Although violinist Joshua Bell is a Hollywood-vetted crossover star — with his new album featuring the likes of Sting and Josh Groban — he has the training and taste of an old-school virtuoso, with ties to Golden Age performers running deep.
One of the forty-one-year-old Indiana native’s heroes is Belgian violinist-composer Eugène Ysaÿe (1858-1931), a forefather of modern violin technique who had pieces dedicated to him by such contemporaries as Chausson, Debussy and Cesár Franck.
Ysaÿe was the teacher of Bell’s teacher, the Russian-born Josef Gingold, concertmaster of the Cleveland Orchestra under George Szell and one of the great violin pedagogues. Gingold instilled in Bell a reverence for Ysaÿe as history’s greatest
violinist-composer after Paganini.
“We only have recordings of Ysaÿe when he was very old, but his technique was legendary,” Bell says. “Gingold studied with him as a boy. He would talk about Ysaÿe, imitate the way he played and encourage me to learn his music. I have an autographed picture of Ysaÿe hanging in my apartment that my former girlfriend gave me, and I have a ceramic replica of his hand that Gingold gave me just before he died, in 1995.”
Ysaÿe himself learned from Henri Vieuxtemps at the start of a Franco-Belgian school of violin playing that would be made famous on record by Arthur Grumiaux. Gingold stressed the expressivity and nuance of Ysaÿe’s playing, with “subtlety and beauty of sound its hallmarks,” Bell says, “not necessarily pyrotechnics.”
But in recent Bell recitals that also included sonatas by Brahms, Franck and Janáček, Ysaÿe’s solo Sonata No. 2 in A minor was the most technically difficult piece on the program, exploring “the violin in amazing ways,” says Bell. “The piece is called the ‘Obsession,’ which refers to
Ysaÿe’s obsession with Bach. He wrote a set of six works for solo violin just
as Bach did, and Ysaÿe quotes from Bach’s Partita No. 3 in the second solo sonata. I joke that if Bach’s solo works are the Old Testament of the violin, then
Ysaÿe’s are the New Testament.”
