James Ehnes: Transcript
Leah Roseman:
Hi, you're listening to Conversations with Musicians with Leah Roseman. In episode 11, season one I spoke with James Ehnes, the internationally renowned violin soloist. In this conversation, you'll hear him talk about his mentors and teachers and the way he learns and prepares music, different recording projects, programming his chamber music projects, and he also gave some great advice for musicians generally. All of these episodes are also in video format and the link is in the description. Good morning, James Ehnes.
James Ehnes:
Good morning.
Leah Roseman:
I hope you're a violinist who doesn't need any introduction, but you're really famous the world over as a concert violinist, and I believe you just put out your 59th recording.
James Ehnes:
That sounds possible. Yeah, I've lost track of the numbers at this point.
Leah Roseman:
I was looking on your website, actually, this morning and counting, "One, two." I knew you'd done a lot and you're relatively young. It's very impressive. This is a very special recording you made a year ago. Can you tell us about that project?
James Ehnes:
Well, actually, I'm not exactly sure what you're talking about because I've released two recording within a couple of weeks that are both interesting stories in that they were, I guess, pandemic products and the logistics of putting them both together were unusual. The solo recording of Ysaye six sonatas for solo violin, that was something that was completely unexpected, not planned at all. But last year when things were breaking down, concerts were all getting canceled, I was here in my home and things were falling out of the diary day by day by day. And there were a few of the European festivals, Prague Spring Festival, the Dresden Music Festival, those two in particular, I had been due to play at them, I guess, it would've been late May of 2020. So maybe in April, they said, "Well, we've canceled the festivals, but if you'd be able to create some content, maybe you could film a performance of yourself and we'll play it on our channels and we'll give you a little money." Having nothing else to do, I said, "Yeah. Yeah, sure. I can do that. No problem. I do that all the time."
James Ehnes:
Of course, I'd never ever done anything like that before. I had no idea how I was going to do it, but it was the one thing we all had at that point was time. So I thought, "Well, surely I'll figure this out." So with the help of a great friend of mine, wonderful producer who has produced most of my albums for the last many years, a man named Simon Kiln in London, he and I got talking and he made some recommendations of maybe investing in some proper equipment, nothing that was going to break the bank exactly, but some nice stuff that could serve me well, in terms of recording myself. We didn't know how long things were going to be going on like this at this point, but we figured it could be awhile and it's not a bad thing to have the capacity to record myself.
James Ehnes:
I got some mics and audio interface and downloaded a program on my computer and started the process of figuring out how this all worked. Now, in my house, very fortunately, we built this house not long ago and built a room, a big central room, where the idea was if we cleaned everything out of it, took out the furniture, took out the carpets, that it could really sound quite nice, have little house concerts, and it does sound quite nice and it actually sounds really nice. We stripped the room and I started recording samples and sending them to my friend Simon saying, "Oh, what do you think? Am I doing this right?" Of course, at first I was doing it all completely wrong, but we worked on refining mic height and distance and placement and just all of that stuff, placement within the room, and eventually we got to a point where he said, "It sounds really good in there. It sounds as good in that room as in any studio that you're going to find. I think you could actually do some serious work in there if you wanted to do that." And so I thought, "Well, okay. This is an interesting idea."
James Ehnes:
So I ended up filming some of these programs for these festivals that I've mentioned and learned through that process how to film myself with an iPhone and really, just what we had in the house. I mean, I did spend a bit of money on the mics and the audio interface, but the filming part, I think I spent $60 from Amazon for a couple of the cheapest tripods they had and little connectors for phones. I mean, it was really on a shoestring budget, but between this camera we had in the house, just an old SLR camera and my iPhone and my wife's iPhone, we had this nice three camera set up. And so I made these films for the festivals and I thought, "These are not bad." And so then I enlisted the help of ... It's a long story. You sorry you asked yet? My wife and I got in touch with a filmmaker friend in London and he was saying, "Oh. Well, you know can do this and you can do this and there's this app for your phone that gives you full manual control of this and maybe you can buy a really cheap stage lights." Go Amazon again, $29 or something, so we set up for some sort of proper filming and I ended up recording all of the Bach Sonatas and Partitas and all the six Ysaye sonatas for these filmed recitals.
James Ehnes:
I called them my Recitals From Home and I sell them via my website, they're on Vimeo, and that was an enormous project. It was one of those things that now, the music businesses by no means recovered, but it's recovered at least to the point where now it seems just unfathomable that I could have spent so much time on this one project, but I'm glad I did and I knew that the audio could eventually be used for, because it was all recorded in high resolution and all that, so could eventually be released as albums. So yeah, the Ysaye sonatas from the Recitals from Home, those were remastered for CD and released quite recently and the Bach is going to come out later in the year.
James Ehnes:
The other album that just came out is the first of four CDs of Beethoven quartets that my quartet recorded. That was another crazy adventure because we had booked about a week to spend in England recording with Simon, who I already mentioned. This was booked for last August and as the summer went along, it was clear we were not going to be able to get over there, he was not going to be able to come over to us, but none of us wanted to scrap it. We were like, "Well, we've worked so hard," and we had been playing cycles of the Beethoven quartets over the last several years and it was the right time for a project. Sometimes that's just how it is. It's like the time is now. If it's not now, it's not going to happen.
James Ehnes:
Amazing modern technology, so Amy, the other violinist in the quartet, she runs a an elite music school in Macon, Georgia, the Robert McDuffie Center for Strings at Mercer University. Mercer University has a really lovely concert hall that happened to be free at this point in August because school was not yet in session and so Amy booked us into there and her husband, who is a drummer, percussionist, amazing guy, also is a recording engineer. And so he, on the ground in Macon, Georgia, managed to coordinate a broadband stream to Simon in London, who was monitoring the sessions in real time at 48K. It was amazing. We had Simon's face on a Skype call on a computer and he produced these sessions.
