Queen Elizabeth Hall; Royal Opera House, London
The singular violin-cello duo turn music into exhilarating conversation. And the father of all Germonts dazzles at Covent Garden
Skirts flowing, instruments held aloft, feet jingling in bell slippers, stamping heels and toes, they bounded on to the stage of Queen Elizabeth Hall with whooping calls to action. The violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja and the cellist Sol Gabetta made the kind of arresting entry that they alone can carry off, setting the mood for a daring, energetic evening of duos: no other instruments to add variety or colour, for none were needed. These two star players turn music into conversation, fast, ironic, teasing and empathic. Having landed, they burst straight into Leclair’s Tambourin in C, a rowdy 18th-century stomp that in other hands can sound all too refined (it was so characterful in theirs, I didn’t recognise it as a work I already knew).
The Moldovan-Austrian Kopatchinskaja, renowned for her independent spirit, can do anything, technically, and does: from a breathy, almost inaudible whisper that makes her violin sound like a rustic flute, to the fat, clawing rasp she creates as she digs her bow into the bottom string, as if determined to saw through it. She examines the component parts of everything she plays and puts it all together in her own irrepressible way, always faithful to the original but not afraid to provoke.