[Image: Nicola Benedetti and friend. Photo by Simon Fowler.]

Violinist Nicola Benedetti, currently all of age 26, has been rocking critics and audiences back on their heels for nearly two decades. From Wikipedia:

She started learning to play the violin at the age of four. At age eight, she became the leader of the National Children’s Orchestra of Great Britain. By the age of nine, she had already passed the eight grades of musical examinations while attending the independent Wellington School, Ayr, and in September 1997 began to study at the Yehudi Menuhin School for young musicians under Lord Menuhin and Natasha Boyarskaya in rural Surrey, England…

At the end of 2004, she agreed to a £1m six-album recording contract with Deutsche Grammophon/Universal Music Group Classics and Jazz.

Of course, it can’t hurt that she’s photogenic, evidently very pleasant-natured and mature, and dedicated to various philanthropic causes. But the only thing that counts, really, is what happens when she raises the violin to her chin, and her bow to the violin. (Which violin is a 1717 Stradivarius, reportedly worth some $10 million.)

Here she performs the three movements of a concerto by Antonio Vivaldi. The digital liner notes (by Michael Talbot) which accompany this album, Italia, say:

This exuberant violin concerto entitled “Grosso Mogul” is probably from the late 1710s. Vivaldi experts puzzle over the significance of its title. “Grand Mogul” refers to the contemporary ruler of India or his territory, but this is not a descriptive concerto. My guess is that it was played by Vivaldi during the performance of an opera set in India. Like a few other “theatre” concertos, it has demanding cadenzas in each of the outer movements…

The D major Concerto with the title “Grosso Mogul” offers a wonderful opportunity for “extreme” violin-playing, particularly in its long, fully written-out cadenzas. It has nearly the same name as a Vivaldi flute concerto (“Il Gran Mogol”) that came to light only recently in the National Archives of Scotland, but is an entirely unrelated work. Benedetti comments on the slow movement: “You’ll be shocked when you hear it! It sounds like a mixture between Indian classical music and gypsy violin improvisation, yet within the Italian Baroque style. It’s maybe the most unusual movement of all.”

Of all genres of music, I’m least qualified (amateur that I am) to comment knowledgeably on classical (from Italy, India, or anywhere else). I can only fall back on the classic excuse of Philistines since, well, I guess since Old Testament times: …but I know what I like. I could listen to music like this for hours and lose — happily — all sense of the passage of time.

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Aside: Benedetti will be performing performed here in February 2014, as a part of the big local university’s annual arts festival. We probably won’t didn’t attend, alas. Still, whatever else you can say about recorded music, digital or otherwise, I’m very glad it’s an option!