James Ehnes:
The first CD we ended up recording ... Oh, that was another nice thing because we didn't have to fly all the way over to the UK and we didn't have to fly all the way back, so that actually gave us, I think, about four more days in the recording schedule. We had originally been thinking we would record two CDs, Beethoven quartets, and we got started and it was like, "Well, let's just keep playing until we run out of time." We ended up recording four CDs. So we recorded everything from Opus 74 to the end. And the first CD of Opus 130 and 133, that was just released and I think we just approved the master for 127, 131, and I think we're just waiting on one of our members to approve the master on the 74 and 95.
Leah Roseman:
Wow. I was going to ask you about the quartet. I haven't heard you yet, but I'm going to buy those recording as well.
James Ehnes:
Hope you like them.
Leah Roseman:
How do you manage it? In a normal year when there's no pandemic or we hope we've gone through the worst of this at this point. With your touring schedule, so intense as a soloist with orchestras and recitals, how do you manage to have a quartet?
James Ehnes:
Well, the quartet is really ... I'm trying to think of when we formally established ourselves as a quartet, maybe 10 years ago or something. We're all really old friends. We've known each other for years. I mean, Amy, the other violinist, she and I went to summer camp together back in 1989, so our families are like family and the cellist, Edward Arron, he and I were suite mates at Julliard back in the '90s. Playing a quartet is hard in a lot of ways and I think it's a sad reality that for a lot of quartets, it becomes so immersive that there's a certain amount of personal distance that develops and that is required. There's all these famous stories about four members for quartet in four rental cars and taking four separate flights and staying in four hotels.
James Ehnes:
And I think that that's not always the case, of course, by any means, but our quartet is the opposite because we would get together to hang out anyway. That was how the quartet got started, is just the idea of some projects, where we were eager to do the projects, but just as eager to get together and just hang out. So sadly, our real life has set in for us, in that our violist Richard O'Neill eventually was like, "I think want a real job with real stability and real ..." So we were thrilled Richard took the position with the Takacs Quartet. That was another reason why these Beethoven quartets, it was like, "Well, this either happens now or it doesn't happen at all," because Richard was joining the Takacs Quartet and moving to Boulder and being in residence there at the University of Colorado this is a chapter in his life.
James Ehnes:
So for the last 10 years or so, it's basically been finding any pockets of time where our calendars line up and getting together and cramming like crazy. Everything about it has been difficult to the point of being unrealistic and nearly impossible and that, I think, has kept our motivations for doing it extremely pure because none of us are doing it for any other reason that we just really, really want to because it has always involved just these ridiculous things. It's like, "Well, let's see. If I took an overnight flight from Los Angeles to New York and then we rehearsed all day and then I played a concerto with the Philharmonic at night and we could rehearse during the second half and then we could fly to South Carolina and perform it the next day," and that's a terrible idea but we would do things like that just because it was fun.
James Ehnes:
And then I'm the artistic director at the Seattle Chamber Music Society and we have two festivals a year, one in January, one in July. And that, often, was a time for us to be more properly in residence together, learning some repertoire and spending a little bit more time. It's hard to know what the future of the quartet is because it's just hard to think about it without Richard, but it's funny. We thought that this was going to be something we would really have to figure out for this season, of the 2020-2021 season. But then, of course, everything was canceled so it's like, "Oh, we don't have to make that decision." How's this for kicking the can? We were like, "Well, how about this? How about we play string trios where Amy plays violin and I play viola and Ed plays cello?" so we've been doing some of that this summer.
Leah Roseman:
And you just mentioned the Seattle Chamber Music Society. So when this is released, that will be going on online and I believe people can stream those concerts until September 13th.
James Ehnes:
Yes, I think that's right.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Do you want to talk about any of the rep you'll be playing there or people you'll be working with?
James Ehnes:
There's so much. It's funny. This was lucky planning. I've got all my planning stuff sitting on my desk here. It's hard to keep track because you plan one festival and then by the time you've got those programs put to bed, you're thick into the next one. I have been thinking, "Okay, what is on these programs this summer?" because I haven't thought about it for a little while. I would like to spread whatever credit there is, but I should at least accept blame for the programs myself because that is my job. What I like doing with programs, and this applies to my chamber music programs, it applies to the recitals I play or really whatever, I like variety. I would like to think, over the course of the season, that people can see some sort of recurring themes or they can feel like there's a value of experiencing an entire season.
James Ehnes:
And that being said though, I think it's a shame when somebody goes to a concert. Well, I mean, our streamed concerts are cheap, they're very inexpensive, but during normal life, you go to a concert, it's expensive. Tickets are expensive and you maybe you've got to go into the city and park your car and it's a whole thing. And I feel like it's a little bit unfair sometimes when you go to a concert and you feel like you've received one piece of a puzzle. You're like, "I don't know quite what to make of today or tonight." So I think that one of the challenges of programming series is, for lack of ...
James Ehnes:
Our concerts are usually at night, so I'll say for every night, make that night a special night, a special night and a complete night and a whole experience and a wonderful experience. But also for the diehards, the people that are really in for the whole season, that they get additional context and additional depth to what's going on. There's a lot of variety in our programs and one thing that I've really focused on with the streaming concerts is there's a certain focus on what was happening in Leipzig the middle of the 19th century and just what an incredible time that was when you had the Schumanns and you had Mendelssohn and there was just this incredible atmosphere of music making.
