David Garrett (violin)
Unlimited – Live from The Arena di Verona
Franck van der Heijden (guitar), John Haywood (keyboards), Jeff Lipstein (drums), Jeff Allen (bass), Rogier van Wegberg (guitar)
Show concept & Creative Director: David Garrett, Musical Director: Franck van der Heijden, Video Director: Marc Schütrumpf, Producer: Matthias Greving
Picture 1080i 16:9, Sound PCM Stereo and DTS-HD MA 5.1
Subtitles: English, German, Korean
Region Code: ABC
rec. live 15 September 2019, Arena di Verona, Italy
C MAJOR 759904 Blu-ray [105 mins]
Before I watched this Blu-ray disc of the American-German violinist David Garrett playing one of his usual crossover programmes, I played some of his classical CDs to test my theory that many critics are simply wrong about crossover artists in general. Garrett is slightly different from other artists who abandoned a classical career – especially Nigel Kennedy – in that he made a very conscious decision to do it at a younger age in his professional career. You might even argue he made the decision before it had even begun since he made it while still a student at Julliard.
Garrett has made very few classical CDs, almost half of which were made when he was fifteen or so years old. Some of these are high on virtuosity, and the repertoire is testing for a young violinist – Mozart sonatas and Bach’s Partita No 2 notably. His technique is largely flawless – the influence of Perlman (one of his teachers) comes through in his Paganini and Kreisler. If there were some difficulties with his Mozart recordings with Abbado – made when Garrett was still a teenager – these are largely down to the demands of the music (Mozart is exacting), and a not especially symbiotic partnership between soloist and conductor. Fast wind a couple of years and we come to his Tchaikovsky and Conus recordings which are not at all standard performances. They’re interpretations of some depth and the Tchaikovsky is at times astonishingly beautiful, reminiscent of Elman in its golden warmth – the downside of this performance being it can sometimes seem less edgy and exciting than some. The Conus is a different matter; brilliantly played it’s perhaps Garrett’s best record. Of the four ‘big’ violin concertos – Beethoven, Brahms, Mendelssohn and Bruch No 1 – the Beethoven does little for me. The Brahms and Bruch were both recorded in Israel with Zubin Mehta, and are Garrett’s most recent concerto recordings (from 2014). Neither is a modest performance, but then neither is the Mendelssohn which struck me when I first heard it as so tonally weighty it seemed quite out of proportion to the work’s scale. The Mendelssohn is not technically flawless but it’s driven with such relentless power I find the performance of it unusual; and at times his tempi are extraordinarily quick. What the Bruch and the Mendelssohn both have in common – and this is a Garrett trait in many of his recordings – is a tonal warmth to his playing and an elegance of phrasing; his clean bow-to-string playing, sharp fingering and a beautifully judged wrist pressure are typical of a Garrett sound.
Are his classical recordings in any sense helpful to understanding his crossover concerts? I think the answer is yes and no. Although not every non-classical track on Garrett’s programme given at the Arena di Verona in Italy in 2019 benefits from or translates well from a clear classical style many do. Conversely, some of the classical tracks don’t seem to work in a very classical way at all because they become part of a much larger crossover experiment. The most notable example of that is the Khachaturian Sabre Dance. It’s certainly not unique among the works here in having no solo violin part written for the piece – what we largely hear is what the first violins play in the original work. A peculiarity of the performance is that it felt slower and more laboured than one you would hear from a full orchestra – in my case the more electrifying one of Kertész and the VPO with full-on rapier strings came to mind. The 5TH – from the opening movement of the numbered Beethoven symphony – works against it in a similar way although here there is at least significantly more original writing for the instrument. It’s certainly not period performance, either, despite the extreme modernity of the medium. Again, it can sound on the weighty side but that can be attributed to the band’s acoustic. An excerpt from Hans Zimmer’s score for one of his Pirates of the Caribbean films merged seamlessly from the Beethoven – and this would be a feature with tracks generally being played in triplets without breaks between them.
I had been slightly wary of hearing ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ – the Nirvana song written by Kurt Cobain in 1991. It has become something of an anthem for an entire generation. It’s also unquestionably a great song. There’s nothing especially original about its composition – it’s no more powerful in sound than similar songs Nirvana wrote, and nor do its guitar choruses or hardcore shifts between loud and soft dynamics mark any new ground. But, like a lot of Cobain’s songs the meaning is ambiguous – indeed the lyrics, which were never published with the album Neverland, are often incomprehensible in that typical Cobain way– and a revolutionary generation didn’t so much latch onto it as hijacked it. I’m not a fan of any great music being adapted but there was, in fact, something Romantic about Garrett’s version of it – it played to those tonal colours of his instrument and gave the piece a distinctly individual voice. It’s perfectly clear he deeply respects this music. The violin – not alone among instruments, but certainly one of the easiest on which to express it – can allow a decent enough soloist a range of ‘vocal’ expression and Garrett brought some of that to the fore here. Cobain’s raspy voice, the sound of grinding gravel – not that there isn’t a great deal of strain on the voice either, as there is in ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ – don’t always come across here – and sometimes hardly do, in fact – but on its own terms this wasn’t the disaster I feared, although I doubt I will return to it either.
It's perhaps a little surprising that some of the more hard-hitting band names on this programme – AC/DC, Guns N’Roses, even Queen – produced arrangements of music here that was less ‘heavy rock’ than one might have expected, ‘Back in Black’ by AC/DC, for example. Over the years I have begun to find ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ less the masterpiece that it once was – or perhaps it was simply the pared down, rather anodyne – and overly electronic – version of it we got here which makes me think that is the case. There’s always been an appealing nihilism and rage to ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ – perhaps not appreciated enough given what it parodies – that predates Nirvana by almost two decades – and yet you sometimes felt in this arrangement the parody of the operatic, the choruses, the recitative and the phrasing all seemed so very wrong. Little of the original seemed to remain at all – beyond the obvious tune of the song.
