‘Celebrating the violin in its different guises’ - Madeleine Mitchell on the Red Violin festival

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‘Where there are violins there is hope’ (from The Violins of Hope) 

I founded the Red Violin festival with Lord Menuhin as Patron in 1997. Inspired by Le Violon Rouge paintings by Pougny, Dufy and others, I had the idea to bring everything together across the arts celebrating the violin in its different guises. We had a very successful festival throughout Cardiff in partnership with the BBC and many other organisations over ten days. The following year the film The Red Violin came out so we showed that in the second festival in 2007.

Five years ago I gave a recital in the University of Leeds International Concert Season and Nicholas Snowman OBE (former CEO Southbank Centre), who attended, introduced me to Michael Beverley, former chairman of Opera North. I told him about the Red Violin festival and he said ‘why don’t we do it in Leeds?’ With the pandemic and the Leeds Town Hall being closed, it’s taken five years before coming to fruition, but we’re delighted that many of the arts organisations in the city have come on board in partnership and that Lord Michael Berkeley agreed to be our president. 

Menuhin said to me ‘the violin is the instrument of the gypsies or displaced people because you can take it with you’. I’m glad to have a concert with a violinist of Roma origin, playing both gypsy and jazz inspired music. The violin also enabled people to survive the Holocaust by playing in the orchestra. Some of those instruments were rescued and restored - named ‘The Violins of Hope’ and this is celebrated in the song cycle with strings by American composer Jake Heggie and librettist Gene Scheer: Intonations - Songs from ‘The Violins of Hope’. I got to know Gene Scheer when I studied at the Eastman School of Music as Fulbright/ITT Fellow to the US.

The London Chamber Ensemble with mezzo soprano Siân Griffiths and violinist Chloë Hanslip will give the European premiere in the same concert as music for string quartet by Herbert Howells, with the launch of the London Chamber Ensemble album Howells & Wood Quartets for SOMM. This includes the recently discovered earlier version of Howells’ Quartet ‘In Gloucestershire’ 1920, thought lost and his Luchinushka and Chosen Tune, two of his Three Pieces for violin and piano (1917) which I have arranged for string quartet. 

What’s new for Red Violin festival are walking tours with violin soundtrack. Dr Rachael Unsworth, who runs Leeds City Walking Tours is also an amateur violinist and will relate music by violinists who played in Leeds including Paganini and Sarasate to places. She’s also introduced me to a fascinating Leeds violinist, George Haddock (1823-1907). His memoirs Some early musical recollections of George Haddock published privately in 1906, give great insight into the burgeoning Leeds musical life in the second part of the 19^th century. Haddock studied with and later became friends with Vieuxtemps and Joachim, owned three Strads, taught Delius and founded the Leeds College of Music (now Leeds Conservatoire). I hope he would have been pleased with our original venture with them - A HundRED Violinists of all ages and levels performing a new five-minute piece by local composer and violinist, James Gerrard in Trinity Centre on Saturday lunchtime on 19 October. 

Also new in this festival is a collaboration with Opera North’s education department, In Harmony, whose tenth anniversary we attended. It’s impressive and poignant how they are filling the gap, enabling children in deprived areas who wouldn’t otherwise be able to learn instruments. Having started violin myself in free shared lessons in a junior school in Romford, Essex and then as a Junior Exhibitioner at the Royal College of Music, paid for by the local authority, this wouldn’t happen now, so this is dear to my heart. My career has come full circle in a way because we’re programming Peter Maxwell Davies for a large group of young violinists to play; my first job was as violinist/violist in Max’s groundbreaking group The Fires of London. 

This time I thought we could feature the Red Violin Caprices for solo violin live before the two showings of the film, The Red Violin. I’m glad to include a talk on the Polish Lithuanian emigré violin virtuoso Felix Yaniewicz by his descendant Josie Dixon. He settled in Britain, playing in Leeds in 1807 and co-founding the Edinburgh Music Festival in 1815. 

The violin is such a versatile instrument. It has been embraced not only in folk and jazz, which I enjoy, but in Indian Classical music. I previously programmed Indian Carnatic Violin and this time we’ve enhanced that by having an evening with both North and South Indian violin in collaboration with Leeds’ South Asian Arts. Leeds International Concert Season were happy to feature the violin in four concerts they programme, from violin and organ to Anglo-French quartets. With the support of the Vaughan Williams Foundation I was able to commission James B.Wilson to write a piece – Love is Sleeping for violin and piano will be premiered on 18 October at the University’s Clothworkers’ Centenary Concert Hall - where the idea for this venture came in 2019 – along with violin duos. And each day the local music shop will display violins for anyone go and see/try/buy. 

In earlier festivals, I didn’t play a concerto. I love the Bruch Violin Concerto no.1 so I’m pleased to have been asked by the Sinfonia of Leeds to join them and their director David Greed, who, for 44 years was leader of the Opera North Orchestra, in the grand finale where he and his son will also perform Vivaldi Double Concerto. I like the fact that this festival celebrates local people as well as being international in flavour. 

I’d like to thank everybody involved in making this festival happen.  

The Red Violin festival in partnership with Leeds International Concert Season, University of Leeds International Concert Series, South Asian Arts, Leeds Conservatoire, In Harmony Opera North, Everyman Cinema, Leeds City Walking Tours, Sinfonia of Leeds, Hobgoblin Music and Leeds Libraries.

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