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stage, there’s clearly a feeling that the audience is there for all the right reasons. It’s a really great free-flowing energy between performer and audience.’
As part of this tour, Anthony performs Schumann’s Cello Concerto in A minor op 129, transcribed for violin. ‘I don’t normally plunder other instruments’ work!’ he insists with mock indignation at the suggestion, ‘but since there was an historical nod in that direction, I thought yes, let’s try this.’
Antony continues, ‘It was actually discovered when the violinist Joseph Joachim died. There were some manuscripts discovered in his papers, and no one took that much notice. A little bit later on, after closer inspection, it was discovered it was a transcription that Schumann had made himself. I believe Joachim never played it.’
But why had Schumann created this version for violin? ‘I think he had a little difficulty in getting the Cello Concerto performed. He was quite open and flexible about how it might be done. There’s even a version for cello and string quartet, which I heard recently and it’s a bit … How shall I put this …’, he hesitates before admitting, ‘… recessional! It loses something, I think.’
Anthony explains that he has effectively combined the string quartet and full orchestral version. ‘It was actually my intention to arrange it myself, but I simply ran out of time and thought no, I will ask my friend Orlando Jopling to do it because he will do it way better than me. He’s quite free with the particular lines he gives to particular instruments. He uses the strings so extremely imaginatively. The violists have far more to do than you would imagine!’
The violinist has in fact already performed the arrangement in April with his own ensemble, the Irish Chamber Orchestra. Anthony confides, ‘Quite honestly, I wasn’t sure – but it really is marvellous.’
But how has the cello solo translated into a violin solo? ‘It works very well. The cello line in the original is incredibly high at times, so it lies very naturally within the range of the violin. It feels very “right” in a strange kind of way.’
‘And I am completely mad about Schumann,’ he continues. ‘I will play as much Schumann as I possibly can. He is a composer who really speaks to me. I love the point where beauty is about to break up and disintegrate into madness and chaos. It’s beauty at its most fragile, like a flower that is in such full bloom that you know in any minute it is going to die.’
This analogy fits the character of Schumann, whose struggle with mental illness is often expressed in his music. ‘It is sad to say but his illness is, in a way, our gift. What he could create in that state was something very particular and unusual and intensely beautiful.’
‘I’m trying to forgive her,’ Anthony says, referring to Clara Schumann, who suppressed some of her husband’s late works. ‘I think that for his close friends and his wife that music was too much bound up with his mental illness, and they couldn’t see it clearly for what it really is. It’s only with the benefit of time that people have begun to understand that those late works are something special and magical.’
Even so, in the present day, Anthony encounters a reluctance to have these later works performed. ‘It’s extraordinary the number of times I mention the “real” Violin Concerto, of which I am most definitely a fan, and people say “oh, it’s a very weak piece”. It’s not a weak piece at all! It’s an unusual and quite misunderstood piece.’
Also on the program is the Australian premiere of a work by John Kinsella, Prelude and Toccata. Anthony explains, ‘It was written for string quartet, which is how I heard it, and it was just one of those coincidences that, at the very same time, John Kinsella was having the thought that he would like to have this played by larger forces. I didn’t even have to ask for it, it just arrived. It’s brilliant writing for the group – extremely light, fleeting and mysterious at the same time – quite captivating.’
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