Lodestar and strings combination leaves audience spellbound

In the last of this year’s St Leonards Concerts Season, Max Baillie and colleagues left Victoria Kingham and the rest of the audience spellbound with the sound of unusual instruments, the nyckelharpa from Sweden and Norway’s Hardanger fiddle. There will be another season next year, she was relieved to hear.

Many villages and small towns have their own players who stage occasional concerts, and obviously large towns – Birmingham, Liverpool, Leeds, London – offer opportunities for exceptional string players of varying levels of experience to perform in public. Many such players may be seen, for example, in the church at St. James, Piccadilly, where the music is free: this is a wonderful thing for students or recent music graduates (for instance) to attract a good audience in the summer. It’s also a little haven in the middle of the noise and commerce of Piccadilly.

Cut to downtown St Leonards, where the quality of classical music performances in our own church haven is equal to any in the country. Max Baillie’s recent concert, which combined his own Lodestar Trio with a massively talented string section (plucked from an ensemble called The United Strings of Europe) is a shining example.

Daring arrangements

It’s very unusual, even among musicians, to hear formal classical music played on traditional Scandinavian folk instruments like the Swedish nyckelharpa and the Norwegian Hardanger fiddle.  The nyckelharpa, now considered the Swedish national instrument, is a kind of cross between a harp and a fiddle – played with a bow but with 16 strings, most of which form an accompanying drone alongside the melody.

The Hardanger fiddle is a kind of violin but with eight strings, some of which provide extra resonance, resulting in a unique sound. Olav Mjelva and Erik Rydvall are both masters of their respective instruments. Have a listen to their solo albums and familiarise yourself with the best of Scandinavian folk.

Courageous eclecticism

Max Baillie, apart from being a virtuoso violinist, has a vast musical and musicological repertoire, and also teams up with a courageously eclectic variety of musicians. Most of the pieces that were performed at Christ Church in Silchester Road on 6 October needed to be arranged, or re-arranged, to include the unusual combination of instruments. Whatever the age of the music, the amplified sound was controlled by modern digital input.

In Christ Church, with its heaven-bound acoustic, the results were wondrous. Even the best digital recording could be nothing in comparison to the ethereal, living sound of this ensemble. Their enjoyment of what they do was palpable, and the variety of music exceptional.

The programme included an arrangement of Grieg’s (orchestral) Holberg Suite, original pieces by Rydvall and Mjelva, a transcendent slow movement from a Dvorak quintet that brought tears to my eyes, and a frantically fast, final tune called Flippen (by a New York band, Punch Brothers, whose music has been called “American country-classical”) as a complex and brilliant ending that left the audience spellbound before finally erupting into sustained, rapturous applause.

The St Leonards Concerts Season is finished for this year but we can look forward to ever more fantastic musical adventures soon.

The musicians were:

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