James Ehnes:
And with this chamber music that is often so intimate, as we've been filming our last couple of festivals, I've realized that the way that people experience music on a screen is very different than in a hall. And of course, one of the great joys of chamber music is it is, I think, for the listeners as well as the performers, a very intimate interactive experience. There's an exploration of that intimacy with these filmed concerts, playing music that ... Music is fantastic because you can adapt it to your circumstance. And yeah, I mean, you can play the Schumann last violin sonata or the third piano trio. You can play these in concert halls and you can make them work. But to have them in your living room with close film work and all that, I think is maybe a little bit closer to the essence of the music.
James Ehnes:
We're having some fun with that and I always try to throw in some interesting new music. There's actually a great friend of the National Arts Center, Jocelyn Morlock has written a wind quintet for us this year, which we commission a piece annually, and very, very happy that Jocelyn could write this wind quintet for us. Stewart Goodyear is coming down and we're playing some of his music as well as him performing on the piano. There's great stuff and I hope our viewers today might be interested in checking out the series at Seattle Chamber Music or seattlechambermusic.org.
Leah Roseman:
It'll be linked in the description, along with your website and everything. I wanted to follow up on a few threads that came up so far. I have to say, when I heard you play Ysaye Ballade first time was an encore when you were with our orchestra in Southam Hall. It was completely unexpected for us. Maybe you planned it. We were like, "What?" And then I heard you play it in your concert, Recitals From Home, and the sound you achieved are just unbelievable and such a different experience. I've always heard you when I've been in the orchestra and I don't normally see you. Your back's to me and I'm appreciating your tone going out into the hall, but this was such a different experience. And also your Bach, because I have your first CD that you put out quite a while ago, almost 20 years ago now, and it's wonderful you'll be releasing this new set as well. For non-violinists, they may not realize we practiced solo Bach. For me, it was every year, always as part of what you're doing is solo Bach. Was that also part of your upbringing?
James Ehnes:
Yeah. I think really, all through my student years, I was pretty much always playing something of Bach and something of Paganini. I mean, what better ways to train the hands, really, than those two composers? So yeah, Bach has always been ... I think that so many violinists during the shutdown of the last year and a half, so many violinists turned to Bach because for one thing, what better music to turn to? For another, of course, it's something that is complete for a solo instrument. So much of what we do is part of an ensemble or duet at least, so to be able to play music that is the greatest music there is and that is self-contained, complete as a solo instrumental thing. And then also, I think that, as you said, for violinists, it's part of our history, part of our lives.
James Ehnes:
Bach has been, I think for most violinists, a constant since early days. So yeah, it's always great to come back to Bach. And it's funny. There was a period of time. I made that recording a long time ago. I think that was about 20 years ago, more maybe, 22 years ago or something. I think it was probably close to a decade, maybe between say 2004 and 2014, that I just got really lazy. There were three of them that I played all the time and I played the second and third Partitas and the first Sonata all the time. And the other three, I just didn't play just because when somebody needed Bach, well, that one's in my hands. And then, of course, that becomes this cycle that it's hard to break out of. And so I guess it was probably around 2012, 2014, I don't know, something like that, that I was like, "Okay. Well, this is ridiculous," and so I started playing ...
James Ehnes:
Actually, I got asked by a friend to do just the most ridiculous thing. He was like, "Oh, can you come to my festival and play all the Bach sonatas and Partitas in a single night?" I was like, "No, absolutely not. I don't want to do that." But he's a good friend. He was like, "Oh, no. You should come. You should do it, you should do it." And it's like, "Oh, this sounds like a terrible idea. I'm not sure I can do it."
Leah Roseman:
I can't.
James Ehnes:
I did it and discovered that it's actually a really nice way to experience that music. It sounds awful. It sounds like punishing the player and punishing the audience, but you can just get into that world and just live there for a few hours and so that was wonderful. I started doing that in a bunch of places and either in a single evening or in two evenings and it was around that time that I thought, "I think my thoughts and feelings on the music have evolved to the point where it might be worthwhile to rerecord them." Old recordings, I feel like it's like looking at old photographs. You see them and hopefully, if you've had a happy life, you see old photographs. You're like, "Yeah, I remember being that person at that point and that's a happy memory," but it's not necessarily who you are now.
James Ehnes:
I remember somebody putting on a recording of Bach at one point. I wasn't really listening, it was just on. And I remember thinking that I really liked it, which turned out to be a good thing because it was me. I listened to it and I was like, "I really love that. I wonder who that is." And it was interesting is when I realized it was me ... I mean, there's a funny story about Mischa Maisky, apparently hearing his first recording of the Bach suites and getting really angry and being like, "This cellist doesn't know what they're doing," then asking the person in the record store, "What is this terrible recording?" And they were like, "It's you, Mr. Maisky," and that's why he recorded them again.
James Ehnes:
And so happily I didn't have that experience, but it was more the experience of I don't really recognize that person anymore even though it was a part of me. So all this to say, that I thought, "Well, maybe I should record them again, but that's a big undertaking and when is that really going to happen?" Since I love to record with Simon, it's like, "Well, what am I going to go over to the UK and find time and go into some hall and how is this going to happen?" So for this shutdown, it was like, "Well, that's easy." Of course, the thing that was weird about it is that they were entirely self produced. I didn't have a producer listening in saying, "Oh, why don't you give that movement another try or what do you think of this and that?" So in a way, I guess these Ysaye and Bach recordings are the most solo solo can be. I didn't have any input from anybody, for better or for worse.
