Scottish-born violinist returns to KC with Italian Baroque Orchestra.
Kansas City heard violinist Nicola Benedetti for the first time in 2007 at a free Harriman-Jewell Series Discovery Concert. Benedetti was on the cusp of a brilliant career and has since become a classical music superstar.
Benedetti will return to the Harriman-Jewell Series, this time with the Venice Baroque Orchestra, for a concert Feb. 16 at the Folly Theater.
Benedetti is an incredibly versatile musician, performing everything from the great Romantic violin concertos by Johannes Brahms and Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky to modernist works by James MacMillan and even lush
Hollywood scores. Her Folly Theater concert will feature music by the Italian Baroque composers Francesco Geminiani, Arcangelo Corelli and Antonio Vivaldi.
Benedetti says she loves a wide variety of music and compares diverse genres to architecture.
“I like walking around New York City and seeing some of the original apartment buildings juxtaposed against the most sparkling, shining, most futuristic buildings ever,” she said. “To me, one looks more beautiful because it’s positioned next to the other. The differences and beauties of both become highlighted because I can perceive them both at once. I feel that way about my experience with music.”
Benedetti, who began playing the violin when she was four, studied at the Yehudi Menuhin School for young musicians in England. One of her memorable early experiences was playing second violin in Johann Sebastian Bach’s Double Concerto for two violins. The great Menuhin himself was the conductor.
“He was such a powerful force when he entered a room,” Benedetti said. Everybody was hushed. It was a very special moment when he would come to the school. And later, as I began to develop my own taste for violinists, I grew to admire his playing for certain repertoire maybe above anyone else’s. The incredibly human singing voice his violin had was quite a rarity.”
Over the years, Benedetti has studied with early music specialists, learning the subtleties of Baroque performance practice. But she says her playing and that of the Venice Baroque Orchestra is far from academic or clinical.
“If you were not to analyze it and just listen to the wildness of a composer like (Antonio) Vivaldi, it inspires a certain freedom,” she said. “To me, it’s just unavoidable, no matter how much you would choose to do something different, you have to go in that direction.”
The Venice Baroque Orchestra is certainly not known for staid performances. They bring 18th-century music alive, with verve and fire. Benedetti will be featured in almost every work on the program, but she says that she will be “integrated” into the ensemble.
“They are a very collegial orchestra and also have a lot of spontaneity and they inspire a lot of trust in me,” she said. “Trust that whatever direction we choose to go, everyone will follow in good faith and good spirits, rather than there being rights or wrongs and good and bad.”
On Jan. 27, the Harriman-Jewell Series will present the Moscow Festival Ballet at the Muriel Kauffman Theatre, Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts. Founded in 1989 by Sergei Radchenko, a principal dancer of the Bolshoi Ballet, the Moscow Festival Ballet is dedicated to presenting classical works in the grand Russian ballet tradition.
The program will please lovers of fairy tale and romance. Sergei Prokofiev’s “Cinderella” and Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s “Romeo and Juliet” will be featured, as well as Camille Saint-Saens’ tender and heartbreaking “The Dying Swan.”
On Feb. 26, violinist Simone Porter will give a free Harriman-Jewell Series Discovery Concert at the Folly Theater. Joined by pianist Armen Guzelimian, Porter will play music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Leos Janacek, Arvo Part and Johannes Brahms.
Called “a future star” by the Los Angeles Times, Simone was a big hit at the Harriman-Jewell Series Prelude Gala in 2015. Now the 20-year-old Avery Fisher Career Grant recipient is returning for her first public recital in Kansas City. Just like Nicola Benedetti’s Discovery Concert in 2007, this is an opportunity to hear a violin star in the making.
For tickets or information, call 816-415-5025 or visit www.hjseries.org.
–Patrick Neas
