The BBC Music Magazine Interview
THE BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE INTERVIEW
Renaud Capuçon talks Elgar with Richard Morrison
Down the phone from Paris, Renaud Capuçon sounds like the living embodiment of that rare thing these days – the entente cordiale between France and Britain. ‘Yes, I am French, but I love this piece!’ the 45-year-old violinist exclaims as we discuss his new recording of Elgar’s Violin Concerto. ‘And I had the huge advantage of learning the concerto with British conductors – first Jeffrey Tate, then Paul Daniel and now Simon Rattle.’
Capuçon is as Gallic as they come. Married to Laurence Ferrari, one of French TV’S most glamorous and famous anchorwomen, he directs the Easter Festival at Aix-en-provence, and is the go-to virtuoso whenever Paris needs a special occasion enhanced by special music-making.
When the fire-ravaged Notre Dame briefly reopened its doors for a Good Friday service last year, it was Capuçon who provided the sole musical accompaniment.
So when did this quintessential Frenchman first play the most quintessentially English of concertos? ‘It was in Vienna more than ten years ago with Jeffrey Tate. I don’t think the Vienna Philharmonic had played it for a long time. I remember at the first rehearsal I was so excited and passionate about the piece that Jeffrey turned to me and said: “Don’t be a lion too much”. We laughed a lot about that.’
On his new recording, conducted by Rattle, Capuçon manages to be both lion and lamb, ardent young lover and wistful old man, flamboyant showman and tender companion. ‘I am completely in love with Elgar’s way of expressing his feelings in music,’ he tells me. ‘I love his symphonies as well, but in the Concerto there is a particular noblesse. That’s what drew me in. And also the freedom the work gives the soloist. I mean, you have to fit into Elgar’s world. But when you are inside it, first of all you are completely moved by the sound around you – especially when it is created by the London Symphony Orchestra
‘‘I am completely in love with Elgar’s way of expressing his feelings in music. That’s what drew me in’’
– and then astonished by the room you are given to be yourself. Some concertos allow very little space for the soloist to be imaginative, but here there is such possibility for self-expression.’
The Concerto is not just very long – 50 minutes – but also fiendishly demanding in technical terms. That’s hardly surprising. It was written in 1909 for Fritz Kreisler, one of the greatest violinists of Elgar’s day. And if you look at the original sketches for the work you can see passages where someone – perhaps Elgar’s friend Billy Reed, the leader of the LSO (see left) – pepped up Elgar’s first thoughts to make the figuration even more dazzling.
‘Yes, it’s a crazily demanding work, especially the last movement,’ Capuçon laughs. ‘When you start that finale you have already been playing for 30 minutes and have 20 still to go. And when you reach that famous accompanied cadenza you still have eight minutes to play. The first time I played the Concerto in public I sweated so much that at the end I felt I had run seven kilometres. But as you get older you learn how to conserve energy.’
What does he think the work is about? Even by the standards of Elgar’s enigmas, it’s a concerto shrouded in a mystique – emphasised by its famous opening dedication: ‘Aqui esta encerrada el alma de…..’ (‘Herein is enshrined the soul of ..... ’), a quotation from the 18th-century novel Gil Blas by Alain-rené Lesage. Whose soul? Is it Elgar’s confidante Alice Stuartwortley, with whom he was in constant communication during the Concerto’s composition? Or his first serious girlfriend, Helen Weaver, who emigrated to New Zealand leaving Elgar heartbroken? Or maybe a younger version of Elgar himself? The composer deepened the mystery by promising his wife (another Alice) never to reveal ‘the mystery of the five dots’.
‘The fact that we don’t know, plus the feeling of nobility and the love that is everywhere in the piece, makes the Concerto all the more romantic and powerful,’ Capuçon says. ‘As a performer you are giving everything without knowing who you are giving it to. That’s exciting. You can bring into it your own story, your own experiences. I completely get what Elgar wants, even though I can’t explain in words what he means.’
Capuçon says he can’t believe the Concerto is hardly performed in France. ‘I don’t know any of my compatriots who play it apart from Philippe Graffin. I don’t understand why. But I like to feel that, although we didn’t intend this, releasing this recording so soon after Brexit – with a French soloist working with a British conductor and musicians – is a very appropriate way of emphasising the cultural bridges between us.’
