Gosh it was good to hear the violinist live again in a concerto tailored to her strengths

Far from silenced by the pandemic, the violinist Nicola Benedettihas been using it to support young musicians, posting dozens of Zoom sessions and hundreds of videos to players of all standards round the world. It was good to hear her live again, though, and in a concerto tailored to her strengths: Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No.2 in G minor.

Simon Thompson

★★★★☆
When Stravinsky wrote The Soldier’s Tale in 1918 he scored it for miniature forces because enormous economic dislocation and a global pandemic had made it impossible for a large orchestra to perform together on stage. Sound familiar?

His distillation of the Faust legend, where a soldier unwittingly sells his soul to the devil, certainly fits the slimmed-down resources of both his time and ours, with only seven musicians and three actors to tell the story through narration and music.

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Simon Thompson

★★★★★

I haven’t asked her, but I’d stake money on the idea that, if the star violinist Nicola Benedetti felt butterflies in her tummy about any of the concerts in her Edinburgh International Festival residency, it was this one.

That’s not necessarily because it’s more virtuosic than her others: it’s because it’s so exposed. This concert was her alone on stage for an hour, with nothing but a violin for company, playing some of the most fiendishly challenging works in the violin literature. The technical obstacles are forbidding enough, but the real challenge for any violinist in this music is to find the beauty lurking behind the bravura.

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★★★★★
Mark Simpson’s new Violin Concerto deserves audiences far and wide. Not only the unseen online viewers on their sofas at home, but people in a concert hall, close enough to feel this music’s thrilling pulse and soak up its visceral energy. A real crowd that will no doubt clap long and loud when they hear this piece, which, even streamed, left me reeling. This was a terrific premiere.

Proms 2020, OAE, Royal Albert Hall, review: Nicola Benedetti thrillingly brings out Vivaldi's wild side

★★★★

Despite the absence of fellow star fiddler Alina Ibragimova, this concert of six Baroque concertos proved an evening to savour …

★★★★★
When Nicola Benedetti came across Elgar’s early, memorable little tune-spinner Salut d’amour, the fledgling violinist was just six. It made her cry. And she has certainly not lost her feeling for the piece, which was featured last month in her YouTube tutorials for young musicians and is given a typically soulful performance on the final track of this incandescent album (a streaming or download-only release at the moment). Yet it took until she was skirting 30 before Benedetti began exploring and playing the album’s big beast, Elgar’s Violin Concerto of 1910, which is emotionally and technically one of the repertoire’s most taxing.

The delay was wise and maturity’s fruits are everywhere in this ardent account, recorded late last year with the London Philharmonic