REIMAGINATION with violinist SADIE FIELDS & pianist KEN GEE

Violinist SADIE FIELDS returns from Edinburgh, Scotland, to join her duo partner/pianist KEN GEE for a Guelph Musicfest ENCORE concert at the Guelph Youth Music Centre.

In 1935, the violinist Fritz Kreisler admitted something he’d hidden for decades: several “long-lost” Baroque pieces he’d been performing, including tonight’s Sicilienne et Rigaudon, supposedly “in the style of Francoeur”, were his own invention all along. His response to the outcry: “The name changes, the value remains.”

That question — what changes when we look back and remake something — runs through the whole programme. De Falla turns Spanish folksong into the concert hall; Tartini channels operatic tragedy into the violin; Vitali’s modest original becomes Romantic grandeur in Ferdinand David’s hands; Schnittke plays knowingly with Baroque forms two centuries later.

The evening closes with Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending, no longer reimagining a style, but a poem, rising above everything that came before it