The atmosphere at the recording sessions must have been special as well. After all, taking place last September just after lockdown was lifted, they were practically the first communal musicmaking either the orchestra or soloist had undertaken for months. ‘Absolutely,’ Capuçon says. ‘The atmosphere was unique. Nobody knew until the day before whether the sessions were on or off, and we were all so happy to be playing again. I think you can hear that on the recording: 80 musicians completely exhilarated by doing their jobs again.’
The Concerto has had many famous recordings already. Did Capuçon draw
inspiration from any of them, or did he deliberately steer clear? ‘On the contrary, before we met to play through the Concerto Simon [Rattle] called me and said: “Do you know the recording by Albert Sammons?”. I said: “Are you kidding? It’s my favourite. It’s such a clear interpretation that it sounds almost French!” And Simon said: “Listen to it again.” I knew then that we had the same attitude to the Concerto.’
Sammons’s version, made in 1929 with Henry Wood conducting, was the first complete recording of the Concerto, and still revered today. Yet it was eclipsed three years later by Elgar’s own recording of the work with the teenage Yehudi Menuhin as soloist. What does Capuçon think of Menuhin’s extraordinary performance? After all, Capuçon was a child prodigy himself – a violin student at his city’s music conservatoire at the age of three, and then, as a teenager, the leader of Claudio Abbado’s Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra.
‘Menuhin’s recording is pure genius,’ he replies. ‘To play like that at 16, well, what else can you say except “chapeau”? But it’s also very moving for me to hear Elgar conducting the LSO, the same orchestra as on my recording – although not, of course, the same players.’
On Capuçon’s new recording, the concerto is coupled with Elgar’s Violin Sonata, with Stephen Hough on the piano.
The Sonata was written almost a decade later than the concerto and at a much darker time in Elgar’s life. It came at the end of a war in which he had lost many friends. His wife was ailing. And by then he felt, perhaps rightly, that his music was out of step with public taste.
‘Yes the Sonata and Concerto are in many ways completely different, yet they share that same, unmistakable nobility,’ Capuçon says. ‘I don’t know what Elgar was like as a man, but to me he seems so classy, so sophisticated in the way he expresses himself in music. And the Sonata also contains a lot of love, though perhaps recollected from a greater distance. The slow movement particularly seems to me like the memory of a young man trying to woo a woman, but not quite daring to say the right words.’
There is certainly a remarkable hesitancy in that movement about the way Elgar picks up, then drops, various themes before hitting on his big tune. ‘Exactly,’ says Capuçon. ‘It’s the lover trying to be bold, losing his nerve, then finally having the courage to open his heart. And then it’s so touching: one of the best tunes ever written! I had never played the work before this recording. Like the Concerto it’s never performed in France. But recording the Sonata with Stephen Hough was so easy. We only met for the first time a year ago, to do Brahms sonatas at the Wigmore Hall, but the collaboration was so natural and organic that I immediately thought of him for the Elgar recording. I’m sure we will do lots together in future.’
To hear Capuçon rave about Elgar you might think he was fixated on the late Romantics. In fact he and his Guarneri violin, once owned by Isaac Stern (‘and owned by me in about 45 years, when I’ve finished paying the instalments’), have generally premiered a new concerto each year. ‘ Of course there is no Elgar today,’ he says, ‘but there are people around who compose passionate music and know how to write for the violin. I’m thinking, for instance, of a concerto I premiered in 2013: Pascal Dusapin’s Aufgang. It’s an amazing masterpiece. And it’s incredible to premiere a work you feel will still be played in 100 years’ time, just as Kreisler must have felt about the Elgar Concerto.
‘I am not stupid. I know when I record a famous concerto that in a couple of years my recording will be forgotten, or will be one of many. But when I commission a new piece I know that when I am long dead my name will still be in very small letters on the score, after the words “dedicated to…”. And perhaps people will say “who was this guy, Capuçon?” That is something to be proud of.’
Capuçon’s recording of the Elgar Violin Concerto and Sonata is out now on Erato
‘The Sonata contains a lot of love, though perhaps recollected from a distance’