Beethoven Violin Concerto 31 August 2014 - 7 September 2014, Cham (Switzerland)

In next September’s project, we will take up the study of Beethoven’s violin concerto. As usual, we will meet for one week, everybody with scores in hand ready to begin the first steps of finding our common idea for this piece. Our work with Beethoven’s musical language began some years ago. When we originally created our study space (the Spira mirabilis), we were sure that Beethoven’s scores were strong enough to survive our experiments, and so his was the first music we explored. Moving progressively forward from symphony to symphony, we developed a shared way to read and interpret the musical text. We have wanted to study Beethoven’s violin concerto for a while, both because of the orchestra’s unique role as protagonist in the concerto – with the solo violin often accompanying the orchestra – and because, by planning much more time than most professional orchestras do to prepare this work, we would be able to handle it with the same care we take with the rest of Beethoven’s symphonic repertoire. Very often soloistic repertoire is viewed by soloists as the perfect arena for displaying their own skills, perfected over the course of a lifetime, and thus they give little consideration to the role of the orchestra. Similarly, in performances of concerti, orchestras tend to take on a passive attitude, participating as only flowery accompaniment to the soloist’s virtuosic display. Taking all of this into consideration, the most natural choice was to give the solo part to one of the musicians who has taken part in our learning process from the very beginning. Completely in the Spira spirit, in this project there will be none of the traditional distinctions between soloist and orchestra; we’ll be able to study the violin concerto using the same methodology and attitude we have for our previous projects.