Violinist Ehnes plans sonata recital at Norton Museum on Wednesday

If you search on YouTube, you can find violinist James Ehnes and pianist Inon Barnatan playing the Schubert "Fantasy in C" for the Charlottesville Chamber Music Festival in Virginia.

It’s an excellent performance of this beautiful work of young Romanticism, but it was filmed in La Jolla, California, in August 2020 for the Dreamstage online concert platform in the pre-vaccine days of the COVID-19 pandemic. And so all the seats in the auditorium are empty. At the end, the two musicians congratulate themselves in the silence, giving each other five.

It was, as Ehnes says, “really rough” to keep going through lockdown.

“My work dried up in the 2020-21 season from what it had been in the previous years to maybe 15% of what it was,” he said Friday night from Detroit, where he was preparing for a concert with his Ehnes Quartet. “And much of that work was stuff that was simply streamed, there was no live audience.

“But as hard as it was for me, it was harder for people that are more at the beginning of their careers. I was lucky to have already been established,” he said.

A bright spot in the coronavirus gloom came from the Lone Star State.

“Thank God for Texas. The orchestras in Houston and Dallas just kept playing through the whole thing,” Ehnes said. “I played three concerts with the Houston Symphony and four concerts with the Dallas Symphony. I did seven orchestral performances in Texas and seven in the entire rest of the world.

“In a normal season, where I would play 75 or 80 concerto dates, I played 14. But a lot of wonderful, gifted people in need of work played two, or none,” he said.

Although recent news about the omicron variant of the coronavirus, particularly in Europe, is raising fresh concern about a difficult winter ahead, so far the concert season for 2021-22 is moving forward uninterrupted. On Wednesday evening at the Norton Museum of Art, Ehnes and Barnatan, an Israeli-born pianist, are planning to play the Schubert "Fantasy" and sonatas by Fauré and Beethoven for a live audience.

It’s the second concert in the Chamber Music Society of Palm Beach’s current season, which opened last month with a program at The Breakers featuring a sextet by Dohnanyi and the Brahms Horn Trio. The three pieces on Ehnes’ program present significant challenges and rewards for performers and audiences.

The Beethoven Sonata No. 8 (in G, Op. 30, No. 3) was written at the same time the composer realized that his growing deafness was going to be a permanent condition, leading him to contemplate suicide. But this muscular, delightful sonata doesn’t reflect that.

Ehnes said it’s one of the first of the 10 Beethoven violin sonatas that he got to know deeply. “It’s been with me for so many decades now. Every time I come back to it, it holds a lot of personal memories as well.”

The two instruments in the sonata “are quite often written to be very imitative, and they are fundamentally such different instruments,” he said. “The piano parts of the Beethoven violin sonatas have elements that are more challenging than (his) piano sonatas because often he will want the piano to imitate violinistic phrasing, things like bow changes that are not a part of piano technique. Whereas the violin part will be much more challenging because the figurations are pianistic rather than violinistic.”

Despite those hurdles, it’s still a “wonderful piece,” he said, and well-written enough to make its impact just by following Beethoven’s basic instructions. “But I think to really play it with the proper interplay between instruments requires an incredible delicacy and refinement of technique,” he said.

Also on the program is the first of two violin sonatas by the great French Romantic composer Gabriel Fauré, written early in his career in 1876. (His second would not appear until 1916, in the middle of World War I.)

“When I think of the Fauré A major sonata, I just think of beauty. It’s an extremely beautiful piece,” Ehnes said. “The beauty of the writing is virtuosic in itself. You just tip your cap to someone who could come up with something that is so pleasurable to listen to.”

The sonata (which is his Op. 13) is replete with the subtle, elegant language unique to Fauré, in which a Bach-influenced purity of line and harmony are allied with a deeply sensual melodic directness. And while the piano part ranges widely over the keyboard (Fauré was a fine pianist), the violin part is deceptively straightforward.

“Among violin students it’s often underestimated because it doesn’t look like a particularly note-y part,” he said. “But in order to sustain those lines and to shape the piece in a way that creates a whole rather than a collection of lovely moments, that is indeed hard.”

Wednesday’s program concludes with the Schubert "Fantasy," composed in December 1827 and premiered at the beginning of 1828, which would be the last year of Schubert’s tragically short life. Already suffering from syphilis, he died of typhoid fever in November of that year at only 31.

"This piece is so special. When one wants to hear the Schubert ‘Fantasy,’ there’s really nothing else that will quite do,” Ehnes said.

Schubert was an able pianist, but not a virtuoso, and he had played violin as a member of his family’s string quartet. He is often criticized for his sometimes-awkward, non-idiomatic writing for both instruments.

“In his late career, it seems that he wrote things often with an idea of what might be possible for a great virtuoso. He didn’t necessarily write for posterity in the same way that Beethoven did because he didn’t have the luxury of that success,” Ehnes said.

Schubert was striving for something else, and it’s worth getting the ungratefully written moments of the piece to bring out what he was after, he said.

“A really successful performance is kind of transcendent. There’s nothing in the repertory that’s quite like it,” he said. “He wrote just a little differently for the violin than anybody else.”

A native of Brandon, Manitoba, Ehnes, 45, received the Order of Canada in 2010. But he has lived in the Tampa-area city of Ellenton for 20 years with his wife and two children. He has appeared with the Chamber Society of Palm Beach previously with his quartet, and is a frequent visitor to South Florida concert stages.

"I feel very grateful that the fall season was really busy for me, really packed. I was able to stay active,” he said, but has learned from the COVID experience not to lock in concert dates well in advance as he used to do.

“But I’m hoping for the best, for the very obvious reasons that we want everyone to be safe and healthy,” he said. “And for the very selfish reasons that I hope to keep playing because I love it. I love my job, and I feel lucky to have it.”

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If you go

James Ehnes and Inon Barnatan will perform at 7 p.m. Wednesday at the Norton Museum of Art. A reception for members of the Chamber Music Society of Palm Beach begins at 6 p.m.

Tickets are $75. Visit www.cmspb.org or call 561-379-6773.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Daily News: Violinist Ehnes plans recital at Norton Museum