JEAN-GUIHEN QUEYRAS

Years ago my then girlfriend and I had dinner at a once popular Los Angeles restaurant in the hills above Sunset Boulevard.  A few tables from where we were sitting I saw a muscled pygmy whose face looked annoyingly familiar, but whose name I could not recall.  A little later I almost choked on my lobster ravioli because I suddenly realized that the pygmy was a very famous action movie star.  Seen from a few feet away, however, this silver screen superman projected all the menacing authority of a bipedal hamster on a high protein diet.   After that sighting I never could watch the guy's movies again without laughing...

A few months after that restaurant encounter, I had a similar experience when I went to hear the English Concert under Trevor Pinnock playing at the Ambassador Auditorium in Pasadena.  What I heard from my seat just a few rows from the stage was not the towering, muscled, athletic, edgy sonic presence of the period instrument band I knew from numerous Arkhiv Produktion CDs.  Instead I heard a few thin-textured, bass-shy tuttis separated by long stretches of nearly inaudible, barely pitched buzzing.  After that I never could listen to a period instruments ensemble again without laughing.  Which is exactly what I did at another concert where the heavily perspiring soloist, Monica Huggett, tried to scrape her way through the ascending melodic line with which the violin makes its entrance in the Beethoven concerto.  I had to leave the concert hall in disgrace, with third degree burns left on my back by the fiery stares of numerous HIP devotees in the audience.

I mentioned the above autobiographical trivia because that's what I had on my mind recently while I was listening to the beefy, muscular, lithe textures of the period instrument ensemble (Akademie für alte Musik Berlin) accompanying Jean-Guihen Queyras's superlative readings of Vivaldi's cello concertos (recorded live at the Concertgebouw on October 30, 2011).  I did not believe for a second that this kind of orchestral sound projected much further than the (very closely placed) recording microphones.  Not that it mattered much to me, since the music itself easily gets on my nerves.  I am just not the kind of guy who holds his breath when listening to endlessly repeated  arpeggiated chords, which is what Vivaldi's concertos offer as (or rather in place of) thematic elaboration.   But listen I did, and more than once, because I find Queyras' musical intelligence and instrumental craft simply irresistible no matter what music he plays.