Leah Roseman:
And you were recording it from midnight till 4:00, I believe?
James Ehnes:
About that. Yeah. I'm lucky. I live in a very quiet area, but still there's noise. There's lawn mowers, there's whatever, and we actually live along a river, so there's boats. And so between that outside noise and realistically, the inside noise of having a couple of kids and we're all locked in the house, there wasn't practically going to be any way to record during the day. The other thing is, since I was filming all this stuff, I wanted to have control over light and that can be a tricky thing if the light is changing through the course of an afternoon. So yeah, we realized that the only way to do this, really, would be to record at night.
James Ehnes:
I would try to maybe go to bed at 7:00 or something or 8:00 maybe, and wake up at 11, 11:30 and have a cup of tea. There was this whole list of things I had to do where it was like, "Okay, I'm going to turn off the breaker for the refrigerators so that doesn't hum and I'm going to turn off the air conditioning and I'm going to turn this light onto this level, this light onto that level, and make sure that all ..." And actually, in retrospect, I'm amazed that I didn't have a night that I recorded all night and got nothing because there's a lot to think about, making sure that all the cameras are running and all the batteries are charged and that there's space on the hard drive, all these things. I think that I did enough dry runs to know what it was that I had to be doing, but also I think I got lucky.
Leah Roseman:
You're normally traveling a lot and dealing with time zone changes, so was that putting you back in that zone of, your body's able to cope with this?
James Ehnes:
The thing I was laughing about, my kids are a little bit older now. They're seven and nine so they're not big kids, but it brought me back to the days of when they were babies where you're just tired all the time. And I think that between the time zone thing and being a parent, the fact is that as a performer, if I'm on the road somewhere and people are like, "Oh, how do you deal with the jet lag?" Well, if I'm playing concerts, I mean, the work that goes into it is the preparation. By the time I play a concert, particularly if there's no rehearsal that day, I can be completely jet lagged because I only really have to be a hundred percent on for an hour of the day and I can be a zombie the rest of the day if I need to be.
James Ehnes:
I don't know. I think that you begin to train the body a little bit into knowing that I have to be on now and I can collapse later. The recording days, I would record just one piece a night basically because I didn't have a producer. My process would be like, "Okay. Well, I'm going to record Bach C Major Sonata tonight," which was a daunting night. I got up, I was like, "Well, I'll play it through each movement four times or something." If I don't have it by now, then that's on me. That's a reflection of my preparation and I have to live with that. And so yeah, I would just run through these pieces over and over. And honestly, psychologically, it was not a bad way to spend the time. We were all going a little bit crazy. And down here in the States where I live, there was at this time here, I mean, it was not just the COVID lockdowns, but I mean, all of the social fabric of the country was tearing apart. And to spend a few hours playing Bach was not a bad thing, mentally. It helps get my head together a little bit.
Leah Roseman:
That C Major is just amazing and that Fugue, three parts. I played that for my final recital at McGill, the whole Sonata, but no one had advised me that you should really practice doing a run through of the whole Sonata, so I'd always practice each movement. And I got on stage and I thought, "I have never actually played this through," so I always tell my students that. No matter how tiring it is, just do whatever the run is.
James Ehnes:
I remember the first time I played Brahms Concerto and the first time I played Elgar Concerto, it was the same thing. I got to the end of the first movement, I was just completely done. And with Brahms, it was funny. I obsessed over that piece as a kid on the LP, so first movement is side A and I would just listen to it over and over and over and over and then eventually I'd flip it over to side B. But yeah, that first performance of Brahms Concerto where I got to the end of the first movement and I realized that the tank was completely empty and I had two very challenging movements to go. But yeah, that's a good point about the Bach.
James Ehnes:
It's funny, one of the ones, for me, is a funny one in that regard is the first Sonata. It's not that it's terribly long, but the last movement is challenging. Technically, there's a lot happening there and you can start to play mind games with it, being in two parts, each part repeated. So it's like, "Okay, you've gotten through the first movement. Got through the Fugue and you're through the Sicilian." And it's like, "Okay, I got through the first half now. Now I've got through the repeat of the first half," and you start seeing the finish line and that's a dangerous way to play.
Leah Roseman:
You'd mentioned Paganini before, that you did a lot of Paganini growing up. You've recorded the Paganini Caprices a while ago. Do you think you would redo them at some point?
James Ehnes:
I recorded those twice, too.
Leah Roseman:
Oh, I'm sorry.
James Ehnes:
It was the first thing I recorded back in '95, I guess it was, and so that was Paganini Caprices. And then back in 2009, I think it was, I recorded them again and I still mess with my wife with that every once in a while. When I feel like it's been long enough that I can get away with it, I'm like, "I'm thinking I might record the Paganini." She's like, "No, no," so the preparation for the 2009 recording was intense. I feel like I was training for the Olympics or something. I don't know. I know that with that recording in 2009 that I worked, I prepared for that as hard as I could and I haven't listened to it in, well, probably a decade, maybe more. I don't know if I've ever really listened to it after I approved the master for release, because it was too close.
James Ehnes:
And I know I'm proud of what I did and I know that what I did was the best that I could do at that point. There was no question of, "Well, if my schedule had been a little different or if I prepared a little more or if I had scheduled the sessions a little differently ..." I feel like I can hold my head up high because I did it right, the way I would've wanted to. And so in a way, I don't want to listen to it because it's been 12 years. Surely, there will be things where I'm like, "I wish I'd done it this way instead or I wish I'd done it that way instead." But realistically, I don't really play a lot of those pieces anymore, which is too bad.
