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It was something of a coup on the part of the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra's Anthony Ernst to secure a single engagement with one of the world's hottest young musicians, Canadian violinist James Ehnes. On September 4, Ehnes (pronounced Ennis) will play Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto with the APO, conducted by Oleg Caetani. In March, when he played the same work with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra under Kent Nagano, critics praised his kinetic energy and penchant for the risky, his spectacular phrasing and his unerring technique. In a musical world saturated with marketing hyperbole that rarely delivers what it promises, Ehnes' violin playing does not disappoint. His touring diary is full, and his list of recordings contains many award winners.
Ernst, the APO's manager of artistic planning, first heard of Ehnes from the orchestra's acting principal cellist, Jeremy Turner, who was an old schoolmate of the violinist. Then, in 2006, on one of his annual talent-scouting trips, Ernst had the good fortune to hear Ehnes playing the Walton concerto with the New York Philharmonic, whose eminent conductor, Lorin Maazel, had actually learned the work especially for the performance. Like most people, Ernst was blown away by the experience.
He and Turner had dinner with Ehnes, who said he had always looked forward to visiting Australasia. He was busy throughout 2007, but there was a space following an Australian tour in 2008. Ernst grabbed it. He was also introduced to Walter Homburger, Ehnes' manager, the man who had managed the career of Glenn Gould and brought Seiji Ozawa to Toronto. So enthusiastic had he been about Ehnes' talent, Homburger came out of retirement in 1993 solely to manage the violinist's career when Ehnes was only 17. The rest is history.
Speaking from Brisbane the morning after a performance of the Tchaikovsky concerto with the Queensland Orchestra, Ehnes sounds fresh and full of anticipation at the thought of a few days' rest. He certainly needs one after three weeks performing the Tchaikovsky and the Bernstein Serenade with the major Australian orchestras. It all sounds rather gruelling, but he says he doesn't mind living out of a suitcase, especially as this time he's accompanied by his wife, Kate, a dancer. "We always try to see something of the places we visit. We especially try to get out of cities as much as we can. The Queensland Orchestra has been kind enough to arrange a behind the scenes' tour of the Australia Zoo, outside Brisbane, where we're really looking forward to playing with the koalas."
Ehnes was fortunate in having parents who realised the talent that lay in their small son and nurtured it. Theirs was a musical household in Brandon, Manitoba, where his mother was a former ballet dancer and his father taught trumpet at Brandon University. Ehnes has recalled he could have chosen to learn any instrument, but what made him decide on the violin - at the age of four - was hearing Itzhak Perlman playing on Sesame Street. He was given a mini-violin for Christmas and until the age of nine was taught by his father. He then began study with Francis Chaplin, a renowned local violin teacher.
From 1989-1992, Ehnes also attended the prestigious seven-week Meadowmount summer schools for string players at Westport in upstate New York. Here he came into contact with Sally Thomas, of the Juilliard School in New York. She became his teacher, and to this day he remains grateful for her belief in encouraging each pupil's individual talent. He particularly appreciates her refusal to rely on an imposed "method" with its inherent danger of making all pupils sound the same. "With her, nothing was formulaic," he says, "there was no set order of pieces that had to be learned, no set fingerings and bowings. She was keenly aware when a student needed to be cut off - allowed to go their own way."
The result of such an approach is clearly evident in Ehnes' playing, with its distinctive blend of athletic energy, emotional range and, perhaps above all, startling delicacy of phrasing. Added to these qualities is a sense of musical judgment that means Ehnes never underlines emotion already explicit in the notes, something that many high-profile performers, not only violinists, make entire careers out of doing.
Ehnes graduated from Juilliard in 1997 and began his international career. His first recording, of the Paganini Caprices for Telarc, was actually made before his graduation, in 1995, and was quickly acclaimed. However, his engagement as a Telarc artist came to grief. "They took a chance on me," he recalls. "They announced the Paganini recording as the first of a long-term exclusive contract, but the whole industry changed so radically soon afterwards, with a dramatic downturn in sales of classical CDs, that we never got to the second project. I learned a valuable lesson from the experience - that in this business it's the label that makes all the decisions, not the artist. They play God." Since then, Ehnes has preferred to record for smaller, more adventurous companies, avoiding being pigeon-holed as a decorative accessory to big-name orchestras and conductors in over-recorded mainstream repertoire.
For Chandos, he has recorded the Dohnanyi Second and Dvorak concertos, as well as the relatively little-known Dallapiccola work called Tartiniana; for Onyx, he has made his award-winning recordings of the Elgar concerto and the triple bill of Barber, Korngold and Walton concertos. His extraordinary talent is perhaps best heard on his complete recordings of the Bach solo partitas and the sonatas with harpsichord for Analekta. In 2006, he recorded for CBC Mozart's complete violin concertos, which he also conducted with an orchestra made up of players he hand-picked from around the world. This remains his favourite of his 21 recordings.
One of the great problems for violinists of his calibre is finding an instrument to match the talent. Of course, it has to be a Stradivarius, and here, too, Ehnes has been fortunate. For a period, he played the 1717 Windsor-Weinstein instrument on loan from the Canada Council. Nowadays, he has the 1715 Stradivarius, known as the "ex-Marsick", formerly owned by the Belgian violinist and teacher Martin Pierre Marsick. It is now the property of David Fulton, of Chicago, whose large collection of Stradivarius and Guarneri instruments includes violins formerly used by Yehudi Menuhin and Isaac Stern.
Ahead of Ehnes are engagements in Switzerland and the US. He begins work again on the Berg Violin Concerto, surely a piece that might well have been written for him. "In fact, I've never performed it publicly, simply because no one asked for it before." On the evidence of his superb performances of other works from the period, they soon will. Other concertos he's keen to work on are the Nielson and the Szymanowski First. There's also a plan to record both Bartok concertos.
For those who might have wished to hear Ehnes playing the Elgar or Walton concertos on this visit, there is good news. He's very likely to be back in 2010. But don't miss him this time. ?
* Star Serenade, Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra, with James Ehnes, Auckland Town Hall, September 4.
