Baroque violinist Lina Tur Bonet, ‘Kate Bush of early music’, brings Musica Alchemica to Perth Concert Hall

Baroque violin virtuoso Lina Tur Bonet laughs at her billing as the “Kate Bush of early music” on a national tour with Musica Viva this month. “It’s not the first time, and I find it very, very funny,” the Spanish maestra says. “I love Kate Bush. Maybe because of the creativity.” The comparison perhaps refers to Bush’s channelling of classical themes in popular music, reflecting Tur Bonet’s success in reviving some of the earliest modern works with her hand-picked quartet, Musica Alchemica. “It’s true that I love classical music but I also love the way of actual musicians, and maybe this is something people can recognise in my music,” she says. Her art sits somewhere between ancient and modern practice, but she steers clear of outright reinvention. “I am still, let’s say, a traditional player,” she said. “The important thing for me is to create again the contact with the audience, that in the 19th century and the 20th century sometimes is broken because of the big scenarios and this kind of going to a concert like going to the church that we have sometimes. “I believe that musicians in the early times, like in the Baroque, were much closer, much more easy-going at the concert. Without doing anything that maybe other artists try to do … maybe I think the audience are intelligent enough to realise or to understand what a musician wants to share and the way he or she wants to share it. “So maybe that’s the point in my vision.” Steeped in classical tradition, Tur Bonet plays a wide range of genres from Baroque to contemporary composition. “I was very lucky to work with really very well-known specialists of all that music,” she says. “With Claudio Abbado, I played for a long time in the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, or under John Eliot Gardiner, or Minkowski or Christie. Last time I was in Australia I was conducted by Daniel Harding. “So I could learn from the tradition, from the best players, the best conductors. But on the other hand it’s true that I’m also interested in all other forms of art, in paintings and theatre and everything, actually, in mode also, in different things. “And also in the music that rock players are doing, and pop players, so the creation of nowadays, and I think this also can be heard in the mix of all those influences.” For this tour she focuses on early music and instruments, with works from the origins of the Western canon through to the high Baroque of the 18th century. “We will begin with some pieces by (Heinrich Ignaz Franz) Biber, who is one of the very first virtuosos of the violin,” she says. “We will play two sonatas by Arcangelo Corelli; these sonatas were made in 1700 and influenced all the music history after that, so everyone wanted to play and to compose in the way of Corelli in these sonatas. “Because of that it’s very important.” Musica Alchemica colleagues Marco Testori (Baroque cello), Giangiacomo Pinardi (archlute) and Kenneth Weiss (harpsichord) will also play compositions by Muffat, Telemann, Piccinini and Westhoff. “Because I have such great colleagues they will also play solo pieces,” Tur Bonet says. “And we will play also a sonata by Schmelzer, which is one of the most beautiful and most virtuoso sonatas of the time.” Distant as that era may be, Tur Bonet is convinced modern audiences will connect with the repertoire. “They love it because it’s also music that has a lot to do with nowadays music,” she says. Musica Alchemica’s first Australian tour covers seven cities starting on Saturday in Canberra, through Sydney then Melbourne to Perth Concert Hall on November 15, then Adelaide, Brisbane, Newcastle and back to Melbourne. “We have a lot to do, but we arrive with a lot of energy and we’re looking very much forward,” Tur Bonet says. “And the music and the audiences are also going to give us the energy we need for that, I’m sure.”