James Ehnes:
The music business has changed and I've definitely witnessed the way that things change as a soloist gets older. The type of repertoire that people asked before is very different than what they asked me for 20 years ago, so I don't know. I don't anticipate that I will record them again. I would like to think that I'm still young enough that I could do them as well as I did, but if I'm not going to record them in the next 10 or 15 years, when I'm 60, I know I won't be able to play them the way I did when I was 30.
James Ehnes:
I don't know. But it's too bad that music is not appreciated, perhaps more by the intelligentsia than it is because I think Paganini was a wonderful composer. I love the first violin concerto. I think it's a fantastic piece. I think it's super fun. It's really entertaining. It's beautiful, it's dramatic, it's funny. And I don't think I've been asked to play it in 10 years because it's like, "Oh. Well, he's in his 40s and we'll have him play Brahms or Beethoven." What am I going to say? If someone asked me to play Sibelius Concerto, I'm going to be like, "No"? Of course, I'm going to play. I mean, that's why I do this. I love it, but it's funny. I remember one of the first pieces I played with the National Arts Center Orchestra was Wieniawski Second. Great piece. Fantastic.
Leah Roseman:
Beautiful piece.
James Ehnes:
I think it's been 20 years since anybody's asked me to play that piece. And actually, I know Joshua Bell last year, a couple years ago or something, he just made a point. He's like, "I'm going to play it." And he just basically told orchestra, he's like, "I want to play this piece." And they said, "Really?" He said, "Yeah," and so, "Okay," so he did. And I thought, "Well, that's great. Good for him," because sometimes, I don't know, there's certain delusions of grandeur in our business and I think that nobody loves Bach and Beethoven and Mozart more than me. I put myself in that category of people that worship at the altar of these great masters, but I think that there's room for music that is also just entertaining.
James Ehnes:
I mean, it feels like a lot of programs these days are just so serious. There has to be some B composer, Bach or Beethoven or Brahms, and the most serious of that and then maybe a contemporary piece with a social context. And this is all great. Yeah, of course, but it's a bit of a shame as a violinist that we have all of this music that doesn't really get played on that much. And so I'm excited that actually, I don't think that any of this has been released, but the next time that I'll be playing with you will be some more fun pieces. Looking forward to having a little bit of fun.
Leah Roseman:
I remember a friend of mine had done master classes with Milstein and his requirement was that everyone have two Paganini Caprices in their back pocket in case he didn't like the piece you chose to play from that day. He'd say, "I don't want to hear that."
James Ehnes:
Wow. Yeah, that's ...
Leah Roseman:
Old school, right? Can you imagine?
James Ehnes:
That's super old school. I think honestly, if more violinists were growing up that way today, I think it would be a good thing. I meet all these kids. I'll come across some 16 year old kid who's playing the Behr Concerto and I'm like, "Yeah, have you ever played the Zigeunerweisen?" And they're like, "Zigeurner, what? I haven't heard of it. No." It's like, "Well, that's too bad." Anyway.
Leah Roseman:
So let's talk a little bit about your youth and your training, because you come from pretty small place, Brandon, Manitoba. In your own words, why don't you talk a little bit about ...
James Ehnes:
Sure. Well, yeah. I grew up in Brandon, Manitoba, which is a great place. I feel lucky to have grown up there and had my family there for many years. My father was the trumpet professor at Brandon University. My mother had been a ballet dancer. That was actually how they met. My mom was dancing and my dad was playing in the orchestra. When my parents moved to Brandon, she was opening a satellite school for the Royal Winnipeg Ballet. They were Americans and moved to Brandon, Manitoba, thinking, "Oh, this could be an interesting place to live for a couple of years," and they ended up staying there for almost 40 years. Brandon University School of Music is a remarkable place. And particularly at that time when I was growing up, there was ... I mean, I don't mean particularly in contrast to what it is now. It's a remarkable place now. Obviously, I don't know it as intimately as I did then, but it was a really incredible assortment of just amazing musicians that had been brought in.
James Ehnes:
The whole idea of the Brandon University School of Music was really quite remarkable. Starting from the 1960s, this amazing man named Lorne Watson, he started bringing in world-class musicians, I mean people from all over, to create a school of music that, I think of it as the Canadian equivalent to what Indiana University did in the States, where sure, you can go to Montreal or Toronto or any number of cities and immerse yourself in that city environment and that's what I did. I went to New York and so I understand the value of that, but I think there is also a real value for the right type of student to go to a smaller place, where there's an enormous amount of individual attention, very few distractions, and you can immerse yourself in that musical life. And so the violin teacher at Brandon University was this legendary man named Francis Chaplin, who was, fortunately, my dad's best friend, too. My dad would never have had the nerve, I think, to ask him, "Oh, will you listen to my little boy play?" But there was a woman named Lise Elson. Do you remember Lise Elson?
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, I met her. Yeah.
James Ehnes:
Yeah. And she came through Brandon. She heard me play when I was little. I don't know. I think I was eight, maybe just turned nine or something like that. And she called Francis Chaplin and said, "Oh. Well, you should listen to this boy," and so I was extraordinarily lucky at this young age to be studying with a university professor, who was quite incredible. Up to that point, I had been studying with his students, so I had this rotation of violin teachers because I'd study with one and then they'd graduate. I'd study with another, then they'd graduate.
