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Violinist.com Interview with
James Ehnes: Four Seasons
and No Apologies
January 19, 2016, 9:37 PM · Canadian
violinist James Ehnes would rather play for
the hundreds of concertgoers who inevitably will fall in love with Vivaldi's "The Pirastro Strings
Four Seasons" than worry about a few who might have grown tired of the piece.

Because in more than 20 years of playing it, he hasn't tired of it.

"It's really resilient music -- it can be done so many different ways, and it
always works," Ehnes told me, speaking by phone over the winter holidays.
"Sometimes people make a point of cultivating an air of ennui, 'Oh, The Four
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Seasons. Oh, the Mendelssohn Concerto. Do we really need this again?' And I
think, 'Well, yes we do! This stuff is great!' If I play The Four Seasons
somewhere, there might be some person out there who feels that they're far too
sophisticated to sit through yet another Four Seasons. But I know that there
are hundreds of people out there who have never heard it, or certainly never
heard it live, who are going to come away thinking, 'I really, really like this!'
And that, I think, does a lot more good." Jameasy
Ehnes, who will perform the Beethoven Violin Concerto with the New York
Philharmonic next week, recently added Vivaldi: Four Seasons; Tartini: Devil's
Trill; Leclair: Tambourin, recorded with Andrew Armstrong and the Sydney
Symphony, to his considerable discography of more than 40 recordings, which
also includes Khachaturian and Shostakovich (2014); Mendelssohn: Concerto
and Octet (2010) and Paganini: Caprices (2009).
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We spoke about why "The Four Seasons" holds up, how he practices for the
nonstop trilling in Tartini's "Devil's Trill" and what it's like to go on a concert
tour with his two toddlers in tow.
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James Ehnes. Photo by Benjamin Ealovega.
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"There are those pieces where, if it's not a great performance, then it's just a
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complete write-off, a total loss," Ehnes said. "Of course, the Four Seasons
benefits from a great performance, but it's music that can be appreciated in so Fiddlershop
many different ways. You can hear a student group perform it and still
appreciate it. It's interesting, it's colorful, it's creative. Certainly it is an Nazareth Gevorkian Violins

http://www.violinist.com/blog/laurie/20161/17308/ 1/4
23/4/2018 Violinist.com Interview with James Ehnes: Four Seasons and No Apologies
immediately appealing piece, but once you get beneath that surface, then it Los Angeles Violin Shop
becomes even more interesting."
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But aren't all Vivaldi concertos the same? There's that old yarn: that Vivaldi
wrote one concerto, 600 times. Ehnes doesn't see it that way, although "at Violin Lab
times, with some of his music, you see the same forms, the same type of Wangbow Violin Bow Workshop
violinistic techniques, the same proportions," Ehnes said. "The Seasons are
different; and their familiarity sometimes masks their inventiveness. Take, for Free Sheet Music Download: Jazz Violin
example, the slow movement of 'Autumn,' where there's no solo violin part at Caprice by Christian Howes
all; or the sound effects that are explored in various of the other movements; or
the immediate, shotgun tempo changes that happen; or these episodes within SUBSCRIBE
the movements that seem like they're coming from a completely different
world." Email Address

Vivaldi wrote "The Four Seasons" around a set of descriptive poems, written Sign Up
into the pages of the music. "It's so interesting, the way that he uses music to
illustrate these ideas," Ehnes said. "The poetry also opens up all sorts of fun,
interpretive questions." Some people treat the poetry as a minor suggestion of
what should happen in the music; others go overboard, trying to render the
music as special-effect accompaniment to the poetry. "So despite these being
pieces that any advanced student can get through, there are interpretive
questions you can ponder for years and still find different things to do, and
different ways to do them."

Since Vivaldi, Tartini and Leclair are Baroque composers, did Ehnes try using a
Baroque bow for this recording?

"No," James said. "As far as equipment goes, I've had some fun conversations
with colleagues, and everyone comes to their own solution." For Ehnes, the
solution is the use the equipment that he so passionately sought out: he plays
on a 1715 Strad called the "Marsick," and a Tourte from about 1820-25. "I'm in
a very lucky position to have no excuses left. For me, a comfort level with the
equipment is more important than anything else," Ehnes said. "If I have
something good, and I know how I want to use it, then that's going to give me
more options. If I'm having trouble making a particular sound or finding a
particular color, that's on me. It could be that there are certain violins or bows
where it might be easier to find a particular sound, or they might be more
naturally suited to playing a particular type of music. But I'm never going to
develop that kind of a close comfort level with equipment if I'm always
switching around."

"Some people feel certain equipment is so specifically suited to repertoire from

the period when it was designed, they must use that. I've have some friends
that use different bows for different pieces, or different strings for early or
Romantic repertoire," he said. "I can certainly appreciate that; that's just not
the way I go about it."

Stylistically, he's really neither in the "period music" or the "more Romantic
interpretation" camp.

"I've certainly enjoyed collaborations over the years with people whose careers
are more focused on early music than mine has been, and it's hard to know how
much I've been influenced by them," he said. "In a way, this felt a more like a
culmination of a lot of years, rather than a new exploration or new start. I just
came to a point where I thought, 'This is how this music speaks to me, this is
how I think it needs to go.'"

