Fiddler will conduct and join OSM
OSM guest conductor will perform with and without prized Stradivarius
“Give me 10 seconds,” Joshua Bell said when reached at his apartment in New York. He was arranging for the delivery of his violin to a luthier to have the fingerboard planed — standard maintenance even for the so-called Gibson ex-Huberman Stradivarius of 1713.
Which Bell will play Tuesday and Wednesday with the OSM in concerts that also represent his conducting debut with the orchestra.
“I use it for everything,” Bell said of this instrument, which was stolen in 1936 from the Carnegie Hall dressing room of its namesake Polish virtuoso, Bronislaw Huberman, and recovered more than 50 years later after a deathbed confession by a café violinist who claimed to have bought it from the thief.
Sure, Bell has a modern fiddle to practise on while the Strad is in the shop. But the Gibson ex-Huberman is what he carries with him on stage.
“The violin becomes an extension of yourself,” Bell explained. “It becomes almost unthinkable to go back and forth between instruments.
“And I can afford only one Stradivarius.”
His concerto offering in the Maison symphonique is Bruch’s popular Violin Concerto No. 1. One presumes there will be appropriate backstage supervision of the Strad while Bell occupies the podium to lead Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7.
Conducting is not an altogether new pursuit for this American, whose first appearance with the OSM as a 20-year-old in 1988 resulted in a Decca recording under Charles Dutoit.
Since 2011 Bell has been music director of the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields in London.
“The difference with them is that I conduct with the violin,”
he said. “I sit in the concertmaster chair and play along much of the time.
“As for getting up in front of an orchestra without the violin, as I will in Montreal, that doesn’t happen so often. But it is happening more and more, and I am starting to feel more comfortable in that role.” Bell uses his hands alone. “It feels more natural to me than holding a baton. Maybe someday I will work on ‘stick technique,’ as they say. But I feel like I can show what I want with my hands.”
Anyway, conducting is an elusive concept. “There are really no two conductors who do the same thing,” Bell said.
“It’s a strange art form. There are some who do very little but get amazing results in their own way.”
Bell is greatly encouraged by his experience with the Academy. “Anything I dream up, they will achieve. That is a great feeling as a conductor.”
And he has nothing but respect for the OSM. “Many of them are my friends. I hope we’ll get on in this capacity.”
Bell has another connection to Montreal: François Girard was the director of The Red Violin, the 1998 film for which the New York composer John Corigliano wrote Academy Award-winning music. Bell was the soloist.
This score is characteristic of the lyrical music Bell has gravitated toward throughout his career. While his repertoire includes most of the standards — and a few semi-standards, such as the Glazunov Violin Concerto, which he played in the first regular OSM subscription concerts in the Maison symphonique in 2011 — it is not laden with much material that could be called modern in the stylistic sense.
In 2012 Bell shared a credit with actress/singer Scarlett Johansson for his obbligato in Before My Time, a song by J. Ralph from the climate-change documentary Chasing Ice, which was nominated for an Academy Award. On Sunday in Washington, D.C., he gives the première of Anne Dudley’s The Man With the Violin, a story with music based
on the day in 2007 Bell spent as a not-too-successful subway busker (an experiment documented by columnist Gene Weingarten in the Washington Post). The piece will be performed also on a date to be announced at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa.
“I have one simple criterion,” Bell said about how he chooses repertoire. “I have to be moved in some way. I have to feel I can tell the story confidently, so that every note means something.
“There is nothing worse than having a piece of music in front of you that you don’t relate to. And then you still have to perform it. You feel a little bit like a fraud. I never want to be put into that situation. “Some of my colleagues, whom I respect, have said they think the Schoenberg Violin Concerto is one of the greatest things to hit the Earth. Let them play it. The luxury of the violin repertoire is that there are so many great pieces that do that for me, that I have yet to run out.”
Two reviewers of the Opéra de Montréal production of Dialogues des carmélites used the adjective “European” in connection with Serge Denoncourt’s stark and avowedly atheistic approach to the 1957 opera by Francis Poulenc. For a truly European perspective on Dialogues, have a look at the Bavarian State Opera version concocted in 2010
by the Russian bad boy Dmitri Tcherniakov. If you can find it.
Late in 2015 a French court of appeals upheld a demand by the estates of Poulenc and Georges Bernanos (author of the play on which Poulenc based his libretto) that BelAir Media withdraw the DVD and Blu-ray from their catalogue. The judgment also prevented Mezzo TV from broadcasting the performance, drawn from a revival run in 2012.
In this odious staging (revived again a year ago) there are no visual references to religion. The Carmelite nuns, in drab modern dress, appear to belong to a sect. Mother Marie strips down to her bra. At the famous conclusion, the non-nuns (who in the Poulenc scenario march to the guillotine as victims of the Terror during the French Revolution) attempt to gas themselves in a mass suicide. Blanche de la Force, the central figure in the story, prevents this from happening, but is then herself blown up.
Whatever one might think of this “interpretation,” it is hard to reconcile with the score, which includes the repeated sound of a falling guillotine blade and makes no provision for explosions. Conductor of the initial Munich run of 2010 and on the banned video? Kent Nagano.
Theft is not the only misfortune that can befall a venerable Italian instrument. Last week Matt Haimovitz, who plays Bach’s Cello Suites this weekend at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, reached for a score in his home studio and lost his balance.
Down he went, as did his 1710 Matteo Goffriller. Happily, Haimovitz managed not to fall on the cello, but it still suffered a snapped neck and an assortment of lesser fractures. Haimovitz flew to New York with his ailing Goffriller the next day.
“It’s in good hands. Someone who has known my cello for years and years,” the McGill prof assured me early this week. “He said I was lucky in my bad luck. The break was very clean and everything is totally reparable.”
The less happy news is that the reconstruction will take six to eight months, which is a long time to go without a companion you have made music with for decades.
“It’s so individual, so personal,” Haimovitz said of the loss. “You feel you have no voice.”
Haimovitz tried a few potential loaners in New York, including a 19th cello by Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume, the most acclaimed of French luthiers.
No dice. Too light, too nasal. “I’m sort of used to old Italian instruments,” Haimovitz said. (Goffriller, 1659-1742, was the founder of the Venetian school.)
Haimovitz was planning to test drive a few cellos in Quebec before making a final decision about which instrument he will use at the MMFA and for subsequent performances. “It will be something good,” he assures us. “But it won’t be the Goffriller.”
The program remains unchanged: Bach’s Six Solo Cello Suites. On Saturday, Haimovitz delivers the Suites No. 2 (2 p.m.), No. 3 (3 p.m.) and No. 4 (4 p.m.) with starters by Du Yun, Vijay Iyer and Roberto Sierra. These free mini-recitals are at the newly opened Michal and Renata Hornstein Pavilion for Peace.
On Sunday, Haimovitz settles down in Bourgie Hall and plays Suites No. 1, No. 5 and No. 6 with overtures by Philip Glass, David Sanford and Luna Pearl Woolf. Tickets to the Bourgie Hall recital cost $14.56 to $26.96 via mbam.qc.ca. akaptainis@sympatico.ca
The luxury of the violin repertoire is that there are so many great pieces that do that for me, that I have yet to run out.