Charlotte Gardner
Cellist Bruno Philippe (second right) performs an all-Vivaldi programme with Ensemble Jupiter at the Saint-Denis Festival in France last year
We’ve all done it as journalists. That is, come up with a clever hypothesis with the makings of an interesting article, only to have it crumble to ashes the moment we begin to do a bit of solid digging. However, that’s not what happened when I began to explore further a trend that I’d been spotting of late among young string players – namely, the rise in the number who are incorporating varying degrees of period performance into their stylistic boxes of tricks, even if they don’t plan to identify primarily as period instrument performers.