Joshua Bell and Academy of St Martin in the Fields Stun Symphony Hall

Joshua Bell showcased the elegance of the violin in a superb performance with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields at Boston’s Symphony Hall on Sunday. Performing four wildly different pieces, the world-renowned musician and the chamber orchestra that he directs unleashed both their technical brilliance and emotional exuberance.

As both the music director of and a violinist in the performance, Bell received a huge round of applause the very moment he appeared on stage holding his 1713 Gibson ex-Huberman Stradivarius violin. He contributed to the first violin section of two symphonies, Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 1 and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 8, and led two pieces for violin and orchestra, Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto and Schumann’s Elegy for Orchestra. Bell also served as conductor throughout, directing the orchestra with his expressive body movements and his bow. Visibly perspiring before the end of the first piece, Bell’s energy dominated and united the ensemble.

Bell’s performance as an instrumentalist was most impressive in Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto. One of the composer’s most renowned pieces, the concerto was famously rejected by violinist Leopold Auer, the piece’s intended dedicatee, for being too technically challenging. For Bell, however, these difficulties provided an opportunity to prove his outstanding skills. He took full advantage of the cadenza in the middle of the first movement, giving a powerful interpretation of this prolonged monologue of melancholy and struggle. The violin’s timbre was captivating, and the shivering high-pitched notes sounded almost like sobs. In the third movement, Bell’s fingers seemed to be flying above the violin, and with each passing second, vastly different sound textures succeeded each other. Bell’s performance exploited the full range of pain, anger, passion, and elegance in Tchaikovsky’s writing.

In Schumann’s Elegy for Orchestra, Bell also stole the show with his delicate interpretation. The short piece was a last-minute substitution for Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins due to a minor injury sustained by violin soloist Pamela Frank, but Bell’s performance sounded as well-rehearsed as it could have possibly been, effortlessly graceful and technically impeccable. Despite its brevity, Bell endowed the piece with a wide range of emotions.

By contrast, the Prokofiev and Beethoven symphonies demonstrated the accord between Bell and the rest of the orchestra. The orchestra did full justice to Prokofiev’s classical, dignified composition. Beethoven’s symphony resounded with joy and power, and the cellos, the brass instruments, and the percussion section gave the piece a weight that the violins alone could not have achieved. The last movement, the weightiest of the four, drew a wide variety of sounds from all the instruments to form a compelling whole.

Widely celebrated as one of the world’s greatest instrumentalists, Bell showed in Sunday’s concert that he is also a charismatic and talented leader. His work with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields showed both his own and the ensemble’s brilliance. Bell and the orchestra’s performances fully merited the three standing ovations that they received from an enthusiastic audience.

—Staff writer Tianxing V. Lan can be reached at tianxing.lan@thecrimson.com.