James Ehnes:
But anyway, so with Francis Chaplin and there were some of the other members of the music faculty that were my musical family and my real family, too. I mean, my pianist and piano teacher and coach and overall guru man named Donald Henry and Lawrence Jones and these people, they took me under their wings. And yeah, it was an extraordinary environment in which to grow up. And there were other kids from my town that went on to extraordinary things as well. People, they're like, "Oh, you're from Brandon. Well, that's so unlikely. What are the chances of a violinist coming out of Brandon?" Well, two of best friends there ended up one place in the orchestra in Stuttgart. The other is one of the concert masters in the Metropolitan Opera. This was not an isolated thing. This teacher was a magician and the whole society was so nurturing and fostering of what we did there.
James Ehnes:
Anyway, so my teacher, Francis Chaplin had been a student at Julliard in the '50s and one of his classmates was Sally Thomas. He got in touch with Sally Thomas at one point when I was in my early teens and sent me away to Meadowmount to study in the summers at the Meadowmount School of Music, where Sally Thomas still teaches at Meadowmount. I mean, it's gone virtual the last couple of years, but she has not missed a summer in, I think, 75 years or something, just absolutely unbelievable. She went maybe 70 consecutive years. She just had her 90th birthday. And anyway, so I went to study with her in the summers and then continued on. I followed in my teacher's footsteps and for university, went to Julliard and continued studying with Sally Thomas there.
James Ehnes:
So yeah, in a way, I've had a lot of influences, a lot of tremendously influential people in my musical life, between my father and this man, Donald Henry I mentioned and various coaches here, there, and everywhere. But really, my only two main teachers of any length of time were Francis Chaplin and Sally Thomas and they were students together with Ivan Galamian. So in that sense, there's sort of a tradition, I guess, to the teaching that I've had.
James Ehnes:
I think in retrospect, the most remarkable qualities of both of these teachers are that they don't do a paint by number approach. They actually gave me an enormous amount of individual freedom and they give that to all their students. I remember being at one of Sally Thomas's studio classes where, just by chance, it was three kids that night were all playing Chausson Poeme. And it was so interesting to me that in contrast to basically what would've happened at almost any of the other studios at Julliard where they would've all been just cut from the same cloth, the performances were all so different. Different bowings, different fingerings, because they were tailored to each individual student. I think of her teaching being like, you release a horse on a track and it's a wide track. There are fences on either side, where if things start going a little off, they will go down that path, but they can find their own route, and I think that was a very valuable thing for me and really, for all students.
Leah Roseman:
That's a really cool image, actually. That's neat. I've heard you talk about your preparation, which it really resonated with me, that when you have the luxury of time, you'll prepare a new piece to about 90% and put it on the shelf and come back to it, which I think is so valuable. I was curious. That 90%, does that involve memorization or still with the score, if it's something that you have to memorize?
James Ehnes:
I think it depends, probably with the score. I'm sure it's this way from many people. It's that last, whatever you want to call it, 10%, 5%, it's the hardest part, particularly when a piece is fresh and for whatever reason, the mind is an amazing thing and there is a certain amount of work that continues almost subconsciously. And I've come to recognize that there will be certain things when I'm learning a piece, where this is going to be better and it's going to clarify if I just let it sit for a little bit. So yeah, I do, when possible, to learn a piece and not get too worried about getting it to that very highest level. I don't need to get it performance ready and then bring it back. And I just find bringing pieces back in general, it helps so much.
James Ehnes:
I feel grateful that the way my career developed allowed me to rotate a lot of repertoire as a young person. There was never a moment for me where all of a sudden, I was thrust into playing. I didn't win some competition that then was like, "Oh, you've got 90 concerts next year," after having three the year before. Not saying that can't work for certain people, but for me, it was such a gradual build up and that every season I could program something new. I could make a point of programming something new so that piece got of added to my collection, so to speak. And then the second time you bring it back is easier, the third time is easier still, and the fourth time is easier still. I feel lucky that happened because it allows me now to rotate a lot of repertoire because there are a lot of pieces that are, if you think of the brain as a file cabinet, there are a lot of pieces that are permanently near the front of that file cabinet.
James Ehnes:
Honestly, sometimes the rotation of repertoire can get a little bit silly. Packing for this summer, a stack of music like this high, that's a little excessive. I think it's a little bit limiting to be in a position where it's like, "Well, I'm playing Tchaikovsky for this concert, so all the weeks around that have to be Tchaikovsky." There are some of my colleagues and friends that they prefer to do that and they prefer to live in that world and immerse themselves. But for me, I guess I need it to be a little bit more special, so I don't want to ever play a piece more than two, three weeks in a row. I feel like it's impossible for me to be as excited about it by week four as I would need to be.
James Ehnes:
I'm always going to practice no matter what piece it is, no matter how well I know it, I'm going to practice it because I feel like that's my job. And the day that you don't is the day it doesn't go well, so you have to practice, of course. But if I'm playing Mendelssohn, well, for example, this just happened the couple weeks ago, where say I was playing Mendelssohn on a Thursday and then the next Thursday I was playing Tchaikovsky and there were some people that were like, "Oh, should we coordinate this repertoire for you so it can just be the same piece for both?" And I was like, "Well, if it's the same piece, I'm still going to be practicing every day. And honestly, the amount of work that it would take to get Tchaikovsky performance ready is not more work than it would be to keep Mendelssohn performance ready, so doesn't matter, really.
Leah Roseman:
When you were a student, teenager and Julliard, what was the rate of digestion of new concertos? I'm curious, as a virtuoso coming up, which repertoire was your teachers giving you?
James Ehnes:
Well, it's so hard to remember. I had a strong appetite. So I think that my teachers wanted to indulge that, I guess, or wanted to, I don't know, work that to my advantage. I learned a lot of pieces and I was just churning through a lot of repertoire. I've always had this weird collector's view of things, too, where it's like, "Well, if I learn a Mozart concerto, I want to learn all of Mozart." I don't know, it's just part of my mindset. I don't know why. I like collecting things or something.
