Chiara Banchini : a pioneer, a stunning (...)

Swiss-born Chiara Banchini is an internationally-renowned baroque violinist. She studied with Corrado Romano, Sandor Wegh and Sigiswald Kuijken (and was one of the original members of La Petite Bande) and for many years has led an intensive career as a solist and teacher.

She taught baroque violin at the Scuola Civica in Milano and at the Centre de Musique Ancienne in Geneva, holds a chair at the Schola Cantorum in Basel. She also gives numerous masterclasses throughout Europe and in North America and in Australia. Many of her former students have become important personalities in the baroque music world. In 1981, Chiara Banchini founded Ensemble 415 which became a reference in baroque world. Chiara Banchini has undertaken a rich variety of projects, as her recordings for Erato, Accent, Astrée and harmonia mundi France attest; beginning in 2002 she will appear o the Zig-Zag Territoires label. Some of her memorable recordings include Corelli’s Opus 5 sonatas with Jesper Christensen and the complete Corelli concerti grossi op 6 with a specially-assembled 40 members orchestra. These records were greeted with enthusiasm and stimulated lively discussion about the early music movement.

Excerpt from an interview with Chiara Banchini by Edouard Bailly for Resmusica.com in October 2003 :

‘By chance I was able to attend masterclasses by Harnoncourt on the Bach cantatas. I must say I was quite stunned to hear them; it was a complete revelation. I said to myself, ‘Of course, he’s right! That’s how this music should be performed.’ After that my conversion took place very quickly, and I soon joined La Petite Bande under Sigiswald Kuijken, with whom I was taking lessons . . . Then I leapfrogged from La Petite Bande to Savall, along with Monica Huggett . ‘. . . I read somewhere that when Tartini died, the funeral eulogy stressed that this great violinist - and the Italians in general - were against musicians ‘who always play everything too fast and too loudly, who have not understood that music is always singing’.

‘A great deal of the energy I invest goes into teaching - because guiding others forces me to call myself into question, and what’s more I enjoy contact with enthusiastic young people who are keen to take up this career. ‘I work a tremendous amount with my pupils. In fact there are bonds of loyalty that are created over a period of years, then they scatter to form their own ensemble, to join other groups or to teach in their turn. And then another generation appears that’s just as promising . . . Ensemble 415 is made up of musicians who are all pupils of mine, and I think I’m not mistaken in saying that Sigiswald Kuijken does more or less the same thing with La Petite Bande; that way you can achieve an orchestra with great cohesion of sound and character.’

“Chiara Banchini takes music and text as its central focus. Her approach involves a whole new phase of learning (including abandoning the chin-rest - the school known as ‘chin off’ - and extensive work on bowing to absorb the subtleties of ‘small-scale articulation’) which makes it possible to reach a proper understanding of the texts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in terms of style and above all of rhetoric.” Amandine Beyer.