Getting a seat wasn’t easy. Seemed everybody and his brother had turned out to hear the Zurich Chamber Orchestra (ZKO) perform its “Journey through the Baroque” in the city’s gracious Predigerkirche. Every single pew in the church was filled. As Music Director of the ZKO, violinist Daniel Hope has a reputation for enlivening old music, which brings out crowds in generous numbers.
The programme’s first half included both double concerti and a sonata for two violins, a logical choice, since concertmaster Willi Zimmermann, too, is highly gifted with his instrument. In Georg Philipp Telemann’s Concerto, TWV 52, Hope bent and wound around his sound, tapped his patent leather black shoes, and, in the last movement, categorically let loose in both volume and tempo. Zimmermann, by contrast, stayed upright and sovereign, holding his own with clear musical markings. Both musicians were demonstrative, but used entirely different tactics.
Antonio Vivaldi’s Concerto for two violins, RV 522 repeated the same model between the principals, except that its last movement gave Hope his first real chance to give us “ferocious”. Granted, he keeps up eye contact with the other players, but in such spirited play, even Vivaldi takes on a somewhat off-the-cuff and gypsy-like sensation. Indeed, the orchestra’s string player closest to me once parked her instrument on her hip momentarily much like the casual gesture of a mother and her heavy baby.
In the Telemann Violin Concerto in A minor, TWV 51, played next, the principals had the generous support by the theorbo (Emanuele Forni) and cello (Nicola Mosca), who worked closely with the two violins to make a fairyland of tinkling tones. Towards the end, the cello drove the piece on as if from inside a wasp’s nest. Before the break, Vivaldi’s La Follia was a piece contemporaries often called “crazy”, a piece that showed the composer “as if he’d lost his senses”. But it gave Hope the chance again: in virtuoso playing, his bow was like a knife cutting through water, his fingering like something that could give a sewing machine competition.
The second half of the programme included a several short pieces by lesser- known composers, the ill-fated tippler, Nicola Matteis, among them. Having emigrated from the Continent, he died of liver cirrhosis in England at aged 24. I found his piece for six players less than a “mature”, though, its same repetitive patterns largely uninspired. The highly prolific Johann Paul von Westhoff fared much better, however, and the second of the three von Westhoff pieces performed, Imitation of the Bells, gave soloist Hope the chance to generate a truly angelic voice in his upper range.