Time to shine

Throughout much of the last century, technically showy encores by Paganini and Kreisler were standard fare for violinists, but in recent years players have moved away from the established virtuoso works to embrace everything from solo Bach to folk tunes and contemporary commissions.Charlotte Gardner talks to top players about their encore choices

Violinist Hilary Hahn and pianist Cory Smythe perform works from Hahn’s In 27 Pieces encore project for Celebrity Series of Boston at New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall in March 2013

ROBERT TORRESPHOTOGRAPHY /CELEBRITY SERIES OF BOSTON

Here’s a memory exercise. Cast your mind back to the various concerts you attended over the couple of years prior to Covid and ask yourself how many times you heard a firmly established artist play one of the old virtuoso encore standards by Paganini, Ernst, Kreisler, Heifetz and chums. Then ask yourself how many times their encores were solo Bach, or something entirely original. I, for one, have heard more of the latter two options, and when I have heard an old virtuoso favourite then it’s been from a young artist.

‘Encores have changed unbelievably in the last ten years,’ confirms Huw Humphreys, head of music at London’s Barbican. ‘I’d say Itzhak Perlman was central to reviving a lot of the old virtuoso encores in the 1970s and 80s, really setting the standard. Now, depending on what they’ve played in their main programme, it feels as though people are leaning more towards having fun, while at the same time concentrating on the sheer beauty, simplicity or musicality of what they’re playing.’ He continues, ‘For some artists, the idea of just coming on stage and playing the first thing that’s popped into their head has also gone completely. People are putting so much more advance thought into their encores, because it reveals more about themselves than perhaps a staple like the Sibelius Concerto does. The logical extension for some has actually gone beyond a single encore to appearing in full post-show foyer events.’

Left and right Joshua Bell performs Paganini’s First Violin Concerto –a work he says has been sadly neglected in recent years – with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields at Symphony Hall for Celebrity Series of Boston in February 2020

KUUSISTO PHOTO FELIX BROEDE. BELL PHOTOS ROBERT TORRES /CELEBRITY SERIES OF BOSTON

‘PAGANINI, WIENIAWSKI AND VIEUXTEMPS ENCORES USED TO BE A MEANINGFUL PART OF THE REPERTOIRE FOR VIOLINISTS, AND SADLY I’VE FELT THEM DISAPPEARING. THEY OFTEN SEEM LOOKED DOWN UPON AS SECOND- RATE MUSIC’

Violinist and incoming Norwegian Chamber Orchestra artistic director Pekka Kuusisto is one artist known for thinking creatively about encores, and that creativity even extends to how he uses the old favourites. ‘If I wanted to play a Paganini caprice now,’ he muses, ‘it would have to be something like no.24 because of the instant effect of just the first few notes, and I would never play it after a Romantic or a virtuoso concerto – I’d play it after something like Ligeti or Thomas Adès, to illustrate perhaps something that those composers learnt from the tricks Paganini invented.’

Violinist and Academy of St Martin in the Fields music director Joshua Bell, however, maintains that it’s not the traditional encores themselves that don’t hit the right buttons these days, but rather the way that they’re often treated.‘Paganini, Wieniawski and Vieuxtemps encores used to be a meaningful part of the repertoire for violinists, and sadly I’ve felt them disappearing,’ he mourns. ‘Somehow, this often seems looked down upon as second-rate music. But I grew up with a very different attitude towards it. My teacher Josef Gingold studied with Ysaÿe – who studied with both Vieuxtemps and Wieniawski. Gingold adored the works of these violin masters, and looked upon them as masterpieces. These gems were written by violinists for violinists, and they offer something that Beethoven or Schumann weren’t necessarily trying to achieve.

‘I WENT TO A VIOLA RECITAL WHERE THE SOLOIST BEGAN BY PLAYING THE ENCORES. IT WAS LIKE EATING DESSERT FIRST, WHICH I THINK EVERYONE SHOULD EXPERIMENT WITH NOW AND THEN!’ 

VIOLINIST PEKKA KUUSISTO

Playing – and singing – violinist Pekka Kuusisto

They celebrate the instrument in a glorious way, just as Chopin’s music does in the case of the piano. Of course, audiences enjoy them too, sometimes to an annoying extent – when, after you’ve poured your heart and soul into sonatas by Beethoven and Brahms, and then you do a little Wieniawski encore, people tell you that it was their favourite part of the programme! But that’s also a wonderful thing.’

For that audience reaction, though, this music does have to be approached in the right way. ‘Often, students seem to think these works are only about fireworks and showing off their technique,’ Bell explains. ‘There’s a music-making knob that turns off during difficult passages, and things like phrasing, harmonic emphasis and nuance go out of the window. But when you listen to this music played by any of the violinists from that golden era – Kreisler, Heifetz, Milstein – there is no separation of music and technique! In fact, because the pieces were so elegantly written for the instrument the performance seems effortless, and the violinist is allowed to show their charm, wit, humour and love. Another pitfall for performers, if they don’t approach the music with enough reverence, is that it becomes over-sentimentalised and vulgar… and hence “bad music” –a self-fulfilling prophecy!’

