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SOME MAY CALL the past arts season The Year Benaroya Hall Opened, but I much prefer The Year of the Violin Soloist. In a single season, under a single roof, a remarkable procession of violin virtuosos played here to thunderous applause and audible sighs. The likes of Midori, Sarah Chang, Nigel Kennedy, Hilary Hahn, Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, Gil Shaham, and Itzhak Perlman stood on Benaroya's stage in tuxes and spangles, each with a distinctive persona—ingenue, nice guy, bitch, rebel. . . . Whatever you think of the caliber of player these days, the cult of celebrity among violinists is unquestionably richer and more diverse than it has ever been.
In one way or another, violinists have always been music's cult figures. The violin emerged in the early 16th century when players were most often found doubling for vocalists at dances or churches. They were considered social outsiders, of lower status than the singers—the equivalent of the hired help. Toward the beginning of the 17th century, though, individual players—many of whom were also composers—experimented with the instrument's range and technique, and the violin found its niche as a solo instrument. Violinists became objects of admiration, capable of sonic feats that not only replicated but transcended the human voice, and there soon proved to be a cultlike aspect to their facility: the incredulity it inspired. "People are fascinated with something they can't do," my violinist friend Glenn told me recently. "I can imagine what it is like, as a violinist, to have that facility, to have such a height of consciousness, brain to fingers, but it's still a mystery. Is it [the product] of genetic makeup? Talent? Or did [famous violinists] go through a system that worked for them?" Add to that the physical relationship of the already anthropomorphic violin to the player's body—an awkward but visually compelling juxtaposition that relies on the violinist to animate an object of incredible value and craftsmanship as if it were just another limb.
Today's Cult of the Violinist is populated by players whose personal reputations precede their performing ones. It's no longer enough, as it was for violinists earlier in this century, to be known for playing brilliantly—audiences need to latch on to a persona to make art more accessible (either that, or it's just that music alone isn't enough in this media-driven age to hold our attention). "An audience's expectations are insatiable," Glenn said. "We want to soak up anything that comes our way." While we buy tickets because we know who we want to see and hear—the unmistakable lushness of the king, Itzhak Perlman, or the potential for an audacious, foot-stomping assault from the likes of Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, the player often referred to as the Bitch—audiences are becoming equally drawn to those violinists who are unfamiliar, whose compelling personas elude us.
"Everyone's allured by the more standoffish [players]," Glenn pointed out. "It's like they're behind a glass case and you can't touch them. But because you can't get to them, you want to even more." Take the ingenues: Midori, a fragile flower in appearance, goes only by her first name and has successfully put her "child prodigy" label behind her. During her October recital in Benaroya Hall, she bent at the waist through most of her pieces, making it nearly impossible to "read" her. Likewise, 18-year-old Hilary Hahn played the indomitable Brahms Concerto at Benaroya in February with a surprising polish, yet she was intensely aloof, her face compellingly blank; the less she showed her emotions, the more I yearned to decipher her. By contrast, Sarah Chang, 17, glided onstage in a flouncy purple gown in November, all smiles and confidence. Leaning into each phrase of the Strauss Concerto, she revealed an uncanny tenderness toward the music, and even managed to raise her eyebrows flirtatiously at Seattle Symphony conductor Gerard Schwarz a few times. During the intermission I asked her how she felt on stage. "It's like skin and bones for me," she said, still smiling.
About her own aggressive, bad-girl persona, Salerno-Sonnenberg said in a recent telephone interview, "I've always played the way I play because that's the way I am," she said. "My approach to music is that I've always been the kind of artist that you either love or hate. With that comes a lot of controversy, a lot of uphill battles, and a large amount of adulation and fame that is not found by a lot of classical artists." Another rebel who plays by his own rules, the British violinist Kennedy (the artist formerly known as Nigel Kennedy, whose recent name drop is symptomatic of a celebrity identity crisis of one kind or another), known more for his Mohawk than his technique, performed his rendition of Jimi Hendrix as part of the Symphony's Pop Culture series last November. He addressed the audience on a mike, then executed guitarlike riffs on his plugged-in fiddle—and the audience sat up and took notice. Sadly, when he switched to Bach, which he performed with reverence and energy, people around me started to doze off.
