself in the last two decades as a soloist of rare personality. It shines through not just in the concert hall but in his extensive recorded repertoire, the latest additions to his burgeoning catalogue being the Beethoven Sonatas Nos 7 and 10 with pianist Andrew Armstrong, the fourth volume in their cycle released on the Onyx label at the end of 2020.
Watching Ehnes perform on video in his constructed home studio during lockdown is to realise the immediacy
‘‘The first time that I was able to get up in front of a live orchestra for several months was pretty overwhelming,,