Balanced Busyness
By Kyle MacMillan
James Ehnes is certainly thrilled to be adding, in 2023–24, three more ensembles to the list of elite orchestras with which he has collaborated—the Israel Philharmonic, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, and Zurich’s Tonhalle Orchestra. But the famed Canadian violinist is just as happy to be returning for his second season as artistic partner with the far less widely known Artis-Naples in Florida. The multidisciplinary organization encompasses the Naples Philharmonic, with which he will collaborate several times during the season, including concerts serving as both soloist and leader.
Photo: Benjamin Ealovega
“As far as the ‘prestige’ of a particular engagement, I think the nicest thing about the business is that any night can be a really special night, and that really doesn’t have so much to do with where it is or how fancy the engagement might look on paper. Of course, playing with some of these great orchestras, they’re likely to be wonderful artistic experiences, but all the others can be too,” he said from Norway, where he was working on a recording with the Bergen Philharmonic.
On September 5, Ehnes will join the Chicago-based Music of the Baroque and Dame Jane Glover, who returns for her 21st season as music director, as soloist in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 3. He has appeared four times at the Ravinia Festival, but this visit will be his first since 2013 when he performed two French works with conductor James Conlon and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. “I love playing in the Pavilion at Ravinia, but I’ve never played in the Martin Theatre, so this is going to be something new, different, and exciting,” he said.
Photo: Carlin Ma
The 47-year-old violinist appeared as a soloist with Glover at the Aspen Music Festival in 2021 in the Beethoven Violin Concerto. “I just found her music-making to be so natural and so enjoyable to play with, so I’m really looking forward to being with her again,” he said. It so happens that Ehnes’s birthday coincides with that of Mozart, so he marked his 30th birthday in 2006 by joining the worldwide celebration of the 250th anniversary of the celebrated composer’s birth with an album of Mozart’s five violin concertos on the Onyx label. He organized the undertaking himself, putting together what he called a “hand-picked orchestra” and setting up the recording session in Toronto. “It was kind of a crazy project—an enormous amount of work to put together logistically, but I loved it, and I’ve remained very proud of that,” Ehnes said. As he does sometimes in situations that feel appropriate, he led the performances from the violin. “It was a small-enough group that it felt very ‘chamber-music-y’ and was not really in need of a conductor per se,” he said.
Ehnes’s career got a big lift early on from a competition—but not in the usual way. He quickly took to the violin after beginning lessons when he was 5 and later entered little-recognized regional competitions around Canada as a way to secure valuable performance opportunities. One such contest provided an unexpected but decidedly crucial connection—an event sponsored by the Women’s Musical Club of Toronto that he won when he was 15. “It’s not like the Tchaikovsky Competition,” Ehnes said with a laugh, referring to the famed international contest held every four years in Russia.
James Ehnes in 1993, the year he began studies at Juilliard, with Walter Homburger [Photo: Women’s Musical Club of Toronto]
But it turned out that the husband of the club’s board chair happened to be Walter Homberger, a legendary Canadian impresario (who died in 2019 at 95). He served as managing director of the Toronto Symphony for 25 years and was the first manager of such ennobled artists as Glenn Gould and Louis Lortie. Homberger guided Ehnes in the early years of his career, introducing him to conductors and other key figures in the classical world and helping him get acclimated to the music business. “He took me under his wing,” Ehnes said, “and we became very close. He was like family.” The violinist went on to The Juilliard School, graduating in 1997, by which time his performing career was already well underway.
A major recent career milestone came in 2021, when Gramophone magazine named Ehnes its Artist of the Year. The award honored both the final installment in a series of albums featuring the complete set of Beethoven violin sonatas and, more important, the first of two recordings that the violinist produced at home in his living room (Ehnes lives in Florida) in 2020 with recording equipment he purchased during the COVID-19 shutdown. “That was a total gamble, that project, because I was desperate to do something like a lot of people were,” he said. He first posted his at-home performances on his website as videos, combining Eugene Ysaÿe’s six sonatas for solo violin and J.S. Bach’s six sonatas and partitas for solo violin into six sessions, and then divided them into two subsequent recordings that were released on the Onyx label in 2021.
“Can you think of another artist who, during that already-bizarre period of isolation, routinely napped during the day in order to spend the night playing their instrument all alone in semi-darkness? I can’t. And the result is a recording of an emotional intensity that I think would be hard to replicate in ‘normal’ recording circumstances, even given the power and punch of these works,” wrote Charlotte Gardner in Gramophone about Ehnes’s Ysaÿe album.
While Ehnes does spend much of his time doing the kinds of things expected of a major soloist, namely performing with orchestras and recitals, he also devotes an uncommon amount to chamber music. About a dozen years ago, he began performing string quartets with three friends—he met the second violinist of the group at music camp when he was 13—because he wanted to spend time with the repertoire for that combination. “I didn’t feel I was ever going to really know the Beethoven quartets and [Béla] Bartók quartets without getting inside them, so to speak, getting under the hood,” he said. From their very first rehearsals, the musicians realized that they wanted to collaborate regularly. At first, the foursome performed without a name, but presenters insisted they come up with something before a European tour, and the musicians dubbed it the Ehnes Quartet. “We’ve had a couple of changes [over the years],” the violinist said, referring to switches in violist and cellist, “but all the people who’ve ever played in it are old friends.” The group continues to perform 12–20 concerts a year.
Ehnes with pianist Steven Osborne and cellist Alisa Weilerstein at the 2023 Seattle Chamber Music Festival [Photo: Jenna Poppe]
Since 2012, Ehnes has also served as artistic director of the Seattle Chamber Music Society, a job that provides him some of the “most fun stuff” he does each season. In addition to planning the group’s two-week winter and four-week summer festivals and other administrative duties, he’s also a regular performer. In July, for example, he appeared in nine of the society’s 12 main-series concerts. The group’s previous artistic director invited him to participate in the festival in 1995 when he was just 19 and still a student at Juilliard. “I haven’t missed a summer since,” he said.
Ehnes exudes a kind of Zen-line sense of calm and contentment as he talks about the artistic balance he has managed to achieve. As he makes clear, it has little to do with chasing the kind of career that someone might want when he or she is 20—one big-name venue or orchestra after another. “For me,” he said, “the biggest goal and the biggest indicator of success is if you can look at your schedule for a coming season and see a compelling reason for everything that is on it and a reason to be excited about it. And it doesn’t always have to be the same reason week to week.” ■
Kyle MacMillan served as classical music critic for the Denver Post from 2000 through 2011. He currently freelances in Chicago, writing for such publications and websites as the Chicago Sun-Times, Early Music America, Opera News, and Classical Voice of North America.