Joshua Bell has been playing John Corigliano's Violin Sonata on recital programs for several years now. Bell once met Corigliano at a social event and discussed the possibility of having the composer coach him on the work, but their schedules never meshed so that could happen. Last fall, Corigliano learned that Bell would soon perform the sonata in New York, and the composer decided to needle the violinist a bit. "I said to him, 'Josh, I'm finally going to hear you,'" Corigliano recalled in an October phone interview, "and he said, 'Oh, God, I've got to start practicing.'"
Most musicians would love to have a chance to discuss, say, one of Beethoven's sonatas with its author. On a purely academic level, Bell might enjoy that, too. But performances are another matter. "Luckily," Bell said when I spoke to him a week and a half later, "when you play Beethoven, you don't have to worry about the composer listening to you." It was odd to hear Bell express such trepidation, however, when he and Corigliano had spent a good deal of time the previous year collaborating on Francois Girard's film The Red Violin. Corigliano composed the film score, while Bell played all of the violin solos. The $15 million film had its US premiere on June 11, its soundtrack recording having already been released by Sony Classical almost a month earlier.
Bell jumped at the chance to work on the film, primarily out of admiration for Corigliano. "He's very particular about everything he writes", Bell said. "Some modern composers just seem to slap notes on the page. Corigliano is very aware, in everything he's written, about form. That's why I like his music. Everything makes sense. Everything has a reason for being there."
For his part, Corigliano felt that Bell was the right player for this score. "I can tell you the word I would use: Josh is an aristocrat as a violinist", he said. "It has to do with an approach of elegance. You have to be romantic but not syrupy."
The Red Violin opens in 17th-Century Cremona, where master violin maker Nicolo Bussotti and his wife Anna joyfully await the birth of their first child. Bussotti plans to craft his greatest instrument in celebration, but Anna dies in childbirth. Undeterred, Bussotti decides that the violin will be Anna's memorial. To that end, he mixes some of her blood into the instrument's varnish, thus generating its nickname. The film follows the violin through a number of owners' hands over more than 300 years, with settings taking in Vienna, Oxford, Shanghai, and Montreal. Throughout the tale, Anna's spirit mystically hovers about the violin and even influences its ultimate fate.
Most film scores are hurriedly composed after principal photography is completed. In this case, though, several pieces had to be created in advance. "I wrote a chaconne of seven chords, a theme, and a series of seven etudes", Corigliano explained. "I had to write this music before filming began, because all of the etudes are supposedly played live."
As might be imagined, the etudes played at various points in the film, while original, had to reflect the musical sensibilities of different time periods. Bell said some of it reminded him of Vivaldi, while other parts resembled Paganini, and that's where Corigliano's oftnoted talent for pastiche came in handy. "He's actually one of the few composers around today who can really carry that off", Bell said.
Noting that the movie risked seeming episodic or discursive, Corigliano sought a means of unifying it with his score. "All of the etudes are derived from Anna's theme", he says-a haunting lullaby-cum-requiem first heard from a wordless soprano but soon taken up by a solo violin.
The actual shooting of the film kept Bell busy. "It was a fun experience", he says. "The director and I became friends. He's not much older than I am. I told him, 'I want to be involved in any way possible.'"  Any way possible turned out to mean not only playing all of the score's solos, but coaching actors in how to fake their violin-playing scenes, and even serving as body double for close-up performance shots.
Meanwhile, Corigliano had little to do but to sit around waiting for the final edited print, when he could begin to write the connective underscoring. The composer did agree to create a concert work for violin and orchestra, derived from the material he wrote before the filming. This would not-indeed, could not be a compilation from the score, however, as that had yet to be composed. The concert piece was intended for performance in connection with the film's release, but scheduling problems delayed the movie, while The Red Violin: Chaconne for Violin and Orchestra premiered as far back as November 1997, and Bell has already played it in several cities.
I wondered aloud to Corigliano whether he had some special feeling for the chaconne form, as he also used it in the slow movement of his Symphony No. 1 of 1990. "The thing about a chaconne is relentlessness", he said. "You feel this march. It becomes relentless when you have to base everything on this." In the symphony in particular, he notes, "It's like a single line that gets more and more intense."
When filming of The Red Violin was complete, Corigliano continued his quest for unity as he wrote the main score, developing Anna's theme symphonically as the film progressed "It needed a musical glue to hold together this vast panorama." He even looked back on his chaconne for thematic and scoring ideas, though he makes it clear that the film score and the concert piece are different works that merely share some melodic material. Home listeners can readily compare the two, since the soundtrack recording includes the chaconne as a filler. In both cases, Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts the Philharmonia Orchestra.
But this story isn't over yet. By the time I spoke with Corigliano, rumors had begun to circulate that he might be considering developing an all out violin concerto from the chaconne, and I wouldn't have felt like much of a reporter if I hadn't collared him about the matter. "I was never going to write a violin concerto because there are so many great ones", he said. Instead, he had chosen to write such pieces for instruments whose repertory was more limited. "I also felt that everything that could be done with the violin had been done by the time of Paganini. Then, too, there have been no significant changes in the violin's mechanism recently, as in other instruments." He admitted to changing his mind after creating the chaconne, however. "I said, well, look, now that I've got 18 minutes, I've got enough that I can add other movements."
Given Bell's success in performing for the film, Corigliano wouldn't mind having the violinist take up the concerto when it's completed: "Bell is the kind of violinist that I like to write for. I don't do this consciously. I never studied the violin, but I feel what fits because I listened to my father play it from the day I was born." (Corigliano's father, for the uninitiated, was for many years concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic.)
Still, Corigliano proceeds with caution, planning to use the same recipe he did for the chaconne-"I was trying to be very careful in this piece so that, while the orchestra was full of fire, it never covered the violin." But that doesn't mean he decided to forego bravura passages: "You have to battle, because that's part of the excitement."
Bell, informed of Corigliano's plans, reacted jubilantly. "I would love that! It was my goal all along-to get a full concerto." That's a far cry from the young man who was so nervous about Corigliano hearing him play a mere sonata.