Review by Nicola Benedetti and Friends – Delicious musical snacks from a violinist still at the top of her game | classical music

nFor no reason, Nicola Benedetti was declared “the country’s favorite violinist” in the publicity for this concert. Six weeks after her first major concert tour in a decade, she arrived at the Royal Albert Hall to lead what seemed like a celebration in some ways – a kind of highly polished jam session, punctuated by friendly, unpolished conversation from the stage. However, musically, if this was a party, they were serving appetizers – lots of delicious little things, but not quite a proper meal.

However, those little pieces provided a lot of enjoyment. Benedetti’s backing band is an unconventional but inspired combination of cello, guitar and accordion: Maxime Calver, Plinio Fernández and Samuel Tillery were cohesive, flexible and responsive partners, and together the quartet created some interesting sounds, which in this hall came out better than in some of the subtleties.

Music is generally divided into three categories. There were romantic salon pieces, including beautiful arrangements of the Sicilian attributed to Maria Theresia von Paradis and written by Samuel Dushkin, and Beau Soir by Debussy. Benedetti’s generous tone and velvety phrasing could have been reserved for these; The backing trio, sounding beautifully relaxed, conjured an atmosphere that explained the title of Violin Café, the recording released to accompany the tour.

Then there were the Scottish Folk Tunes, in which Finn Moore joined the small pipe players, first providing just the drone background, then taking up the melody as Benedetti improvised above. The encore, Peter Maxwell Davies’s farewell to Stromness, brings us back to these.

And in case anyone thought the task of conducting the Edinburgh International Festival would dilute Benedetti’s powerful style, there were the show numbers: Wieniawski’s Polonaise and Paganini’s Freaks, with No. 1 played solo, as written, and No. 24 in a scintillating arrangement that arguably lost some of the wow factor given that all those notes weren’t coming from just one violin. For Navarra’s Sarasate, a virtuoso but formulaic violin duet, Benedetti brought in Emma Bird as her partner. The same composer’s Carmen Fantasy was the final showcase for a violinist still at the top of her game.