Baroque violinist Pavlo Beznosiuk will bring the audience on an emotional journey with the Avison Ensemble at the Early Music Festival in Cork, he tells Arminta Wallace.
Most people who take an interest in the world of period instruments are aware that Ireland is well up to speed in this particular musical department, with various ensembles performing here on a regular basis. But they might not be aware that one of the major players in the early music field - the baroque violinist Pavlo Beznosiuk - is Irish. Well, Ukrainian-Irish. Or is he?
"Oh, yes," he says, on the phone from his London home. "At the end of the second World War, my dad was in a huge camp in Rimini along with about 15,000 other members of the Ukrainian Free Army. He was released in 1947 and got on a boat which was probably heading towards New York. But he got off in Southampton, where he was basically - well, not a prisoner, but a refugee working on the land on a farm in Lincolnshire.
"He was eventually released through a Canadian society of Ukrainians. I don't know what the name of the organisation was, but scholarships were made available, in his case for University College Galway. Of course he jumped at the chance, and went and did his degree in chemical engineering in Galway.
"Then he got a job and met my mother, who was from Galway, and was a secretary in this company he worked for. They got married and came to England - first to Sheffield and then, in 1955, to London. It wasn't the most economically vibrant time in Ireland then. Unlike now, of course."
A single childhood trip to Ireland stands out in Beznosiuk's memory. "We all trooped over - took the ferry to Holyhead, and a train ride across Ireland. I have very fond memories of that," he says. Otherwise, his visits to Ireland have been mostly of a musical nature.
In the 1980s, he came several times to play at the Kilkenny Festival; this month he comes to St Fin Barre's Cathedral, Cork, to perform what he calls "a 'darkness into light'-type programme" with the Avison Ensemble, in the opening concert of the East Cork Early Music Festival.
"We start with Vivaldi in minor keys," he says. "Then comes Bach's Cantata 54, which is pretty cautionary stuff - the wages of sin is death and all that: bleak, quite stern music - and then we finish up with the sixth Brandenburg concerto, which is all bright sunlight and the joy of that rollicking finale."
The soloists for this particular gig will be the viola da gamba player Sarah Cunningham - who is also the festival's artistic director - and the countertenor James Bowman, still singing after a lengthy and stellar career in early music.
"What's great about James is the quality of his voice. It's like milk and honey," says Beznosiuk. "But it's not just pretty. The counter-tenor voice can fall into the trap of concentrating on just sheer beauty of sound; James he seems to get to the emotional core of whatever he's singing all the time, and that's what marks him out."
Every musician who works with period instruments has a story about how they got interested in what used to be called "authentic" performance style. As a young violinist, Beznosiuk says he was dragged along to early music concerts by his sister Lisa, now a successful flautist - and to begin with, he wasn't impressed.
"She went to the Guildhall School in London in the mid-1970s," he says. "It was a sort of hotbed of early music, a revolutionary movement which had almost hippy connotations back then. It took me a while to get it - the whole period instrument thing." Does he remember what changed his mind? "Well, there were two things," he says. "The first was that I heard Monica Huggett play. She was the first baroque fiddle player to convince me that you could make a very beautiful sound and - dare I say it? - play in tune.
"Things have come a long way since the 1970s, of course," he adds. "But she was the first player I heard who made me think, 'Ah. I'm beginning to understand this'. That was one thing. Then I went to a concert of medieval music - I think it was Carmina Burana with Philip Pickett and the New London Consort - and I started getting into medieval drone and monophonic music, and the improv side of things."
Both he and his sister kept up both modern and early aspects of their performance style and have just recorded a CD of Mozart flute quartets together. Beznosiuk has worked extensively with the London Symphony Orchestra and other large musical groups. But his first love is the baroque repertoire and, having led and directed numerous period instrument ensembles including The Academy of Ancient Music, the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, he admits that his baroque interests "sort of took over in the end".
One of his most successful recent projects, for example, has been the recording and performance of Biber's "Rosary" sonatas. What drew him to these highly meditative - and fearsomely difficult - pieces by the 17th-century violin virtuoso? "The emotional core of the music is just so powerful," he says. "I was looking for something to do which doesn't get done that often. They've been recorded several times down the years, obviously, but I also wanted to put a new twist on it. So I put readings, which I found in a rosary psalter at the British Museum and which are done on the CD by the actor Timothy West, alongside the music."
The resulting combination is - as a quick trip to www.magnatunes.com, where you can listen to and download them, will verify - something pretty special. "The reaction of audiences when we've done the full cycle in concert with an actor has been amazing," says Beznosiuk. If his take on Bach and Vivaldi is equally uplifting, the audience in Cork is in for quite a treat.