Ehnes' new recording also includes Tartini's "Devil's Trill," in which, of course,
means that Ehnes plays that trill-filled cadenza. How does one cultivate a good
trill, without getting tendonitis?

James Ehnes plays Violin Sonata in G Minor, "The Devil's Trill": III. Grave -
Allegro assai, arr. F. Kreisler. The cadenza starts at 5:11:

http://www.violinist.com/blog/laurie/20161/17308/ 2/4
23/4/2018 Violinist.com Interview with James Ehnes: Four Seasons and No Apologies

Violin Sonata in G Minor, "The Devil's Trill": III. Grave - Allegro ass…

"Getting ready for this recording, I was really focused on hand strength," Ehnes
said. "If you have a violin that's set up with a really quick response, and maybe
you've got low strings, you can kind of get away with just kind of fluttering the
hand a little bit, and those notes speak. On a violin that's set up more like mine,
it needs to be a little bit punchier and have a bigger range of dynamics. If you're
not really getting those fingers down, you start hearing false harmonics and
other things in there. That's a challenge in the cadenza: developing that kind of
hand strength and endurance. It's only about a minute and a half long, but the
hand can tire out."

Here's one thing you don't want to do: decide that "'Today is the day that I'm
going to make it perfect!' and then you work on it until you've given yourself a
physical injury." Instead, set specific, do-able goals that won't cause a strain.
With trills that are like turns, "it can be a good idea to know just how many
little turns you want to be making, to slow it down and figure out exactly what
your hand wants to do. If it's the difference between four little turns or three,
it's probably better to know what your plan is and to train the hand to do it," he
said. If you train your hand to do it the same way every time, that will help,
even if you get to the point where you're no longer consciously aware of the
number.

"When it comes to trills, the clarity of the trill is certainly just as important, if
not more important, than the speed," Ehnes said. They should be clear, clean,
fast -- in that order. "Clarity over speed. If you're practicing for clarity, you'll
build strength, and strength will build speed. But if you're practicing for speed,
then you're never going to build the strength that will lead to clarity."

These days, in addition to practicing trills, concertizing all over the world and
making recordings, Ehnes is also spending as much time as he can with his
family, including his daughter, 3, and son, 1.

"Before the kids are in school we're trying to be on the road together as a family
as much as possible," Ehnes said. "That's super-fun, but it does get expensive
and complicated, figuring out the proper lodging, getting the multiple tickets,
bringing the car seats. It's that weird inverse proportion: the smaller the child,
the more stuff they seem to need! (He laughs) So there's only room for Dad to
bring three pairs of socks on this trip, okay!"

"But also, there's a kind of mental hurtle," he said. "For example you might
spend the morning going to the Children's Museum, then you're trying to get
one down for a nap and the other's not tired; your daughter's saying, 'I don't
want to wear purple, I only want to wear pink, and I don't want to wear light
pink, I want to wear hot pink!' and your son is freaking out over something or
other....then all of a sudden: Here's the Brahms Concerto, go! That's a little bit
of a mental trick."

"Performing is such a self-centered activity; in a certain sense, it kind of has to

be about you," Ehnes said. "Parenthood is exactly the opposite of that. At the
same time, I feel like my children have been the greatest gift to me, personally,
and I'd like to think that I'm definitely a better person for them being around.
How could that not reflect itself in something of what I'm trying to
communicate, musically?"

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23/4/2018 Violinist.com Interview with James Ehnes: Four Seasons and No Apologies
"Also, it's so neat to experience music with children -- the way that they
respond to it, the way that they so instinctively understand that it is a method
of communication," Ehnes said. "We spend so much time in the practice room,
thinking about technical details, or looking at the score saying, 'Does that
mezzo-forte come on the third sixteenth note or on the second sixteenth note?'
-- things like this. Then you play something, not even very well, in front of little
kids and they start hopping and dancing around. Or they say, 'No, I don't like
that one.' You think, well, that's really much more important.

"Parenthood is so funny. Before you have kids, everybody tells you certain
things. People tell you that kids are expensive, they get sick, you never sleep
and you never have any time for yourself - but parenthood is the greatest thing
ever! And you think, well that definitely sounds like crazy talk, it doesn't make
any rational sense," he said. "Then you realize, it's all exactly true: when you
have a kid you turn into a crazy person, and you're perfectly happy to be that
crazy person."

You might also like:

Interview with James Ehnes: Homage

In Defense of Violin Music, by James Ehnes
Smartphones in the Concert Hall
Jury Member Explains Why They Gave No Gold to Violinists at the
Tchaikovsky

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Replies

Christian Lesniak

January 21, 2016 at 06:31 PM · It's

interesting to have some perspective
on the practical means of achieving the interpretation you want,
which you almost never get from interviews with artists. I will
have to check out this cd. I heard a wonderful Prokofiev Violin
Concerto 1 on the radio the other day, and when they announced it was James
Ehnes at the end, I was made an instant fan.

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