I suppose when it comes to the tracks from this concert given over to artists like Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder and Prince – well, these I passed over in my youth, middle-age, and still have. I was entirely happy, like many other revolutionary students with an anarchist-stroke-nihilist bent to have embraced grunge, of which only Nirvana totally fits the bill on here. But then, David Garrett does have a demographic in mind – of which I will have more to say in my conclusion.
It was inspired to place ‘Eye of the Tiger’, by Survivor, after one of Bach’s most airy works – ‘Air’. But the most interesting ‘Bach’ piece was a heavy-handed treatment of one of Bach’s fugues (although I think ‘orchestrated’ Bach works better this way). Written by Franck van der Hieijden (a guitarist here) and Garrett himself Rock Toccata is a version of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D
minor. It follows in a long tradition of versions of this work from Spacelab in 1990 to Joja Wendt in 2005 – and even The Grimethorpe Colliery Band. Unsurprisingly, the performance was a good one and a particularly fine reminder that Bach’s solo violin writing in general – especially in the partitas – with its multiple cross-bowing (nowadays made much easier by using a Baroque bow) and difficult fingering – is no easier in a transcription or in the original.
The concert ended with the Beatles’ 1968 song– although in a much shorter version – ‘Hey Jude’. It runs – uncut – for seven-minutes, and might well have provided a template for Freddie Mercury when writing ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ almost a decade later. Perhaps not the most upbeat of encores – Paul McCartney wrote it during a difficult time for the Beatles, after John Lennon had begun his relationship with Yoko Ono – it’s certainly not high-octane. Again, it’s one of those masterpieces you feel might be better off left untouched – no matter how sensitively it’s dealt with. And it largely is here.
One of David Garrett’s motives in becoming a crossover violinist in those late days at Julliard was to increase exposure to classical music, especially to younger audiences. I think if you were to look at the demographic of this audience – which the camera quite often zooms into – that might not be what we he was aiming for. Garrett comes across on stage, quite possibly, as a dangerous combination of Paganini and Cobain – and he successfully manages to stride both those worlds and draw a vast audience into it – but it certainly isn’t a young one. There’s illusion, partly suggested on a large screen which has Garrett in silhouette, but there’s also an extremely personable instrumentalist with beguiling stage presence able to massage a particular audience the way he wants. He hasn’t lost his good looks; if anything he has grown in to them. If his classical concerts and recitals – which he claims to give in equal proportion to these crossover ones – attract the audiences he wants then his mission works; if not then it’s a questionable one.
There is a significant difference between what David Garrett strives to achieve in music and what someone like Nigel Kennedy does – and I think it is probably important to articulate it. Garrett hasn’t entirely abandoned classical music; at least not in the way that Kennedy has. But Garrett does not embrace a different musical art form as Kennedy does – whether it be jazz, klezmer or pure improvisation; he evolves (or perhaps devolves) into creating a new version of it purely to popularise his instrument for a wider audience. It’s certainly arguable that Kennedy’s new-music is much less approachable – even elitist – and draws in a different demographic, perhaps a narrower one. But it’s a creative fusion that now works for a violinist who, frustrated by the depth and richness of his own interpretations, rarely found the chemistry in others that allowed him to be the artist he now is.
This concert was filmed in September 2019 – so just before Covid hit, and Italy, especially in the northern regions, would become the first major country in Europe to experience it harder than most early on. None of that is remotely apparent here but perhaps Garrett concerts might not be like this one in future. He’s generous enough to share the attention with his players – but then I think this is entirely part of his character. Picture quality is sharp, bright and sound is perfectly fine – although my Blu-ray player simply chose a default sound version rather than give me a choice. Some artists might not prefer the very close camera work deployed in this film but it is not unflattering to David Garrett and his bowing and fingering are worth the angles being used. This is not always the case in films like this.
I suppose if this film is your thing, or you want to try it out, then it won’t need a huge recommendation. But if it’s not and you don’t want to crossover into something entirely different then it’s probably going to be neither a loss nor a benefit. David Garrett does what he does, and he does it well.
Marc Bridle
Contents
Introduction Unlimited Tour (Franck van der Heijden)
THE 5TH (Ludwig van Beethoven)
He’s a Pirate (Hans Zimmer)
Smells Like Teen Spirit (Nirvana)
Thunderstruck (AC/DC)
Air (Johann Sebastian Bach)
Eye of the Tiger (Survivor)
Tico Tico (Zequinha de Abreu)
Rock Toccata (Franck van der Heijden/David Garrett)
Walk This Way (Aerosmith)
Smooth criminal (Michael Jackson)
Superstition (Stevie Wonder)
Asturias (Isaac Albéniz)
Child’s Anthem (Toto)
Scherzo of the 9th Symphony (Ludwig van Beethoven)
Claire de Lune (Claude Debussy)
Viva la Vida (Coldplay)
Back in Black (AC/DC)
Ain’t No Sunshine (Bill Withers)
Dangerous (David Guetta)
November Rain (Guns N’Roses)
Sabre Dance (Aram Khachaturian)
Purple Rain (Prince)
Bohemian Rhapsody (Queen)
One Vision (Queen)
We are the Champions (Queen)
We Will Rock You (Queen)
Hey Jude (The Beatles)
