VoxCarnyx

Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Some years ago I recall hearing violin showman Maxim Vengerov interviewed on BBC Radio 3’s In Tune, and Sean Rafferty asking if he was ever irritated by audiences coming to see him more for his virtuosic encore choices than the concertos orchestras contracted him to play.

Vengerov’s memorable reply was: “Well, you may go to a restaurant because it serves the best tiramisu, but you still have to eat.”

It might look as if Nicola Benedetti’s upcoming new album, Violin Café – and the current concert tour launching it – is in danger of serving a surfeit of desserts and no main courses, but that would be to underestimate the sound-world she and her new associates have created.

Italian accordionist Samuele Telari, Brazilian guitarist Plinio Fernandes, and cellists Maxim Calver (live) and Thomas Carrol (on the recording) may make the sort of informal ensemble the album title suggests, but the bespoke arrangements are mostly true to her classical education.

In fact some of them are the work of Stephen Goss, who was Benedetti’s theory teacher at the Yehudi Menuhin School, others by Paul Campbell, who does the same job for her Foundation’s education work, and the freshest by traditional music talent Brigdhe Chaimbeul.

An international star player of the small pipes, Chaimbeul is currently in the midst of tour dates of her own and free to join Benedetti’s group only for the Ulster Hall date at the start of December. Her place in Glasgow was taken by Fin Moore, who has followed in the footsteps of his father Hamish as one of Scotland’s top pipe-makers, and also taught Chaimbeul as a youngster.

That sense of legacy in the sequence of traditional tunes the quintet played at the start of this concert’s second half ran through the whole evening. Benedetti has talked about reconnecting with her core audience following the absences of the Covid pandemic, her work with the Edinburgh International Festival and her maternity leave, and that has gone hand-in-hand with her revisiting her own musical past and the repertoire she learned as a student of the violin.

So she was joined by a younger alumnus of the Menuhin school, Yumi Fujise, for the Pablo Sarasate duet, Navarra, a favourite test piece for young players to push one another on (which also features on the record). Henryk Wieniawski’s Polonaise de Concert is a similar sort of work, and a Niccolo Paganini sequence, which began with a solo Caprice, before the one Andrew Lloyd Webber and Melvyn Bragg made famous, and then the lovely Cantabile Op 17, was clearly in the same territory.

Significantly, though, there was a balance between the fireworks of the likes of Vittorio Monti’s Csardas and more gentle fare, like Claude Debussy’s Beau Soir, Manuel Ponce’s Estrellita (popularly revived by Benedetti Foundation associate Elena Urioste and her husband Tom Poster with their pandemic Jukebox recordings), and the encore of Paul Campbell’s arrangement of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’s Farewell to Stromness.

It was a perfect way to end an evening that saw Benedetti embracing her past but eschewing nostalgia, and it would have been good to hear much more of Fernandes, for example, who came to the fore only at the end. There was a real sense that there could be much more to come from this ensemble.

Keith Bruce

Further dates at Ayr Town Hall (Oct 31), Bridgewater Hall, Manchester (Nov 19), National Concert Hall, Dublin (Nov 23), Royal Albert Hall, London (Nov 27), Lighthouse, Poole (Nov 29), Ulster Hall, Belfast (Dec 1) and The Royal Hall, Harrogate (Dec 4).

Picture by Christopher Bowen