VoxCarnyx

Usher Hall, Edinburgh

She has brought much more to the role of Festival director, including surprises, but this was surely a concert that the panel who appointed Nicola Benedetti to that role hoped she would make happen.

The violinist’s acute awareness of the event’s origins and history was particularly evident in the inspired choice of encore. It reprised a piece commissioned by Festival (and Traverse and Aldeburgh) stalwart Sheila Colvin from composer Eddie McGuire for Yehudi Menuhin to play in the mid-1980s, two decades after he had been awarded the Freedom of the City of Edinburgh.

There had perhaps never been the context to revisit The Fiddler’s Farewell, and certainly not one as appropriate as this, for which the composer was in the audience. As Benedetti explained at the start of the concert, she and the violinist/director of Poland’s NFM Leopoldinum, Alexander Sitkovestsky, were among the last pupils at the Yehudi Menuhin School in London to benefit from his personal teaching in the 1990s.

That shared experience particularly guided the selection of the works on either side of the interval. Directing the smallest group of strings we heard all evening, Sitkovetsky was the soloist in Andrzej Panufnik’s Violin Concerto, which Menuhin premiered. He also rehearsed it with the 15 year old Sitkovetsky but did not live to hear him play it for an audience.

The better part of 30 years later, this EIF performance revealed a polished gem of a work, not just part of the musical heritage of the Wroclaw players but also clearly influenced by American composers of the 20^th century. The soloist’s playing gleamed but the ensemble playing was just as impressive, from the daringly quiet stillness of the Adagio to the vital energy of the Vivace finale.

Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins is one of his best-known works and Benedetti has been playing it all her life, starting with concerts in London and Paris that paired her with Alina Ibragimova under Menuhin’s baton when she was 11 years old. If she and Sitkovetsky had not performed it together previously you could never have guessed, so familiar were they both with the path through its swift 15 minutes. With a harpsichord joining the strings, they shared the direction of the band, but little work was required there either; this was joyous music-making from everyone on stage.

That also could be said of the two works for string orchestra that opened and closed the programme. Elgar’s Opus 20 Serenade for Strings was not included on her 2020 Elgar album, but is a work that has featured in the teaching syllabus of the Benedetti Foundation and sat perfectly at the start of this concert under her direction.

Bartok’s Divertimento for Strings was his follow-up to the highly original Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, with the last movement’s percussive effects provided by slapping pizzicato technique. Sitkovetsky was in charge for this work, with Benedetti his front desk partner, and he noticeably shifted the players up a gear after a slightly tentative start.

With some of the EIF’s Rising Stars of Strings augmenting the NFM Leopoldinum for this second evening in its brief residency, this was an occasion that summed up a great deal of what Benedetti’s Festival directorship is all about.

Keith Bruce

Picture by Andrew Perry