James Ehnes on Bach

Canadian violinist James Ehnes was not long out of the Juilliard School when his first recording of JS Bach's complete sonatas and partitas on Analekta won him widespread critical acclaim back in 2000, and in the 2023/24 season he returned to the same label and composer to join forces with Canada’s National Arts Centre Orchestra (including an old school-friend!) for a recording of eight concertos, which was released last month and praised in BBC Music Magazine for his ability to 'mix precision with expressive engagement'.

During his recent tour of Australasia, James spoke to me from New Zealand about the joys of making music with old friends, navigating a 'weird decade' of his life as he approaches his fiftieth birthday, the wide range of approaches which have been applied to these works during his lifetime, and why he views these concertos as 'zombie music' - in the best possible sense...

How long-standing is your association with Canada's National Arts Centre Orchestra?

The NACO fills an incredible role in a country that is so vast, and it played a pivotal part in my own early life. I grew up in a town called Brandon in south-western Manitoba, which is almost 2000 kilometres from Ottawa, but the NACO has always made a priority of national tours and I remember hearing them in my hometown as well as on the radio all the time. Then in the early 90s (when I was about sixteen) I did a competition sponsored by CBC Radio; in the finals I got to play with the NACO and ended up winning, so they had me back as a soloist a few years later and the association grew from there…

The members of this orchestra are close people in my life, and making music with them genuinely means a great deal to me; there was an incredible amount of joy involved in this whole project. The recording was made towards the end of my time as Artist-in-Residence at the NACO; sometimes those things are just titles to help with branding and ticket-sales, but in this case it was a really significant relationship where we toured together across Canada and internationally and spent a lot of time together on and off-stage.

It was a particular treat to perform the Double Concerto with the NACO concertmaster Yosuke Kawasaki, as he’s been one of my closest friends since our schooldays. We’d never actually played the piece together before, but our musical instincts were so in tune: I always think of the Double as a conversation between two people who just get each other, and that’s certainly how it felt with Yosuke. 

Did that personal closeness influence your decision to play-direct for this recording?

Yes, in a way it’s simpler to do Bach concertos without a conductor: there’s a certain sort of direct energy amongst the players in this music, and sometimes a conductor can actually impede that. That said, I’ve had some wonderful experiences working with great conductors on this music over the years, and a lot of the ideas I absorbed from them have fed into my approach to directing from the violin.

How long have these concertos been in your repertoire?

I think the recording that really got me into these pieces was a cassette-tape that my grandmother gave me of Hugh Bean playing the E major and A minor - I remember listening to that tape over and over in the car when I was a kid. I learned those pieces pretty early on because I was a Suzuki kid and both of them were in one of the Suzuki books, but the other works on the album came later.

I got to know the D minor concerto when a friend of mine played it as her big piano concerto debut in high school; I remember thinking it was very odd writing for the keyboard, then reading that scholars assumed that it was written for the violin and thinking ‘Oh yeah, that makes more sense!’.

The concerto that I got to know latest in life was the triple concerto with harpsichord and flute  - when you’re younger you tend to encounter pieces through hearing them, but this was something I just came across through my library of scores. Then I started exploring recordings and was fascinated by the very different ways people approach that piece...

I’m now at an age where I feel like I’ve lived through several generations of attitudes towards Bach: when we were kids there was the super-slow, super-serious Bach, then in the post-university days it was the ‘How fast can you play it?’ Bach, and somewhere along the way we’ve had the Romantic Bach, the very austere Bach, the historically-informed Bach…It’s been nice to do this project at this stage in life, because I do have that perspective. So many young players get tied up in knots thinking about what they’re supposed to do with Bach, and at my age my attitude: ‘When I was twenty I was supposed to do X, when I was twenty-five I was supposed to do Y, and when I was thirty I was supposed to do Z…and at almost fifty I just don’t need to worry about any of that!’.

My friends and I often use the expression ‘zombie music’, which I promise is a positive thing: there are some pieces which it’s impossible to kill, and these Bach concertos definitely fall into that category! You can hear six-year-olds smash through the A minor concerto and still recognise it as being really great music - what a testament that is to Bach’s genius.

Did you incorporate any elements of historically-informed performance practice into the recording?

