United Kingdom Biber, Froberger, Kapsberger: Rachel Podger (violin), Brecon Baroque (Elizabeth Kenny [theorbo] and Marcin Świątkiewicz [harpsichord]). Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, Cardiff, 1.12.2024. (LJ)
Biber – Sonata 1 in A major; Sonata 2 in D minor; Sonata 5 in E minor; Sonata 6 in C minor (scordatura); Sonata 3 in F major
J. J. Froberger – Suite in A minor
Hieronymus Kapsberger – Toccata in D minor
Dickens and Molière, two well-known writers of their respective countries, describe the arrival of violinists in completely different ways. In Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, the Ghost of Christmas Past takes Scrooge to visit Mr. Fezziwig’s home where Scrooge recalls attending the Fezziwig Ball. It is here that Scrooge remembers seeing a musician tune his violin, making a sound ‘like fifty stomach-aches.’ By contrast, in one of Molière and Lully’s divertissements, no doubt referring to Lully’s ‘les petits violons du Roi’ (a band of 21 violinists performing for the court of Louis XIV), the stage direction reads: ‘Entry of the violinists, dancing’. Needless to say, violinist Rachel Podger’s performance at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama was more ‘dancing’ than ‘stomach-ache’! The performance featured one rather than twenty-one violinists, but this does not mean to say that there was any less vibrancy. Podger’s playing was embodied and evocative of the baroque court. She was expertly accompanied by Elizabeth Kenny (theorbo) and Marcin Świątkiewicz (harpsichord), who also gave solo performances.
The concert comprised of five Biber sonatas for violin (accompanied by the theorbo and harpsichord), and two solos: one for the harpsichord in the first half, and the other for theorbo following the interval. Biber, sometimes dubbed ‘the Paganini of the seventeenth century’, is known for his unique imagination which is reflected in his polyphonic textures and use of double stops, scale figuration over a drone bass, glissando, and the scordatura. His eight violin sonatas were published in 1681 whilst he was a Kapellmeister to the Salzburg court, and they are representative of his style. As Podger said when introducing us to Biber in her opening remarks, ‘you never really know what’s around the corner’. I can see why Biber’s spontaneity would appeal to such a virtuoso as Podger, who, having recorded Biber’s Rosary Sonatas in 2015, is currently compiling an album of the sonatas from 1681. The careful balance between improvisatory flare and formally structured passages makes playing Biber an ongoing exploration. My title to this review therefore quotes Podger, who describes Biber’s ‘world’ as akin to being on ‘a completely different planet’.
Of all the violin sonatas performed during the concert, the fifth in E minor was the most striking. This piece replaced Biber’s Sonata Representativa, which originally appeared on the programme. Unlike the Representativa, the E minor sonata is serious, even mysterious, in its opening bars. It is a complex, pensive piece that uses a combination of variation technique and double as well as triple stops that alternate with free passagework. Podger conveyed the solemnity and vivacity of this piece, demonstrating her affinity with Biber’s baroque world. As a result, Podger immersed her audience into this unique world. Her performance of the Sixth Sonata in C minor was also very memorable, not only because of her masterful scordatura that required retuning her E string to a D within just two bars’ rest, but because her performance of the Passacaglia was both dignified and introspective.
Throughout, Podger’s tone was woody yet sharp, true to that distinctly baroque sound that is unique to violins from the era. She plays a Pesarini violin that was made in Genoa in c.1739. Her ‘twig’, as baroque bows are affectionately called, was made by the French bowmaker René-William Groppe who specialises in bows for the period 1650-1800. Podger’s amazing tonal variety – at times her bow glided, dug, bounced, and weaved over and across her strings – is, in part, due to her connection with this baroque bow which is designed to have a richer tone when played at the frog and a lighter, even wispy, sound when moved across the strings.
Podger’s truly baroque sound was enhanced by her accompanists whose very instruments symbolise the era. Instruments belonging to the lute family (within which the theorbo would be the grandfather), have often been associated with romance, the power of music, and far-off lands (its name derives from the Arabic ‘al ’ūd’ [‘the wood’]). The harpsichord, however, has not fared so well, even in the musician’s imagination. It has been described as sounding like ‘two skeletons copulating on a corrugated tin roof’ (Thomas Beecham), ‘the ticking of a sewing machine’ (Ralph Vaughan Williams), and ‘a performance on a bird-cage with a toasting fork’ (Percy Scholes). Yet, in their solo performances and accompaniment of the Biber sonatas both Kenny and Świątkiewicz performed excellently. Świątkiewicz managed to give the harpsichord a wonderful lyricism and depth not typically associated with the instrument (as the quotes above suggest!). In his performance of J. J. Froberger’s Suite in A minor, he brought an improvisatory freshness to the piece. In his accompaniment, Świątkiewicz was inventive and attentive, no doubt drawing on his experience of playing with Podger and the Brecon Baroque (he is the harpsichordist on Podger’s acclaimed Rosary Sonatas album mentioned above).
Much like Świątkiewicz, Kenny demonstrated her interpretive skill in her solo performance. Kenny’s experience and mastery of her instrument was on full display when she played Hieronymus Kapsberger’s Toccata in D minor. Kapsberger, who was often referred to as ‘Giovanni Girolamo’ throughout Italy, his adopted home, gained another moniker: ‘Il Tedesco della tiorba’ (‘the German of the theorbo’). Rather than using the theorbo as an accompanying bass instrument, for Kapsberger it became a solo instrument. In her short introduction before performing this piece, Kenny described Kapsberger’s toccata as intending to evoke a stream of consciousness and added that the piece should convey thunder and lightning, at least to the extent any lute can achieve such melodrama. Indeed, Kenny’s performance was arresting, filled with intrigue and expectation.
In his review of Podger and the Brecon Baroque’s concert at the RWCMD from Spring of this year, Glyn Pursglove commends Podger for her technical precision, expressiveness, and stage manner – all of which were on display when she now returned to the same venue with Kenny and Świątkiewicz. He closes his review by saying that anyone unsure about baroque music should attend one of Podger’s concerts for ‘a musical conversion-experience’. If such a person followed this advice and attended Podger’s more recent concert, they would certainly have been wowed by, if not wooed into, Biber’s world of the baroque. There was something spellbinding about the music, which transported the audience in Cardiff to ‘a completely different planet’.
Lucy Jeffery