HOPE – OCTOBER 2, 2021
Click here to view the program book for HOPE, including program notes and artist bios.
Click here for “A More Perfect Union” libretto.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
FATE – DECEMBER 4, 2021
Carlos Simon: Fate Now Conquers
Click here to listen to composer Carlos Simon talk about his piece Fate Now Conquers prior to its premiere with the Philadelphia Orchestra
__________
Béla Bartók: Violin Concerto No. 1
Béla Bartók: BORN – March 25, 1881, Sânnicolau Mare, Romania / DIED – September 26, 1945, New York, NY
Violin Concerto Composed: 1907-1908
World Premiere: May 30, 1958 in Basel, Switzerland
Instrumentation: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, 2 harps and strings
Duration: About 22 minutes
Program Notes: Béla Bartók wrote his First Violin Concerto for his early love, the young violinist Stefi Geyer “as if in a narcotic dream”: he inscribed the words “My Confession” on the front page of the manuscript. The first four notes from the solo violin (a real ʻearwormʼ) was described by the composer himself as the “Stefi motif”. However, with late-Romantic expression, the eager and yearning melody, full of Tristan-like passion, is followed by a free fugato – his love was not returned. The work was written, according to the composer, in “still happy times. Although it was only half happiness”. But Bartók was capable of self-irony: at the beginning of the second movement, which continues on from the first without interruption, the highest note of a cadential upward run in the solo violin is counteracted by a hint of Wagner’s “Tristan chord” in the orchestra. Program notes by Berliner Philharmoniker
The concerto was indeed dedicated to the violinist Stefi Geyer, with whom Bartók was in love. Geyer could not reciprocate Bartók’s feelings and rejected the concerto. It was revived after both Bartók and Geyer had died. Geyer’s copy of the manuscript was bequeathed to Paul Sacher to be performed by him and Hansheinz Schneeberger. The concerto was later championed by David Oistrakh. Acclaimed recordings include Oistrakh with Gennady Rozhdestvensky conducting, as well as versions by Maxim Vengerov and György Pauk.
Soloist
Simone Porter – Violinist (Soloist Bartók Violin Concerto)
Violinist Simone Porter has been recognized as an emerging artist of impassioned energy, interpretive integrity, and vibrant communication. In the past few years she has debuted with the New York Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic; and with a number of renowned conductors, including Stéphane Denève, Gustavo Dudamel, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Nicholas McGegan, Ludovic Morlot, and Donald Runnicles.
Born in 1996, Simone made her professional solo debut at age 10 with the Seattle Symphony and her international debut with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in London at age 13. In March 2015, Simone was named a recipient of an Avery Fisher Career Grant. Highlights of Simone’s 2019/20 season include performing Beethoven with the Colorado Symphony, Mendelssohn with New Jersey Symphony, Brahms with the Pacific Symphony, and the Brahms Double Concerto with the Charlotte Symphony. She also tours extensively throughout the US, including concerts with the Wyoming, Arkansas, Santa Rosa, Amarillo, Pasadena, Fairfax, and Midland Symphonies; the Rochester, Westchester, and Greater Bay Philharmonics; and the Sarasota Orchestra and the Northwest Sinfonietta.
At the invitation of Esa-Pekka Salonen, Simone performed his work ‘Lachen verlernt’ (‘Laughing Unlearnt’), at the New York Philharmonic’s “Foreign Bodies,” a multi-sensory celebration of the work of the composer and conductor. In recent seasons, she has also appeared at the Edinburgh Festival performing Barber under the direction of Stéphane Denève, and at the Mostly Mozart Festival performing Mozart under Louis Langrée. She has also performed with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl with both Nicholas McGegan and Ludovic Morlot, and at Walt Disney Concert Hall with Gustavo Dudamel. Other orchestras with whom she has appeared in recent seasons include the Detroit, Cincinnati, Houston, Seattle, Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, Nashville, Utah, and Baltimore Symphonies, and the Minnesota Orchestra. She also made her Ravinia Festival recital debut, her debut at the Grand Teton Music Festival, and multiple solo performances as a guest artist at the Aspen Music Festival. Internationally, Simone has performed with the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra with Gustavo Dudamel; the Orquestra Sinfônica Brasileira in Rio de Janeiro; the National Symphony Orchestra of Costa Rica; the City Chamber Orchestra of Hong Kong; the Royal Northern Sinfonia; the Milton Keynes City Orchestra in the United Kingdom; and the Opera de Marseilles.