My instrument was made around the time that these concertos were written, but it feels like a bit of a reach to say that it’s the same instrument…it’s been modernised over the years, and I’m using modern strings. As far as Baroque set-ups or bows are concerned, my philosophy is this: the higher your comfort-level with the equipment you’re using, the more interpretative options you have at your disposal. It’s wonderful to inform yourself about how instruments worked in the past, but it confuses me sometimes when people who aren’t period-instrument specialists decide that they need to use a specific transitional bow to get into the style of a certain piece: if you don’t actually know how to use it, then you just won’t sound as good as you would if you played with a modern bow! Like pretty much everything else, the bow evolved to become capable of more things, not fewer - so a really good modern bow is absolutely capable of imitating the gestures of a baroque one. (The terminology is all relative, of course: I say ‘modern’, but the bow I’m using on this recording was actually made in 1805!).

One thing that’s become clear to me through experiencing a lot of wonderful performances from people in the historically-informed world is that Bach was a huge fan of virtuosity. I think there was a certain prudishness about that in the mid-twentieth century, a pervasive attitude that virtuosity was somehow beneath Bach’s ideals. I don’t think so at all: listen to something like the Brandenburg Concerto No. 4 and tell me all those notes are there for any reason other than to fly around! I think Bach was very aware of the virtuosic capabilities of the violin, so I’ve definitely leaned into that on this recording and had great fun in the process!

When we last spoke in 2021, you’d just done a crash-course in recording techniques because of the lockdown, making your own recording of the Ysaÿe solo sonatas from your basement! Were you more hands-on with the production and engineering for this project as a result?

God, no - that was born out of necessity! One of the many great things about this experience was getting to work with my close friend Carl Talbot who does all of the recordings for the NACO and is one of my most trusted musical colleagues. He actually engineered my very first Bach recording [the solo sonatas and partitas] back in 2000 and produced my set of the sonatas with harpsichord a few years later.

And with a project like this there honestly wouldn’t have been time for me to get super-involved with the production side of things: for orchestral recordings you usually have the bare minimum number of sessions to get the job done, so having a partner whose musical instincts I trusted so much made it very easy. As a soloist on a concerto recording you might not get a chance to listen back to some of the sessions at all, which can be a little bit stressful - but it can also be kind of liberating, because it forces you to lock into the correct attitude of just trying to be as persuasive and communicative as possible through your playing.

Everyone has different thresholds in terms of how much control they like to have over edits: there’s no right answer, but I think there’s a danger on either side. There are so many historical recordings that I really love for the sweep and energy of the music-making where you can also tell that the musicians involved were just not interested in the editing process! I know certain conductors who are hilarious like that: they’re incredibly meticulous in rehearsal, then when it comes down to making a detailed recording their attitude is ‘OK, not my problem!’. Each to their own, but it seems a strange point in the process to abdicate!

On the other hand, those historical recordings I mentioned can sometimes seem like beautiful woven rugs with a single obvious flaw: it doesn’t spoil your appreciation of the whole thing, but you can't help focusing on the blip. I’d still rather have that than one of these over-produced modern recordings which are perfect polished gems but with all the life sucked out of them; thankfully I’ve not been personally involved in any projects like that, but I know plenty of people who have. A great friend of mine in the industry once said that a producer should be able to rescue a great performance, not create one, and that’s something that really stayed with me.

How did you find the experience of getting back to performing live and touring post-lockdown?

I’ve changed a lot over the past few years, and it’s difficult to know how much of that is down to world events and how much is down to personal factors. I’ll be fifty next year, and my forties have been a weird decade: it’s the period where you go from being the oldest of the young soloists to the youngest of the old soloists, and that coincided with my two children being born and growing up, plus the COVID shutdowns and everything we learned from that…

But one thing which hasn’t altered at all is my love of music and performing - if anything, when things opened up again after the shutdowns of 2020/2021 I was even more grateful that I have so many opportunities to do the things I love. And I love pretty much everything about my life as a musician. I remember being part of a round-table discussion with other performers during the lockdowns and hearing everyone saying ‘Well I certainly don’t miss having to go to post-concert dinners/eat at odd times of day/spend half my life on airplanes’...I thought ‘Guys, do you actually like your jobs at all?! I really enjoy all that stuff!’. I do also wonder if that heightened appreciation for this career and everything it entails is just a part of growing up: when you’re twenty-five you think you’ll go on forever, whereas by forty-nine you know that’s not the case!

What else is coming up for you this season?

I’m in the middle of a seven-week tour of Australasia at the moment, and the next thing after that is a tour with my quartet which is going to be great because I’ve missed them so much! In late May I’ll be giving the premiere of James Newton Howard’s new violin concerto with the National Symphony Orchestra at The Kennedy Center: it’s the second one that he’s written for me, and it’s going to be a big highlight of my spring. 

I’m off to Seoul in June, then the whole month of July is taken up by my chamber music festival at the Seattle Chamber Music Society which is always a great artistic and personal experience. Lots to look forward to!