Rachel provides fitting end to season
Violin solo recital was so varied
Rachel Podger has established herself as a leading interpreter of music from the baroque and classical periods.
And her concert of solo violin music on Wednesday last week seemed a fitting culmination to the current Strathearn Music Society season, focusing on the essence of the chamber musician’s art through the purity of a single instrument.
Among composers such as Johann Joseph Vilsmayr, John Walsh, Nicola Matteis, Johan Helmich Roman, Johann Paul von Westhoff and Chad Kelly, JS
Bach was possibly the only familiar name featured.
Although, in keeping with the adventurous nature of the programme, even the latter was represented not by one of his well- known partitas for unaccompanied violin but by a fascinating re-imagining of that old warhorse of the organ repertoire, the ‘Toccata and Fugue in D minor’.
Whether this piece was originally written for the organ or whether, indeed, it was even written by Bach at all has long occupied the minds of musicologists, but the version played here, arranged by Chad Kelly – in A minor, to better suit the compass of the violin – certainly
presented a mighty convincing case for its adoption into the fiddle repertoire.
There, I’ve done it, I’ve used the dreaded ‘f-word’, so might as well now explain that the whole vibe of this recital – despite the “serious” connotations of chamber music, classical, baroque and all that stuff – derived from the timeless image of a single folk fiddler entertaining and chatting to a group of listeners without a hint of the kind of formality we often associate with modern concertgoing.
After all, what is a suite or partita if not simply a stylised set of dances, and we shouldn’t put ceilidhs, barn dances
and the like into a separate world with different values.
Rachel Podger’s playing switches on a light in our brains that shows us that this kind of music is actually all one and enables us to enjoy it on so many different levels.
It helps, of course, that she’s actually a few steps up from your average village hall fiddler and that she has an unequalled command of her instrument, so that the word virtuoso seems an irrelevance amidst the effortless double-stopping, dazzling bowing effects, gorgeously modulated phrasing and dynamics and ravishing tone.
What may have seemed on paper like rather a “highbrow” evening was in reality a wide-ranging and eye-opening experience which highlighted the position of this amazing four-stringed survivor as one of the most vital of all ingredients in the history and fabric of western music
And in Rachel Podger it has the perfect ambassador to promote its case.
This has been another varied and exceptional season for the Strathearn Music Society.
Thanks are due to its tireless and innovative committee for continuing to bring top-class music and musicians within the reach of all in this community.