Bell isn’t the only one who still admires the old standards. There’s also violinist Hilary Hahn. ‘I tend to play the encores I commissioned for my 2013 project In 27 Pieces: the Hilary Hahn Encores,’ she says, ‘because you have a responsibility to continue to perform works you’ve commissioned if possible. But I grew up with and love the old favourites, and you definitely see the audience exhale when they hear something that they know and love. They’re also a little window into that time, musically, because they were written by or for specific players and for a specific purpose. These days, people are playing more of a variety of works from different eras. But a renewal of the old repertoire is also happening, which I’m really glad about, as this carries on the tradition of Kreisler and his contemporaries. So, it’s good to have the combination.’

In fact, the world of encores really is a melting pot of ideas these days. One way in which this manifests itself is in terms of concert format. For instance, both Hahn and Bell have given concerts where a segment of the programme is devoted to encores. For Bell this is partly about etiquette: ‘I do love to play encores,’ he explains, ‘but I’m hesitant if they are not being genuinely demanded.’ He will sometimes announce the concert’s entire second half from the stage rather than printing it in the programme, so that he can personally introduce the encore repertoire, telling stories about his connections to itAnd some concerts go full-on topsy-turvy. ‘I went to a viola recital by Teemu Kupiainen a couple of years ago where the soloist began by playing the encores,’ relates Kuusisto. ‘It was like eating dessert first, which I think everyone should experiment with every now and then!’

Kuusisto’s own most famous encore was in the 2016 BBC Prom with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, when he brought the house down by both playing and singing a Finnish folk song in a duet with concertmaster Laura Samuel and enlisting the entire Proms audience as singers. ‘I think an orchestra and a conductor will always be happy if the soloist chooses an encore that becomes a part of the entire concert,’ he begins. ‘The encore from 2016 has become a bit larger than life, but its original context was connected to the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto I’d just played, whose finale contains elements of Russian traditional music. Tchaikovsky spent a fair bit of time in St Petersburg, which is the closest main Russian city to Finland. So, the folk song I chose comes from Karelia, a border area between Finland and Russia. Then, after the interval, the orchestra played Stravinsky’s Petrushka, which of course is a mishmash of traditional Russian and other traditional music.’

Some players choose to weave the encore into a real-world political context. In 2014, violinist Lisa Batiashvili used a concerto appearance with Valery Gergiev and the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra to voice her disapproval of the conductor’s endorsement of Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea and the stationing of soldiers in the South Ossetia region of her native Georgia. She did this by commissioning a solo violin encore from Georgian composer Igor Loboda titled Requiem, dedicated to the victims of the Ukraine conflict.

‘An encore is a very memorable, focused moment, so it’s a fantastic opportunity if you want to say something, and I think we should do more of that in the profession as a whole,’ affirms Kuusisto. ‘Soon after my Tchaikovsky Prom, I was playing Sibelius in Lahti, conducted by Osmo Vänskä. This was when the Mediterranean refugee crisis was really kicking in, so with Osmo on the clarinet I played an extremely sad, traditional Swedish song written at a time when many Nordic people were emigrating to America in search of a better life.’

Indeed, one of the joys of folk songs for Kuusisto is that there’s one for any contemporary situation. ‘I’m reluctant to go to mainland China because I’ve been genuinely shocked so many times at the Chinese government’s stance on a number of issues,’ he continues. ‘But I was booked to go a few years back when the Falun Gong people were being persecuted. It turns out that Falun is also a city in Sweden with a strong folk music tradition. A Swedish word for walking is gång, and there’s a style of traditional song in walking tempo which they call – and, coincidentally, Falun has a lot of these, so I was completely prepared to go to China and play Falun gånglåt as encores and be thrown in jail, or at least out of the country!But the trip was cancelled.’

Humphreys, meanwhile, has also noticed a recent encore trend among conductors. ‘There’s now a generation who come out and sit on the side of the stage for the encore,’ he relates.‘Simon Rattle is the first person I noticed, but if one person does it then others become aware.’

‘Encores have changed unbelievably in the last ten years’: Barbican head of music Huw Humphreys

PHOTOS MARK ALLAN /BARBICAN

Whatever the repertoire, everyone agrees on what an encore needs to do on an emotional level. ‘I think there’s a feeling that you expect out of an encore, especially after a long programme,’ comments Hahn. ‘It’s a treat and a surprise, and you can relate emotionally to that feeling even if the piece is unfamiliar, which is why it’s possible for the encore to be the crowd favourite even if the audience hasn’t heard it before.’ And, in Kuusisto’s opinion, ‘If you can somehow dismantle the concerto situation and take the audience somewhere completely different, I think that’s a good goal to have.Funnily enough, this brings us back to Bach. ‘I do like playing a relaxed movement of solo Bach,’ Kuusisto states.