Simone made her Carnegie Zankel Hall debut on the Emmy Award-winning TV show From the Top: Live from Carnegie Hall followed in November 2016 by her debut in Stern Auditorium. In June 2016, her featured performance of music from Schindler’s List with Maestro Gustavo Dudamel and members of the American Youth Symphony was broadcast nationally on the TNT Network as part of the American Film Institute’s Lifetime Achievement Award: A Tribute to John Williams.
Raised in Seattle, Washington, Simone studied with Margaret Pressley as a recipient of the Dorothy Richard Starling Scholarship, and was then admitted into the studio of the renowned pedagogue Robert Lipsett, with whom she studied at the Colburn Conservatory of Music in Los Angeles. Summer studies have included many years at the Aspen Music Festival, Indiana University’s Summer String Academy, and the Schlern International Music Festival in Italy. Simone Porter performs on a 1740 Carlo Bergonzi violin made in Cremona Italy on generous loan from The Master’s University, Santa Clarita, California.
Website: https://www.simoneporterviolin.com/
__________
Johannes Brahms: Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Op. 68
Johannes Brahms: BORN – May 7, 1833. Hamburg, Germany / DIED – April 3, 1897. Vienna, Austria
Symphony No. 1 Composed: Begun in 1855, completed in 1875
World Premiere: The premiere of this symphony, conducted by the composer’s friend Felix Otto Dessoff, occurred on November 4, 1876 in Karlsruhe, then in the Grand Duchy of Baden in the German Empire
Instrumentation: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, and strings
Duration: About 50 minutes
Program Notes: In 1853, Robert Schumann wrote a laudatory article about a 20-year-old composer from Hamburg named Johannes Brahms, whom, Schumann declared, was the heir to Beethoven’s musical legacy. Schumann wrote, “If [Brahms] directs his magic wand where the massed power in chorus and orchestra might lend him their strength, we can look forward to even more wondrous glimpses into the secret world of the spirits.” At the time Schumann’s piece was published, Brahms had composed several chamber pieces and works for piano, but nothing for orchestra. The article brought Brahms to the attention of the musical world, but it also dropped a crushing weight of expectation onto his young shoulders. “I shall never write a symphony! You have no idea how it feels to hear behind you the tramp of a giant like Beethoven,” Brahms grumbled.
Brahms took almost 20 years to complete his first symphony. It is commonly supposed that Brahms’ feelings of intimidation about composing a symphony worthy of the Beethovenian ideal kept him from finishing the symphony more quickly. However, this theory, on its own, does him a disservice. Brahms wanted to take his time, a reflection of the serious regard he felt for the symphony as a genre. “Writing a symphony is no laughing matter,” he remarked.
Brahms began to compose the first movement of his Symphony No. 1 when he was 23, but he was handicapped by his lack of experience composing for an orchestra. Over the next 19 years, as he continued working on his first symphony, Brahms wrote several other orchestral works, including the 1868 German Requiem and his popular Variations on a Theme of Haydn. The enthusiastic response both works received bolstered Brahms’ confidence in his ability to handle orchestral writing. Furthermore, in 1872, Brahms was offered the conductor’s post at Vienna’s Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde (Society of Friends of Music). The opportunity to work directly with an orchestra gave Brahms an invaluable first-hand understanding of how the different sections of an orchestra interact. Finally, 23 years after Schumann’s article first appeared, Brahms premiered his Symphony No. 1 in C Minor. It was worth the wait.
Brahms’ friend and critic, Eduard Hanslick, summed up the feelings of many: “Seldom, if ever, has the entire musical world awaited a composer’s first symphony with such tense anticipation . . . The new symphony is so earnest and complex, so utterly unconcerned with common effects, that it hardly lends itself to quick understanding . . . [but] even the layman will immediately recognize it as one of the most distinctive and magnificent works of the symphonic literature.”