James Ehnes:
I was playing a lot of repertoire and Sally Thomas as I was in my later teens, she knew exactly who I was from the beginning and we've remained very, very close over the years. She was so funny because she knew exactly how to push my buttons and exactly how to make me work. And so she would just casually throw out these challenges. I'd be at summer camp. It's like, "Well, there's this open slot at this performance next week and we were talking about it at the faculty meeting and I thought, 'Oh, if only were a week later because then Jimmy would have the time to learn the piece but of course, it'd be impossible for him to do it on such short notice.'" And then of course, I'm like, "No, no. I can. I can," and she knew what she was doing. So yeah, I think that because of my personality, I think that my teachers saw the value in feeding me a lot of repertoire as opposed to the value with certain students where you might want to really focus in and deal with these issues of refinement.
James Ehnes:
I think that you just have the student and what they're capable of and what their own levels for refinement, intrinsically, is because I think that there are some students that they get a kick out of 75% learning a whole bunch of pieces, but they never actually learn well. But then there are some students, they get so bogged down where it's like, "What? You went to university and you learned three pieces in four years?" That's not great either and that's not realistic. Obviously, a job as an orchestral musician involves just such an unbelievable amount of repertoire. You're just constantly digesting things. I've seen with friends and kids that I've followed in more recent years this real rude awakening of the kid that spends their entire fourth year preparing their graduation recital and that's all they do. And then they graduate and they win a job in an orchestra and they're playing more music in the first two weeks than they've learned in the last two years. That's very difficult.
Leah Roseman:
And it's hard. People don't realize orchestra music, it's often very difficult.
James Ehnes:
Of course. Yeah, it's super hard. And I think that sometimes the orchestral violin parts, they're particularly hard because don't you find some of the busiest stuff and most technically challenging stuff is not the stuff that you necessarily have in your ear from hearing performances of the piece? I've asked conductor friends indulgences over the years to sit in orchestras and play the repertoire and I always think of in Mahler symphonies, the hardest, hardest, hardest passages are often the ones that are really nothing more than texture. So you're not, "Oh. Well, yeah. I know Mahler's Sixth because I've listened to a lot of recordings of it." The passages that you're going to work on the most are the parts that you've never paid attention to.
Leah Roseman:
You are known for, of course, beautiful sound and great musicianship, but also fantastic intonation. You just play so beautifully in tune.
James Ehnes:
Thank you.
Leah Roseman:
But I wanted ask you about that because when you play with piano, it is different than when you play with an orchestra, in terms of where the notes go or do you make those adjustments?
James Ehnes:
I guess I feel of two minds about it. To play with really good intonation, you have to adjust to the circumstances in which you're playing and there's different kinds of intonation. There's chordal, vertical intonation and there's linear, melodic intonation, where sometimes you hear quartets get into that sort of thing, where it's vertically lined up so well, but all the melodies sound a little wrong because they don't quite fit right and everybody in the group is worried about, "Where do I put the third and I'm going to tune my C string up," and it just turns into this craziness.
James Ehnes:
So in our quartet, we laugh about this a lot, that sometimes it's just play in tune. Just play in tune. Just stop. Just stop it. Or the people that are like, "Yeah, well when I play with piano or I play with orchestra," and it's like ... Okay, but also at a certain point it's like nobody plays that out of tune. And also we have the luxury of vibrato, the spinning of the sound in the air. Intonation is tremendously important and I really appreciate the compliment because it's something I think about all the time. And I think that one of the things that fuels good intonation is just being constantly paranoid about it, really.
James Ehnes:
But I think that with intonation, really, I think a lot of when a person is playing, one of the most important tools you can learn is objectivity and really trying to listen to oneself as part of the ensemble or even if you're playing on your own, how does it sound? Not how does it feel like it sounds, not How do you think it sounds, not how do you want it to sound? Those are all very different things. And that's such a fascinating thing to work with students on because we've all had these experiences working with these great, talented young people where you see it. You see it in their faces and you see it in their bodies, what they're trying to do and what they're trying to say and it's sometimes a very delicate conversation to be like, "Doesn't sound like that." You think it does because you feel it so strongly, but what's coming out is not what you're putting into it. And learning the relationship between what you do and what comes out, I think, that's maybe the most important step, going from student to professional.
James Ehnes:
The other thing about intonation is I think from a technical standpoint, I am a big believer in hand position. When something goes well, I want to know why and so I'm really analytical about the way that I play in a technical sense. I feel like the better I understand why something works, the easier it will be for me to replicate it. So in terms of having a very, very solid hand position and knowing the relationships between the different parts of the hand ... There are always parts of the left hand that are anchored in one way or another.
James Ehnes:
I remember just the other day, talking to my nephew, he's just an aspiring young violinist, and he's just learning how to shift. And I was talking to him about it, more importantly to my sister, who's in charge of teaching him, about how it's not always about knowing where the note is. It's about knowing where the hand goes and how the finger fits within the hand. We all do that. If you're shifting up to, you got to leap up to some high note, you don't always know exactly where that note is, but where the hand goes and how the finger fits within the shape of that hand. I might not know where the G is, but I know where the E is or something like that. So anyway, I guess there's a lot of thoughts. But anyway, I do appreciate it because it's something I think about. I don't like playing that's out of tune.
