VoxCarnyx

Scotland’s violin star, Nicola Benedetti, talks to Keith Bruce as she goes out on the road with a small group from this weekend.

Nicola Benedetti has hardly been idle, embracing motherhood and marriage alongside working with her educational foundation and directing Edinburgh’s festival, but she feels it is more than time to re-connect with her most loyal supporters.

“There has been a period, with all the work I have been doing for the Foundation and for the Festival, when I have not toured anything personal,” she told Vox Carnyx last week. “Most of the places I’ve played have been as a guest of an orchestra, or in my role at the Festival. So this is a bit of a reuniting with audiences that I have known for 23 or 24 years.”

She is speaking of her upcoming solo tour, which features the small group of musicians who also feature on her upcoming Decca album, Violin Café, scheduled for release on November 21.

The 14-date tour kicks off in Basingstoke on Sunday before a run of seven concerts in Scotland beginning in Dundee’s Caird Hall on October 15 and ending at Ayr Town Hall, 40 minutes down the A78 from her West Kilbride birthplace, on Halloween. More concerts across England and Ireland follow in November and December, including London’s Royal Albert Hall on November 27.

The violinist is keen to emphasise how much of a personal undertaking both the recording and the tour have been.

“I had several ideas up my sleeve about what to tour and how to tour, and two or three of them were postponed during Covid. In the past I’ve organised parts of tours myself and I wanted to do that again, in collaboration with my management, Askonas Holt, who have a fantastic touring arm to their organisation.”

In fact, she says, the intimate nature of the music came to her, if not in a dream, certainly from her subconscious mind.

“I knew I wanted to put something together around this style of repertoire, but the sound and the instrumentation actually came to me in the middle of the night and I woke up knowing how I needed to do it.

“It’s a bit of a hark back to a Mediterranean café where you might happen upon an accordionist or a guitarist and on occasion, more from the Roma tradition, a violinist too.”

The repertoire covered on the album, and to be featured on tour, is actually quite wide, including Pablo de Sarasate’s Carmen Fantasy, Manuel Ponce’s Estrelita, Peter Maxwell Davies’s Farewell to Stromness, and arrangements of Skye Boat Song and other traditional tunes by small pipes player Bridghe Chaimbeul.

It is far from all fresh territory for Benedetti, but the presentation of it by a small group in which her violin combines with the Italian accordion of Samuele Telari, Brazilian guitar of Plinio Fernandes and Welsh cellist Thomas Carrol is a new direction.

“It is a mix that includes things I haven’t played since I was 16 years old, but I wanted to do music that was light, vibrant and charming. These are pieces that you quite often learn when you are studying – they’re entertaining but rarely feature in the season repertoires of orchestras and concert halls.

“So all of the music has that sweetness to it, that bit of nostalgia, and with quite few virtuosic show-stoppers in there as well.”

The set was recorded in London’s Henry Wood Hall early this year by the same group of musicians and Jonathan Allen, a long-time Benedetti collaborator, producing.

“We’ve been talking about what would go on the album for some time and we did a bunch of little house concerts testing the repertoire, to find out what works in front of an audience.

“But I can never make decisions on anything until it is past the deadline, so I kept stringing out options until the last minute. There were definitely things that I wanted to have arranged for the group that didn’t make it.

“What that does mean is that there is a load of repertoire that isn’t on the album that we can come back to. I think the formation of those instruments works so brilliantly that we should. There’s a lot of textural interest and rhythmic flexibility, and there’s no issue with definition between the instruments, no instrument that over-powers another one. I couldn’t have asked for more in terms of how the group functions together.”

Although young strings students had the opportunity to play alongside her at the latest Benedetti Sessions tutorials by her Foundation in Glasgow Royal Concert Hall only last month, and she guested with visiting artists at the Edinburgh Festival in August, other places in her homeland haven’t heard her live in a long time.

“Half the tour is in Scotland and it is at least ten years since I’ve done as many Scottish dates” she said. “I chose all the touring venues, and they are places I’ve known since I was in my teens.

“There is so much in life now that is serious and tragic, and I hope this is an antidote to that. It’s going to give me an opportunity to stand up in front of people in an environment that is entirely presented by me, touring a beautiful collection of music around the country. I genuinely am very excited for this tour.”

Full details at http://www.nicolabenedetti.co.uk