Arts Features

The popular image of the classical virtuoso—a contorted figure in formal dress, hunched over a violin or a piano and flailing away as if possessed—was established by such 19th-century showmen as Niccolò Paganini and Franz Liszt, and it still holds sway today. But for cellist Frances-Marie Uitti, the mad-maestro stereotype is only one way of displaying virtuosity in a musical world that is rapidly opening to other modes of excellence.

"One can be a virtuoso in concentration, or a virtuoso in slow, quiet playing," she says, reached via Skype from her Amsterdam home. "One can also be a virtuoso in very fast playing-the kind of normal stuff that we expect, loud and fast.

"Virtuosity can also deal with inventiveness," she adds. "So I think there's many, many, many different colours of virtuosity."

The Chicago-born musician modestly refrains from claiming that she's a virtuoso in just about every possible sense of the word, but she is. And she's even invented some new means of expression that are all her own—including playing the cello with two bows, a radical technique that can make a Uitti solo performance sound as rich as a string quartet.

So it's apt that she's one of the featured artists in Solus-The Art of Solo Virtuosity. The Vancouver New Music Festival runs at the Scotiabank Dance Centre through Saturday (October 25), and with performers such as bass clarinetist Lori Freedman, extreme vocalist Jaap Blonk, and Vancouver-based flutist Mark Takeshi McGregor onboard, it's an extraordinary survey of innovators.

Uitti notes that her own performance—at the Dance Centre tonight (October 23)—is something of an overview of her career.

"I'm doing a program with many, many different kinds of playing, of colour," she says. On the bill will be at least one work by Uitti's mentor, the late Giacinto Scelsi, whose shimmering, meditative sonorities are a perfect fit for her "ruminative" side. But she'll also explore an "absolutely fabulous, insanely difficult" piece for amplified cello, penned by the Welsh composer Richard Barrett, along with pieces by Guus Janssen and György Kurtág. And local listeners will be particularly interested in hearing the Canadian debut of The Ecstasy of St. Theresa, penned for Uitti by Vancouver composer Rodney Sharman.

"He wanted to use my voice in it, so I'm speaking some of her ecstatic text," the cellist explains. "But I wouldn't say that the piece itself is a religious piece. Of course she's speaking about her vision of God and all of that, but her experience is physical. It's a physical ecstasy that she experiences in her mysticism; she has visions, and the visions carry her into physical, bodily experiences. Orgasmic, if you wish, although I hate to use that word; it's become so vulgar. But it's the height of spiritual sensuality. Maybe that's the way to say it."

Uitti sounds more than pleased with the way the work turned out. "On the outside, it might seem like ‘My gosh, this work is simple!' " she notes. "But it's not at all. To really play it beautifully is extremely hard, and it makes use of the two-bow technique in a very rich way."

She adds that her explorations of extended technique recently led her into another expression of virtuosity: bow and instrument design. "I played for 20 years with two normal bows, and then I decided ‘This is really stupid; there's got to be better solutions to get a better sound,' " she explains. "And, just wouldn't you know, across the canal from me in Amsterdam is a bowmaker, Andreas Grütter, and he's wonderful. Every Monday night he hosts a bow-building class, so I've been going for five years now and I have about six or seven different prototypes."

Cellists, in particular, might want to play close attention to her bows, although Uitti cautions that she doesn't want luthiers to examine them too closely. "It's not quite out, so I'm not showing it to people," she says of her design. "I mean, I play with it, but I'm not saying ‘This is it; copy it.' In fact, I'd be pretty upset if people did, because I want to finish it—and then of course I'll give it away to everyone."

And there's another aspect of the new virtuoso: generosity. Unlike some virtuosos of the past, today's performers don't hoard their secrets; knowing that real artistry is a rare and endangered thing makes them eager to share.

"What virtuoso really means is ‘virtuous'," says Uitti, laughing. "It comes from the Italian word for ‘good', for something that is positive. It became a little bit corrupted with Paganini and those boys, but that original meaning's still there."