Leah Roseman:
As a orchestra musician, we often have to find very high notes out of the blue. We have to come in quietly, which is always a nightmare. I don't have perfect pitch, so it's really a stressful thing. But it took me many years to figure out the extension of a sixth because when you're up high, you can find a lot of notes. You know, get to fifth or sixth position and then, "Oh, if I extend a sixth, I know where that is," so that kind of geography.
James Ehnes:
Yes. Yes, exactly. That's totally what I'm talking about where you might know where the bottom of your hand is and because of that, you know how. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
I just wanted to ask you, you have long term relationships with certain musicians and I was just listening to your, I think it's called Stream of Limelight that Bramwell Tovey wrote for you, and you play it with Andrew Armstrong, with whom you've done so many beautiful recordings. Can you speak a little bit about those relationships?
James Ehnes:
Yeah. Well, first with Bramwell Tovey, Bramwell, his first music director job in North America was with the Winnipeg Symphony. And Winnipeg Symphony was the closest thing I had to a hometown orchestra. By prairie terms, it was just next door, only 250 kilometers away. And anyway, Bramwell, he came there in, I believe it was '89, I think. And my father, for those years, for many years, was the unofficial fourth trumpet of the Winnipeg Symphony. They carried three and if they had use of a fourth, they'd bring my dad in from Brandon. So my dad had a lot of friends in the orchestra, some of whom had heard me play. I think I played some school concerts with the WSO, maybe in 1987 or 8. And they said, "Oh, there's this new music director coming to town and we should have your boy play for him."
James Ehnes:
And he was like, "Well, I don't know how to set that up," so his friends set it up and we drove into Winnipeg and it was just the greatest thing. You know Bramwell Tovey and he's just the nicest man. He's so warm and wonderful and he's great musician. He's a funny guy. And anyway, he took me under his wing and gave me many of my early opportunities. A lot of the core repertoire, I feel like I broke it in under Bramwell's supervision. We became great friends over the years and have had a lot of wonderful experiences performing together all over the world. I made my UK debut with him.
James Ehnes:
And so when I was doing this tour in 2016, it was my birthday present to myself. It was my 40th birthday in 2016 and I thought, "Well, I want to go on a tour all across Canada to all the provinces and all the territories." I think it can get to a point where just that the nature of the music business ... I've been living in the States for a long time now. I'm married to an American and at that point, I was working with managers, lovely people, but to them, I think Canada felt like Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, maybe Calgary. But it was like, "Guys, there's a lot more to it and places that are really special to me are really important to me." It's always wonderful to be in the big major cities, but I wanted to go to places out in The Maritimes and places in the prairies and smaller centers and a lot of the places that had really supported me growing up and starting my career. Something I also wanted to do was commission a new piece for this and commission a Canadian composer. And so anyway, Bramwell, it was the most amazing thing. He wrote this piece as a birthday present for me and so that's Bramwell and we've remained very close friends and I always love seeing him and working with him and he's an amazing, wonderful man.
James Ehnes:
And Andrew Armstrong, the pianist who was on that recording, who I've made a lot of recordings with, is he's one of my best friends and one of my closest collaborators. He and I have been friends for about 20 years now and it's funny how it started. I'd always heard about him through my student years because he was this pianist from Connecticut that my roommate at Julliard was a pianist. He introduced me to Andrew Armstrong at a concert one time. We were all at this concert at Carnegie Hall to see Radu Lupu play. He was like, "Oh, this is Andrew Armstrong. He's beat me at every competition through my entire childhood." And so I knew he was this great pianist, but I really didn't know him well at all.
James Ehnes:
And Andy called me, I remember in fall of 2001. He was like, "Hey, I've got this concert down in Miami and I thought maybe I would play a duo recital and I need to find a violinist to play with." And the whole thing was weird and I remember telling him on the phone. I was like, "Oh, I have to check my schedule." I knew I was free. I was just like, "This is weird, this guy calling me up." I got off the phone, I talked to my girlfriend, now wife, and was like, "So this guy Andy called me, asked me to do some concert in Miami." And she's like, "Well, are you free?" I said, "Yeah." She said, "Well, do you want to do it?" I was like, "I don't know. I guess I've always wanted to go hang out in Miami." She said, "Well, why not?" so I went down and played this concert and we just had the time of our lives. The concert, I remember not very much about, but I do remember playing three sets of tennis on the concert day and I remember drinking little too much beer and eating some really good barbecue. We just had such a grand time that we ended up playing this same venue in Miami 3, 4, 5 years in a row or something, until eventually it was like, "We could do concerts not in Miami."
James Ehnes:
It was probably not until about 2007 or something that we started playing together a lot. So just over the years, that's been a real joy, exploring the repertoire in great depth and detail with Andy. Our families are very, very close and that's been a great pleasure. And he came with us for this Canada tour, so for large swaths of the tour, it wasn't entirely linear, but big sections, it was me and Andy and my wife and my two young kids, at that point, in a minivan driving across the country. It was a bizarre way to spend our weeks, but it was so much fun. And every year Andy and I are like, "Can we do it again? Can we do it again?" So I don't know, maybe when I turn 50.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Well, on that note, just want to thank you for today. It's been really, really wonderful talking with you.
James Ehnes:
Oh, it's my pleasure. Nice talking with you, too.
Leah Roseman:
So all your many recordings and upcoming projects are all linked to your website, which will be in the description of this video, so thanks.
James Ehnes:
Thank you.
Leah Roseman:
Season one of this podcast had 20 episodes and season two continues with a really interesting mix of musicians talking about their lives and careers with perspectives on overcoming challenges, finding inspiration and connection through a life so enriched with music. Please follow this podcast wherever you listen to podcasts to be informed about each new episode.
