Thursday March 28th Esprit Orchestra led by their artistic director and conductor Alex Pauk presented Violinissimo II at Koerner Hall.

The program leant heavily on soloist Mark Fewer in a pair of big works, playing solos for over an hour in total.

The Four Seasons Recomposed (2012) is still a violin concerto in Max Richter’s intriguing hybrid, employing Esprit Orchestra, a harpsichord and subtle electronics to revisit Vivaldi’s classic. It should not be thought of as an adaptation so much as something closer to a new work re-framing elements from the original, sometimes playfully sometimes irreverently. Given Esprit’s identity as an ensemble commissioning and playing newer music, it was a gently tonal accompaniment to the more dissonant pieces from György Ligeti that followed after intermission.

We hear passages played with a different time signature, a quaver missing to throw off the accent ever so slightly. We hear familiar violin passages from Vivaldi but with the orchestra doing something unlike what Vivaldi would do, whose orchestra usually matched the soloist. In places it resembles pop music, something I say without meaning any disrespect to Richter. Considering how ubiquitous the original has been, I suspect it’s a deliberate choice from the composer to make something new even while suggesting a seminal connection to other musics. As a result it feels very much like a new piece employing known elements. Yet we don’t go quite as far as anything we’d call post-modern or deconstructive, because the reassuring squareness of the baroque elements are mostly preserved, the harmonies rarely venturing far from what Vivaldi did. It might be understood as a sort of neo-baroque, the orchestra sometimes in repetitive patterns underpinning the solos in ways that I think Vivaldi could have understood and even approved. Overall it’s music that is entertaining, fun, a delight that I’d like to think is still true to Vivaldi.

Before we came to the second big violin concerto on the program we were offered a delicious contrast in the person of soloist Wesley Shen, playing Ligeti’s Continuum (1968) for solo harpsichord. I’m happy to be able to share a performance by Shen on YouTube to give you some idea of what we heard, four intense minutes of keyboard virtuosity between two huge violin concerti.

The concluding piece, Ligeti’s Violin Concerto (1990-2) is where I had the notion of calibrating. October 26th I posted a review of Jonathan Crow playing the same concerto with the Toronto Symphony at Roy Thomson Hall, almost exactly five months ago. It’s rare that we get an opportunity to hear a piece that isn’t programmed very often so soon that it’s still in my mind, to be able to make a comparison.

It may seem obvious to say some of this, but a violin or an orchestra sound very different in the intimacy of Koerner Hall, after hearing the same piece in the generous space of Roy Thomson Hall. All the relationships are different. Fewer’s violin sounded immense and heroic among the orchestral players of Esprit, whose sound is sensual and immediate. It doesn’t matter that for example Crow and Gustavo Gimeno managed hyper-precise synchronization of the challenging moments when the violin and percussionist hit abrupt and seemingly unpredictable loud notes at the same moment, while Pauk and his percussionist didn’t always hit exactly with Fewer. So what. If the TSO experience was sharp as a diamond, this one was warm and sensual. The effect is so totally different, I’m glad I was able to have both experiences. I felt more drama in Roy Thomson Hall, while Fewer’s trip through Ligeti’s concerto was more laid back, as if it managed to carry over some of the fun from the Vivaldi & Shen’s harpsichord solo. Maybe it’s all in my head, but where I felt the TSO was being outrageous & blunt, the Esprit take on Ligeti felt more conventional, as though this were just another concerto.

Then again it might be the mood I was in, loving the ambience at Koerner and the enthusiasm of the music-making. In four weeks time Esprit will be back Thursday April 25th with John Adams’ Harmonielehre (1985) and R Murray Schafer’s Adieu Robert Schumann (1976) to be sung by Krisztina Szabo.