Hanslick’s reference to the symphony’s complexity was a polite way of saying the music was too serious to appeal to the average listener, but Brahms was unconcerned; he was not trying to woo the public with pretty sounds. “My symphony is long and not exactly lovable,” he acknowledged, but it is Brahms’ most emotional and personal musical statement. The symphony is carefully crafted; one can hear Brahms’ compositional thought processes throughout, especially his decision to incorporate several overt references to Beethoven. The moody, portentous atmosphere of the first movement, the short thematic fragments from which Brahms spins out seemingly endless developments, are all hallmarks of Beethoven’s style, as is the choice of C minor, a key closely associated with several of Beethoven’s major works, such as his Symphony No. 5, Egmont Overture, and Piano Concerto No. 3. And yet, despite all these deliberate references to Beethoven, this symphony is not, as conductor Hans von Bülow dubbed it, “Beethoven’s Tenth.”
The voice is distinctly Brahms’, especially in the inner movements. The tender, wistful Andante sostenuto contrasts the brooding power of the opening movement. Brahms weaves a series of dialogues among different sections of the orchestra, and concludes with a duet for solo violin and horn. In the Allegretto Brahms relaxes Beethoven’s frantic scherzo tempos. The pace is relaxed, easy, featuring lilting themes for strings and woodwinds. In the finale, a strong, confident horn proclaims Brahms’ victory over the symphonic demons that may have beset him. Here, Brahms also pays his most direct homage to Beethoven with a majestic theme, first heard in the strings, that closely resembles the “Ode to Joy” melody from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. When a listener remarked on this similarity, Brahms snapped, “Any jackass could see that!” Program notes by Elizabeth Schwartz, a free-lance writer, musician, and music historian based in Portland, OR
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
JOY – MARCH 5, 2022
Jesse Montgomery: Records from a Vanishing City
Click here to listen to composer Jesse Montgomery talk about her piece Records from a Vanishing City prior to its premiere with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra
__________
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: Variations on a Rococo Theme, Op. 33
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: BORN – May 7, 1840, Votkinsk, Russia / DIED – November 6, 1893, Saint Petersburg, Russia
Variations on a Rococo Theme Composed: December 1876
World Premiere: Tchaikovsky wrote this piece for and with the help of Wilhelm Fitzenhagen, a German cellist and fellow-professor at the Moscow Conservatory. Fitzenhagen gave the premiere in Moscow on November 30, 1877, with Nikolai Rubinstein conducting. This was perhaps the only hearing of the Variations as Tchaikovsky wrote the piece, until 1941, when it was played in Moscow without Fitzenhagen’s by-then-standard emendations.
Instrumentation: 2 each of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, and horns, and strings
Duration: About 18 minutes
Program Notes: Though one would not infer it from the music, Tchaikovsky wrote his Variations on a Rococo Theme in grievous depression. His fourth opera, Vakula the Smith, one of the series of works between the Fourth and Fifth symphonies, had just enjoyed what he called “a brilliant failure” at the Mariinsky Theater in Saint Petersburg; Sergei Taneyev had reported from Paris that Jules‑Étienne Pasdeloup had “shamefully bungled” Romeo and Juliet and that the work had not pleased; and he had learned that in Vienna, Hans Richter had had no success with Romeo either and that the feared Eduard Hanslick had written one of his most abusive reviews. All this happened within two weeks at the beginning of December 1876. But Tchaikovsky was learning to escape depression through work. Though ill, he pursued a project begun a couple of months earlier (and to be abandoned soon after), an opera based on Othello, and he rapidly composed the Rococo Variations.
