Cannon

I heard Maxim Vengerov today playing Paganini's violin, the Cannon ("Il Cannone"). Exciting! Paganini's violin!

The music was not very typical of what one might maybe associate with Paganini - a Mozart Adagio, a Beethoven sonata, and a Paganini piece, but a slow one with no pyrotechnics. For an encore he played the last movement of Paganini's B minor concerto - that's the La Campanella movement, with the little bell in it (triangle in the orchestral version). There was a special moment in this piece. Let me tell you about it.

In violin-playing, "left-hand pizzicato" means the hand that holds down the notes actually plucks the string on its own. You hold down a note and the next finger up can pluck the string so we hear the note - good for pretending you are two violinists at the same time, because you can carry on playing in the normal way with the bow on another string!

An effective technique is to do a little run of these in rapid succession: left hand holds down fingers 4321 on the fingerboard, then quickly takes them off with the plucking action. Give the first note a start with the bow (we hear the note held down by the fourth finger), 4th finger plucks the note held by 3rd finger, 3rd finger plucks the note held by second finger, second finger plucks note held by first finger, first finger plucks the open string. This happens FAST, in a downward scale, yakatakaTA! TakatakaPA! BRRRRRRump!

There was one of those in the La Campanella performance - just one. It was so loud. The sound jumped into the hall, quite different from the sounds of the rest of the concert. Then I had a glimpse of what Paganini might have sounded like. So many of his sounds must have been like that - supernaturally strange and unlike a violin.

So there was just one moment like this. But five notes, on Paganini's violin, can be a lot. And that's probably the closest I'll get to hearing him live.

Now I have a sound to think of - and there are a lot of Liszt piano pieces inspired by Paganini that need us to know about extraordinary sounds like that. So, good!