Nicola Benedetti in Hong Kong

An image of a  young blonde with an enormous black pear-shaped plastic earring with its shiny black surface dotted with tiny emerald green spots  hanging like an ornamental pendulum upon the lobe of her right ear and a pig tail behind her head looking down and a violin and bow held by her left hand over a black bare top evening gown was placed on the table at the entrance of the City Hall Concert Hall. I looked at it. On top of the dark blue front cover of the Programme Notes were the words "Violin Superstar Nicola Benedetti and friends Leonard Elschenbroich cello and Alexei Gryhnyuk piano." This was about all that I knew about this young group before I settled down in the third row of the hall with my usual concert-going gang. At the end of the concert, I knew I had found another group whose discs I can no longer afford to ignore.

According to the Programme Notes, Nicola Benedetti was born in Scotland, began learning violin at 5, won the BBC Young Musician of the year in 2004, and the Classical BRIT Award (Young British Classical Performer) in 2008, had 5 CDs under the Universal/DGG label including violin concertos by Tchaikovsky and Bruch two of which topped the UK classical music charts for a number of weeks. Her piano accompanist Alexei Grynyuk first studied at the Kiev Conservatoire and then under Hamish Milne at the Royal Academy of Music, won first prizes at the Shanghai Piano Competition, Moscow's Dyagilev Competition and Kiev's Vladimir Horowitz Competition and had appeared in various music festivals in Mexico, Poland, Moscow,, Germany, France and America. Leonard Elschenbroich played Brahm's Double Concerto with Anne-Sophie Mutter, who treated him as her protégé, at the opening concert of the 2009 Schleswig-Holstein Festival and has performed under Valery Gergiev, Semyon Bychikov, Manfred Honeck, Christopher Eschenbach and Fabio Luisi.

The evening's programme started with The Scherzo and Melodie of Tchaikovsky's 3 piece Souvenirs d'un Lieu Cher, Op. 42  (1878), continued with R Strauss's Violin Sonata in E flat, Op 18 (1887-88) in Allegro, ma non troppo, Improvisation in Andante Cantabile and Finale in Andante-Allegro and ended with one of my favourites, Tchaikovky's Piano Trio in A Minor, Op. 50 (1881-82) in Pezzo elegiaco, Tema con variazoni and Finale-Coda. 

Perhaps Benedetti needed a bit of time to get into the mood, her first piece, a rather rapid piece with plenty of staccato, plucking and two string notes, the sound was a twinge dry but her sound improved rapidly as she moved into the the slower passages of the very popular Melodie, the second peice of the originally three-song composition. She plays an Earl Spencer Stradivarius (c 1712). I like its sound, very rich, mellow, warm, never scratchy nor over-bright even for the high notes. She plays with energy even for the low and soft notes. I do not know whether or not it was because she knew that her sound must be heard at the furthest end of the hall, even her low and soft notes were never as soft and low as might otherwise be the case, unlike the playing of Hilary Hahn some of whose soft passages are often almost inaudible beyond the first 30 rows or so. Perhaps for this reason, sometimes I wish she would play with a slightly greater dynamic contrast. However, this impression is completely gone with her final piece. Perhaps because I was sitting so close to the stage, the trio sounded perfect. It was intimate. The players were extremely sensitive to each other's play. This could be seen from the way they looked at or listened intently to the sound from the other's instrument or at the expressions on their faces. This piece has a very personal meaning to me. It recalls to me my first experience with classical music. As I listened, I could not help remembering the way I had to press my ears against the speaker of my integrated Akai open-wheel tape recorder to listen to that wonderfully intimate sound until 2 to 3 a.m. because I had to turn the volume down so as not to disturb my father's sleep. That was more than 40 years ago. The trio was then played by Horowitz, Sterne and Rostropovich. It all suddenly came back to me as I looked at the way the piano, the strings of violin and the cello and the keyboard of the piano were bowed, plucked, or hit when the same motif were played one after the other, joining in at the apppropriate moment and separating, sometimes with one instrument, sometimes with two and sometimes with all three instruments playing together in a perfect web of sound. The enjoyment is not just sonic. I thorougly enjoyed the visual delight of the conmingling of emotions on their eyes, their faces, their hands, their arms, their shoulders and the way they looked at each other as if there were a musical menage a trois upon the stage. Nicola was wearing a red bare shoulder evening gown with folds from below breast line to the waist whilst Leonard was wearing a lose white shirt and black trousers, with a high Roman nose and hair in big curly waves, just like a young Greek god, whilst the shy looking Alexei looks so cute behind his metal rimmed glass and straight light brown hair sliding over his sweaty brow, in a formal black suit. One can see that they were not merely "performing". I believe they were enjoying the comaraderie and the sound from their respective instruments every bit as much as the audience were in listening to them.  

The audience responded with thunderous applauses and the three players were obviously quite pleased with the reception and played the 4th movement of Brahm's 3rd Piano Trio to as an encore to round off this evening of heavenly enjoyment.