Every Performance Comes Alive

Photo by Benjamin Ealovega Photography

For James Ehnes, Brahms’ Violin Concerto has become a familiar friend. A staple of the violin repertoire, and one which the acclaimed Canadian violinist has been playing for over 30 years, the Concerto has helped to inspire a career which has seen Ehnes perform with orchestras the world over. “It’s a fantastic piece, and one of the reasons I became a violinist really was to get to play music like this,” he says.

Featured in Calgary Phil’s On Stage with James Ehnes on 30 November, the Concerto itself has a storied history. Despite its now-iconic status, the piece’s 1879 premieres in both Leipzig and London were met with mixed reviews, a fact which Ehnes suggests had more to do with audience expectations than the piece itself. “Brahms was — not really through any efforts of his own — a controversial figure in certain circles in that there were these philosophical battles on the direction that music should take,” he explains. “When [Brahms] wrote this Concerto it was quite different from maybe what people would have expected out of a violin concerto of the day. People were expecting the violin to be more traditionally virtuosic, for the violin to be more consistently leading the musical line.”

While the Concerto does — especially in its last movement — still have its fair share of what Ehnes calls “traditional virtuosic pyrotechnics,” it is more commonly recognized for its extensive dialogues between soloist and orchestra, a feature which Ehnes says makes it “deeply rewarding” to play.

“It’s really like a symphony with a solo violin, its relationship to the orchestra is so entwined,” he says. “It’s just a much more immersive experience for the solo player.”

Despite what Ehnes refers to as the concerto’s “difficult birth,” many of its elements — including technical demands which led to it infamously being labelled “unplayable” by Brahms’ contemporary Henryk Wieniawski — have become “part of the vernacular,” proof of both the ways in which the expectations of musicians and audiences alike have shifted over the past century and a half, and the innovation behind Brahms’ original composition.

“With new music there’s always been this very fine line between impossible and highly inconvenient,” Ehnes explains. “With a lot of the pieces that are now quite standard repertoire, a fair number of them were seen as unplayable at the time because the players had just not really seen anything quite like that, which I think is a testament to a composer having an individual voice. If you have an individual voice with a composer, chances are it’s going to fit in the hands a little differently than someone else’s writing.”

Just as audience expectations around the Concerto have evolved in the time since its composition, so has Ehnes’ interpretation of the piece changed since he started playing it three decades ago. Importantly though, while Ehnes notes that he “undoubtedly” performs the piece differently now than when he first learned it as a teen, his feelings for the piece “have not really changed.”

“It’s just that I’ve changed, and I continue to change,” says Ehnes, who’s gone on to have a highly acclaimed career with both Grammy and JUNO awards under his belt. “And I think that over time one’s understanding of what it means surely evolves, because we’re different people, and things mean different things to us at different stages of our life.”

Ehnes’ familiarity with the piece now lends his performance a flexibility and responsiveness which he likens to telling a joke to a group of friends, knowing when to draw a moment out, or when to move on: “You can feel the reaction and adjust accordingly, and I think experience certainly plays a lot into that. But there’s also just a lot of human nature with that that makes every performance alive and a little bit different.”

And while Ehnes does note that performing a piece as well-known as the Brahms can lead to an impulse to second-guess one’s interpretation in search of a unique or innovative approach, that individuality ultimately comes naturally from the musician themself: “If you are yourself, then by definition it is individual,” he says. “I think you have to liberate yourself from the idea of expectation and just tell the story as you think it goes and be as compelling as you can.”

Looking ahead to November’s concert, Ehnes — originally from Brandon, Manitoba — is excited to bring the Brahms to Western Canada. “I think everyone from Calgary through Winnipeg feels maybe a certain kinship as Canadians,” he explains. “I’ve been playing in Calgary for at least 25 years, and the community has always been so supportive of me. In my early career having the support of wonderful orchestras like the Calgary Phil and wonderful communities like Calgary, that meant a very, very great deal to me, and continue to mean a very great deal to me.”