These he wrote for his friend Wilhelm Karl Friedrich Fitzenhagen, then twenty-eight and for the past six years principal cellist of the Orchestra of the Imperial Russian Music Society in Moscow as well as professor at the Imperial Conservatory. Fitzenhagen intervened considerably in the shaping of “his” piece, so much so that we really ought to bill it as being composed by both men. The cellist changed the order of the variations, omitting one altogether, making other cuts and restitchings as he went, and he is responsible for much of the detail in the solo part, actually entering his alterations in Tchaikovsky’s autograph. Tchaikovsky did not explain Fitzenhagen’s role to his publisher, Jürgenson, and the latter wrote to him: “Horrible Fitzenhagen insists on changing your cello piece. He wants to “cello” it up and claims you gave him permission. Good God! Tchaikovsky revu et corrigé par Fitzenhagen!” But Tchaikovsky, in another fit of unsureness about his own work, yielded authority to his German-trained friend and acquiesced in Jürgenson’s publication of the work as recomposed by Fitzenhagen—with piano in 1878 and in full score eleven years later. Moreover, in 1887 Tchaikovsky made sure to send his next piece for cello and orchestra, the Pezzo capriccioso, Opus 62, to Fitzenhagen for vetting.
One can easily argue that Tchaikovsky’s original is better than Fitzenhagen’s recension, yet it is beyond dispute that Fitzenhagen himself enjoyed immense success with this grateful, gracious, and charming piece whenever he played it, and so have most of his successors. The theme, so far as we know, is Tchaikovsky’s own. Its invention and what he builds upon it form one of his most warm-hearted declarations of love to what he perceived as the lost innocence of the eighteenth century. Program Notes by Michael Steinberg, San Francisco Symphony
Soloist
Nicolas Olarte-Hayes – Cellist (Soloist Tchaikovsky Variations on a Rococo Theme)
Recipient of the 2016-2018 Leonore Annenberg Arts Fellowship, cellist Nico Olarte-Hayes has given solo recitals at Lincoln Center and the Neue Galerie in New York City, in Memphis’ Artists Ascending Series and New York’s Young Musician’s Forum, and throughout the Netherlands and Japan. He has played on Live From Lincoln Center (PBS) and The Kennedy Center Honors (CBS) in tribute to violinist Itzhak Perlman, a longtime mentor, and has collaborated frequently with Perlman, most notably in the grand opening gala concert of The Kennedy Center’s Family Theater. Other collaborations include performances with mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves in Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall, pianist Christopher O’Riley in Boston’s Jordan Hall, and violinist Ryu Goto in sold-out tours of Japan and the United States, broadcast on PBS, NPR, and Fuji TV, respectively.
Equally accomplished as a conductor, Nico was recently named winner of the 2015 Vincent C. LaGuardia Conducting Competition, and has served as Music Director of New York’s IconoClassic Opera and Harvard’s Dunster House Opera, leading fully staged productions of Massenet’s Werther and Britten’s Albert Herring. He has led the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, Baltimore Chamber Orchestra, Sofia Festival Orchestra, Bohuslav Martinu Philharmonic, Savaria Symphony Orchestra, Camerata Antonio Soler, and Salzburg Chamber Soloists as a conductor in numerous international workshops, including the Tanglewood Festival Conducting Seminar. In 2016, he led the New World Symphony in a workshop with Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas and served as cover conductor for the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra.
A passionate educator, Nico recently served as Music Director of New York’s East End Youth Orchestra, an intensive workshop in ensemble playing for talented public school students. For many years, he also toured as an ambassador for New York’s Midori and Friends, giving performances for under-served children at inner-city schools, and on the third anniversary of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, was asked by the City of New York to perform at “Ground Zero” for the official memorial on NBC. In recognition of his accomplishments and artistic contributions to his community, Nico was awarded the Jack Kent Cooke Young Artist Award, given a Hispanic Heritage Youth Award, and honored by the Davidson Institute for Talent Development.
Nico was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts and began his musical studies with his mother at the age of three. He completed pre-college studies “with distinction” at The Juilliard School under cellists David Soyer and Harvey Shapiro, and studied for eight years at the Perlman Music Program, Itzhak Perlman’s private academy, under Ronald Leonard. Nico graduated with honors from the Harvard/NEC Joint Program, simultaneously earning an A.B. in Physics from Harvard College, where he studied music with Robert Levin, and his M.M. from the New England Conservatory, where he studied with Laurence Lesser. While at Harvard, Nico coached numerous student groups, performed as soloist with the Bach Society Orchestra, and was Assistant Conductor of the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra. He currently lives in New York City, where he serves on the faculty of Juilliard’s Pre-College Division.
