Julia Fischer's conductor-free Beethoven shines at Gstaad Menuhin Festival

Julia Fischer had previously played Beethoven's Violin Concerto without a conductor only once, in 2015 with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields in Vienna, but her performance with Camerata Salzburg felt like a match made in heaven on a stormy night at the Gstaad Menuhin Festival where she is this year's Artist-in-Residence. 

With a nod from the concertmaster toward the ensemble, the music began almost inaudibly before exploding with a rattle of trumpets and timpani; it then began rolling smoothly towards Fischer's first entrance in which she and her Giovanni Battista Guadagnini (1742) rose nobly into the violin's higher reaches with silvery tones and a tangible anticipation of the musical adventures to follow. There were numerous magical moments to offset the few lapses in precision from the ensemble and its occasional smoothing over the music's iconic four-note motif. Her dialogue with the bassoons in thirds was hypnotic and the free plasticity of her line, despite surprisingly little portamento, infused the music with a personal expressive quality and the tempo flowed magisterially until it surged into Fritz Kreisler's cadenza which she played immaculately. When the ending tutti came, it was with optimistic fire and energy.

Fischer took a measured, noble path through the slow movement's variations, capturing a unique sense of sublime quiet present only in a few other of Beethoven's works. She was unshaken by the church chimes striking nine before the little bridge cadenza launched into a quick, perky and generally untroubled Rondo with more explosive accents from timpani and trumpets, more gorgeous singing from the solo bassoon, and a wonderfully exhilarating attitude. And as a final tribute to Beethoven, and after unrelenting applause and calls for an encore, she played his Romance in F major with exquisite simplicity.

Fischer had opened the concert with a clean performance of Beethoven's other Romance (in G major), and then led the Camerata in a deeply felt reading of Strauss' Metamorphosen in which she and the Camerata took infinite pains layering lines and colors and creating not just long arcs of phrasing but sub-arcs within. As in the concerto, the cello section was particularly forceful and Fischer often seemed to be playing just with them. She occasionally smiled at her colleagues at special moments of beauty, recalling perhaps work in rehearsal that had enabled her to produce such miraculous results. After the music's final emotional drenching had subsided, she let the music relax into its final ambiguous lament and the audience responded with the kind of restrained but warm applause that signified the message had been received. 

Laurence's press trip was funded by the Gstaad Menuhin Festival