For those who do not have access, from The Times today:
"Royal Northern Sinfonia/Rubikis at Sage, Gateshead
Richard Morrison
Published at 12:01AM, February 2 2015
Rated to 4 stars
Hearing the spirited Royal Northern Sinfonia play in its magnificent home is always a pleasure, but this concert was made doubly fascinating by an extraordinary incident. Shortly into the finale of Prokofiev’s Second Violin Concerto the young soloist, Hyeyoon Park, snapped the E-string on her fiddle. That helter-skelter movement has barely half a bar of respite for the soloist, but in one of those half-bars Park swivelled to the RNS’s legendary leader, Bradley Creswick, who — as if by telepathy — instantly handed her his instrument and took hers.
Creswick then looked pleadingly round his colleagues while the Prokofiev swirled onwards (I should add that this was being broadcast live on Radio 3), and someone in the second violins passed him a new E-string in plastic packaging. After several unsuccessful attempts to open it with his fingers he ripped the plastic with his teeth, and proceeded to fix and tune the new E-string in about 19 seconds.
By this time, however, the music was hurtling towards the final, terrifying passage in which the soloist must deliver thousands of prestissimo semiquavers. To play this live on radio on someone else’s fiddle could be professional suicide. So in another half-bar’s respite, Park spun round again, reclaimed her own instrument and returned Creswick’s. The manoeuvre was conducted with such choreographic precision by both musicians that you might have thought they had rehearsed it, and Park went on to play the ending with fierce ebullience.
That old showbiz adage — the show must go on — can rarely have been so nervelessly upheld. The trouble was that the Incredible Fiddle Exchange was the only thing anyone talked about afterwards, which was rather sad for the young Latvian conductor Ainars Rubikis. His interpretations of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and Mark-Anthony Turnage’s rather depressing A Quiet Life weren’t bad — but he had been comprehensively upstaged by an E-string."
"Royal Northern Sinfonia/Rubikis at Sage, Gateshead
Richard Morrison
Published at 12:01AM, February 2 2015
Rated to 4 stars
Hearing the spirited Royal Northern Sinfonia play in its magnificent home is always a pleasure, but this concert was made doubly fascinating by an extraordinary incident. Shortly into the finale of Prokofiev’s Second Violin Concerto the young soloist, Hyeyoon Park, snapped the E-string on her fiddle. That helter-skelter movement has barely half a bar of respite for the soloist, but in one of those half-bars Park swivelled to the RNS’s legendary leader, Bradley Creswick, who — as if by telepathy — instantly handed her his instrument and took hers.
Creswick then looked pleadingly round his colleagues while the Prokofiev swirled onwards (I should add that this was being broadcast live on Radio 3), and someone in the second violins passed him a new E-string in plastic packaging. After several unsuccessful attempts to open it with his fingers he ripped the plastic with his teeth, and proceeded to fix and tune the new E-string in about 19 seconds.
By this time, however, the music was hurtling towards the final, terrifying passage in which the soloist must deliver thousands of prestissimo semiquavers. To play this live on radio on someone else’s fiddle could be professional suicide. So in another half-bar’s respite, Park spun round again, reclaimed her own instrument and returned Creswick’s. The manoeuvre was conducted with such choreographic precision by both musicians that you might have thought they had rehearsed it, and Park went on to play the ending with fierce ebullience.
That old showbiz adage — the show must go on — can rarely have been so nervelessly upheld. The trouble was that the Incredible Fiddle Exchange was the only thing anyone talked about afterwards, which was rather sad for the young Latvian conductor Ainars Rubikis. His interpretations of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and Mark-Anthony Turnage’s rather depressing A Quiet Life weren’t bad — but he had been comprehensively upstaged by an E-string."
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