Website: http://www.olarte-hayes.com/
__________
Ludwig Van Beethoven: Symphony No. 7 in A Major, Op. 92
Ludwig Van Beethoven: BORN: December 1770. Bonn, Germany / DIED: March 26, 1827. Vienna, Austria
Symphony No. 7 Composed: 1811-1812
World Premiere: The work was premiered with Beethoven himself conducting in Vienna on December 8, 1813.
Instrumentation: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani and strings
Duration: About 36 minutes
Program Notes: The Seventh Symphony is Beethoven’s last word for quite a few years on the subject of the big style he had been cultivating since the early 1800s. The concert at which the work had its premiere—it was a benefit for Austrian and Bavarian soldiers wounded at the recent Battle of Hanau—was probably the most wildly successful of his career. What caused the excitement was not, however, Opus 92, the new symphony, but Opus 91, Wellington’s Victory, or The Battle of Vitoria, originally written for a mechanical instrument called the Panharmonicon but presented even at this, its first performance, in the version for orchestra. (At Vitoria, in northeast Spain, an army of English, Spanish, and Portuguese troops under the Duke of Wellington defeated the French on June 21, 1813. In the battle of Hanau, that October, Napoleon thrashed the mostly Bavarian army that attempted to block his retreat toward the southwest.)
The Panharmonicon was an invention of Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, whose most enduring contribution to music was the first dependable metronome. Between the Seventh Symphony and Wellington’s Victory, another gadget of Maelzel’s, a mechanical trumpeter, played marches written for the occasion by Dussek and Pleyel. So great was the success that the entire program was repeated later in the month, again in January 1814, and once more in February. To Beethoven’s annoyance, the critic of the Wiener Zeitung referred to the Seventh as having been composed “as a companion piece” to Wellington’s Victory. But the public liked the “companion piece” too, and the composer Louis Spohr, one of the violinists in the orchestra for the whole series of concerts, reports that the second movement was encored each time.
A semi-slow introduction, the largest ever heard in any symphony until then and still one of the largest, defines great harmonic spaces, first A major, then C major (the gently lyric oboe tune), then F major (the same tune on the flute). The excursions to C and F are entered upon with startling bluntness. Obviously Beethoven’s aim is to draw attention not only to these shifts, but to these new harmonic areas, and in fact every one of the symphony’s journeys is foreshadowed here. The material—scales, and melodies that outline common chords—is of reckless simplicity. Gradually, with a delicious feeling for suspense, Beethoven draws the Vivace from the last flickers of the introduction. Having done so, he propels us with fierce energy and speed through one of those movements of his that are dominated by a single propulsive rhythm. The coda, as so often in Beethoven, is virtually another development, and Beethoven heaves it to a tremendous climax by making a crescendo across a tenfold repetition of an obsessive, harmonically off-balance bass.
There is no slow movement. The Allegretto that the first audiences—indeed audiences throughout the nineteenth century—liked so much is relaxed only by comparison with what comes before and after. A subtly unstable wind chord begins and ends the movement. It is a chord of A minor, the home key, but with a “wrong” note—E instead of A—in the bass. When we first hear it, it sets up the “walking” music of the lower strings; when it reappears at the end, it is not so much a conclusion as a slightly eccentric preparation for the F major explosion of the scherzo. That scherzo’s contrasting trio, which may or may not be a quotation of a pilgrims’ hymn, is marked to go “very much less fast,” and ever since Toscanini took it strikingly faster than his colleagues (though still “very much less fast” than the extremely quick music of the movement’s outer sections), conductors, critics, and others have not ceased to argue about just what Beethoven meant—how much less is “very much less”? As in many of the big works of this period in his life, including the Pastoral Symphony, Beethoven makes the journey through the trio and the reprise of the scherzo twice, though with amusing variants.
