From its beginnings in Krakow over a decade ago, when he was working with Spanish early music guru Jordi Savall, Polish violinist Stefan Plewniak has built his 12-strong string ensemble Il Giardino d’Amore into a formidable touring group, drawing on young players from across Europe and Scandinavia, visiting the Americas and the Far East, and recording for international labels with star singers.
So it was a bit of a coup for the Perth Festival of the Arts that it signed the group for its Scottish debut and that Plewniak chose to premiere a new programme, combining Vivaldi’s Four Seasons with two contemporary responses to it by Astor Piazzola and Max Richter.
Plewniak’s arrangement was not so much a jigsaw of the three works as a three-dimensional Rubik’s cube. It resolved into an exploration of the calendar year with moving images projected above the musicians and stage lighting filtered through theatrical haze.
Read More from Keith Bruce
-
'Their boldest programme to date' - Bearsden Choir at Glasgow's City Halls
-
'A Celtic lament derived from birdsong' - Hebrides Ensemble celebrates Auld Alliance
Those latter ingredients were a mixed blessing, never a worrying distraction but rarely original or unusual enough to impress in their own right. Lithe bodies, time-lapse sprouting seeds, animated birds in flight, and aerial images of the ocean made up much of the visual side, with only a tessellation of eyes and a surreal lightning storm especially memorable.
The music, fortunately, was much more inventive, each section beginning with one of Piazzola’s Four Seasons of Buenos Aires before interweaving the quarterly compositions of Vivaldi and Richter.
Arguably the Edinburgh University-educated German benefitted from the arrangement, his simplistic minimalism providing mellow contrast to the frantic, often purposely scratchy, period-instrument Baroque virtuosity of Plewniak and his young associates – none of whom were named, but the first cello should be singled out for particular praise.
Her ringing tone was full and always precisely in pitch, which could not always be said for the leader and director. There were some collective fluctuations in coherence and intonation across the evening, but when the ensemble was on song, it sounded superb. Allowances should be made if this was indeed a first performance.
Perth Festival perhaps undersold that aspect of this fascinating debut, which was endearingly encored with a sextet version of Waltzing Matilda. Tellingly, that is also a party piece of Andre Rieu (chiefly when the Dutch Strauss-meister is in Australia), and it may be that Plewniak’s ambitions lie towards such stadium success.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here