‘That feels like it really earns its place if you’ve just played something quite violent or rough as the main dish.’ Hahn equally reaches for Bach after a concerto performance, because she finds audiences appreciate it. What’s more, Bach is great to have up your sleeve when you want to respond to the moment – because Hahn’s not one who feels that a last-minute choice is any less valid than a pre-planned one. ‘You know you’re going to play the programmed work, and so you fully commit yourself mentally to that piece on that day,’ she explains. ‘But you can change the encore to fit the mindset. There have been times when I’ve gone to play a pre-decided solo Bach movement, my bow hovering over the strings, but something in me hesitates and I’ll switch to another that – even if it hasn’t been practised as much – just feels right.’

Even though Humphreys loves surprises, he’s equally grateful to artists who give their audiences exactly what they were hoping for. ‘Sometimes it’s nice to give them what they were expecting,’ he points out, ‘to just be a good hack and not leave a dry eye in the house!’ He does have a few points of etiquette, however: ‘I think concerto soloists are largely very respectful of not playing three encores when there’s maybe a hundred people behind them who have to play a Bruckner symphony in the second half,’ he says. ‘Also, if you’re hoping to involve orchestra members in some way, be prepared to give advance notice, and to ask the management whether they think it would be a good idea. Share the creative experience.You might be asking people to carry responsibilities that they would not ordinarily expect. There will be times when people say, “Fantastic idea”, and others when it’s just the wrong moment.’

‘I’VE GONE TO PLAY A PRE-DECIDED SOLO BACH MOVEMENT, BUT SOMETHING IN ME HESITATES AND I’LL SWITCH TO ANOTHER THAT JUST FEELS RIGHT’ 

VIOLINIST HILARY HAHN

Today’s performers ‘lean more towards having fun’: the Kanneh-Mason siblings play a Bob Marley arrangement as an encore at an October 2020 concert at the Barbican

While a sonata recital might initially seem less of an etiquette minefield and richer in repertoire options, it actually brings its own issues. As Bell points out: ‘It can be a bit delicate to ask a great pianist, after collaborating “equally” on a big sonata, to accompany a violin showpiece encore! Sometimes I’ll suggest they accompany me as well as play a piano solo encore, to make it fair, but in the end it really is silly to say one part is more important than another. How exciting it is to hear a great pianist take one of those accompaniments seriously.I was once playing a concerto conducted by Christoph Eschenbach, who is a wonderful pianist. The night before, at a pre-concert benefit, he actually asked whether he could play for me at the piano, and he suggested Kreisler! He played it not as an accompaniment but as a duo. It was an amazing experience.’

As for when live concerts resume, ‘I don’t think there’s going to be any force in the world that would make us forget the experimentation that we’ve seen in the last year,’ declares Kuusisto. ‘I’m dreaming of a project that would take audiences on a trip around the borderlines of interpretation, and if this were to take flight, to use the encore opportunity to create a contrasting interpretation of something already played. This sort of happens already – if, for instance, you haven’t prepared an encore after the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, you might decide to play the last movement again and it will automatically come out completely differently.

Usually people find the second performance better because it’s more immediate and relaxed. These sorts of things would be fun to play around with more.’ He continues, ‘Vilde Frang and I were recently working together on the Beethoven Concerto, and we were thinking about its premiere, where apparently an encore with the violin being played upside down was inserted between movements, and then the Rondo was repeated because people loved it so much. We’ve become awfully stiff since then, haven’t we?! We should get more into that kind of thing, at least with music from that era.’

Bell, meanwhile, plans to expand his championing of the great violinist–composers’ music by also including their larger-scale works. ‘I think we’ve all had a chance lately to contemplate the repertoire we wish to spend our time on in the future. I’ve thought a lot about what I have to offer as a violinist, and the recordings I could make that would be meaningful to me. I do think that the legacy of the old master violinists, including my teacher Gingold, must not be forgotten. Just this month, I was deciding between spending my time practising the magnificent Shostakovich no.1, which I have yet to perform, or both the Glazunov and Wieniawski’s First Concerto. I decided to forgo the Shostakovich for now, a piece championed so beautifully these days by so many, in favour of the other neglected warhorses. Some may think, “Oh, he wants to do the showy stuff and not the real stuff like Shostakovich and Berg,” but in the end, one has to follow one’s heart, and right now my heart wants to play Wieniawski!’ And if you’ve heard the charm and nuance across Bell’s existing recordings of those encores, you’ll know just what an exciting prospect that is.