Sixth
Season
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| A Turn
to the Italian Italy was where the violin gods first appeared. Among the earliest was the composer and violinist Arcangelo Corelli, who was so famous that when he died in 1713, he was buried in the Pantheon in Rome by command of the pope. Generations of Italian violin celebrities followed him, spreading the gospel of stunning virtuosity, outsized personalities, and the new Italian musical forms of sonata and concerto to the rest of Europe. Except for France. Long after the rest of Europe adopted more abstract types of music, the French stayed with their beloved dance music forms such as gavottes, chaconnes, allemandes, and gigues. In contrast, the sonatas and concertos coming out of Italy were new and flashy. “Italian music was extravagant compared to French, full of elaborate—and often improvised—ornamentation, lots of fancy double stops, double trills, high register passages, staccato,” says Ngai. Certainly, the French were aware of Italian music. “But they shunned what the Italians were doing,” says Ngai. “I think the French thought all that was beneath them. They saw it as a pride thing.” By the 1730’s even France, that bastion of résistance to le goût italien, had capitulated to the Italian invasion. The career of French violinist and composer Jean-Marie Leclair marks the change. “Leclair is an intriguing figure in violin history,” says Emlyn Ngai, Tempesta di Mare Concertmaster and soloist in the Leclair Concerto in A Minor featured in Tempesta’s upcoming Force Majeure program. “He bridged the gap between French and Italian style.” Born in 1697, Jean-Marie Leclair started out as a dance master and musician, not an unusual career mix in dance-mad France. But as a brilliant violinist in the French tradition, Leclair had to be intrigued by Italian music. (preview continues below) go to Contents
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PREVIEW (continued)
When Leclair visited Turin in 1723, he sized up the Italian competition and studied with Giovanni Battista Somis, a student of the great Corelli himself. “From that point on, you find enormous Italian influence in Leclair’s music,” says Ngai. “People called him ‘the French Corelli.’” Leclair played like an Italian too, apparently. While traveling around Europe, Leclair confronted Pietro Antonio Locatelli in Kassel in a dual performance. Perhaps the hottest of the Italian hotshot violinists, Locatelli wowed crowds with his virtuosic exploits. He was capable of pulling off triple-stops and would play as high up as the stratospheric 22nd position on the violin fingerboard. But Leclair held his own in the exhibition, impressing commentators who called his playing “angelic” in contrast to the “devilish” Italian. Ngai also comments on this subtler side of Leclair’s talent. “Leclair wasn’t really given to extremes. His work is tasteful,” he says. “It can be virtuosic, but it can also be simple, dark and very intense. It’s clever. It’s very well crafted.” No wonder that Leclair, whose Italian turn was welcomed and emulated when he returned home, casts such a long shadow in France. “He really founded the French school of violin that dominated the latter half of the eighteenth century and the nineteenth,” says Ngai. “All the other French violin masters like Dancla, Rode, Kreutzer—they go back to Leclair.” In case you're disappointed by Leclair in the department of colorful violin legends, à la The Red Violin, have no fear. He’s got a whopper. At the end of his long and productive life, Leclair was murdered. He was discovered stabbed to death behind the door of his own house. The case was never solved, but his nephew, his gardener, and his wife have all been under suspicion. The fact that his wife owned a collection of extremely sharp music engraving implements seems less than coincidental. “The nephew in the vestibule with the knives,” says Emlyn Ngai. “Sounds like a French Baroque version of Clue, doesn’t it?”
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CD
NEWSFLASH “This seriously addictive disc should make New Yorkers envy Philadelphia for its sparkling early-music orchestra, Tempesta di Mare.”
Read the full review at Time Out New York:
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Ngai
leading Tempesta strings.
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