The finale is fast, too, but the sense of pace is quite different. The scherzo, sharply defined, moves like a superbly controlled machine. The finale carries to an extreme point, unimagined before Beethoven’s day and rarely reached since, a truly wild and swirling motion adumbrated in the first movement. Here, too, Beethoven builds the coda upon an obsessively repeated bass—just a pair of notes grinding away, G-sharp/A at first, then working its way down through chromatic degrees until reaching the dominant, E, and its neighbor, D-sharp, the whole inspired and mad process being spread across fifty-nine measures. Of course, to sound wild it must be orderly, and rhythmic definition is everything, here as in the notoriously difficult first movement. Program Notes by Michael Steinberg, San Francisco Symphony
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
TITANS – APRIL 23, 2022
Robert Schumann: Concerto for Violin in D Minor
Robert Schumann: BORN – June 8,m 1810, Zwickau, Germany / DIED – July 29, 1856, Bonn, Germany
Concerto for Violin Composed: 1853
World Premiere: The piece did not premiere until 1937 and the honor went to German violinist Georg Kulenkampff. Famed violinist Yehudi Menuhin played the American debut shortly thereafter.
Instrumentation: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, and strings
Duration: About 31 minutes
Program Notes: Schumann Violin Concerto, a work buried for nearly a century and recovered — or so the story goes — by a message from the beyond.
In the summer of 1853, the young violinist Joseph Joachim asked a friend, pianist, composer and conductor, Robert Schumann, to write a violin concerto for him. Schumann, though suffering from depression, went into a frenzy of activity, completing the Violin Concerto in D Minor (fully scored for all the different musical parts) within 13 days in late September and early October. Within months, however, the composer attempted suicide and was confined to an asylum until his death two years later at the age of 46.
Neither Joachim nor Schumann’s wife, Clara, nor their young friend Johannes Brahms, thought the piece was good enough. In fact, Clara didn’t like much of what Schumann wrote in those last years, according to Christoph Eschenbach, music director of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C. She was a famous pianist and musical personality and, Eschenbach maintains, she used her influence with the younger Joachim and Brahms to bury the Violin Concerto. “Brahms was easy to convince that she was right, and there is also the story of the love affair between Clara and Brahms,” says Eschenbach, who notes speculation that the alleged love affair might have caused Schumann’s suicide attempt.
The concerto was not performed or published, and it would end up in the Prussian State Library in Berlin, with the proviso that it not be performed for 100 years after the composer’s death. But a grandniece of the violinist for whom the concerto was written had an interest in the occult — as did the Schumanns. Her name was Jelly d’Arányi and she too was a violinist. At a seance, she is said to have received word from the beyond urging her to find and perform an unpublished work for the violin. Who, she asked, is the composer of this work? The dial on the Ouija board is said to have pointed to the letters spelling out the name: Robert Schumann.
Maestro Eschenbach treats all of this with a grain of salt, but the fact is d’Arányi somehow tracked down the concerto in the Prussian State Library. “Because she wanted to play it,” Eschenbach says, “but Berlin said no, no, no, no, no.”
The year was 1933, and Hitler’s Germany wanted a German to play the debut performance. The honor went to Georg Kulenkampff, who played the preiere four years later. “He was unfortunately not so good a violinist, ” Eschenbach sasy, “but a terribly good Nazi.”
Famed violinist Yehudi Menuhin loved the piece, calling it the “bridge” between Beethoven and Brahms, and he played the American debut shortly thereafter. D’Arányi played the British debut. But only recently has the concerto been played more and more. Eschenbach’s eyes sparkle when he talks about the piece, calling it “visionary” and “courageous for its time.”
The Violin Concerto offers few chances for technical display. The music instead asks the soloist to dig deep within, to plumb emotions and exploit the dusky colors of their instrument. The first movement unfolds slowly, like a road trip through a subtly changing landscape. The elegance and gentle drama of the solo violin part keeps attentions from wavering, keeps eyes on the road. Schumann was tormented by sounds in his head. At times his ears were filled with incessant whistling, at others he heard beautiful melodies, like the melody of the second movement, which he said was “sent by an angel.” It feels like time is suspended, and everyday life is very far away. Of the beautiful and heart-wrenching second movement, Eschenbach says, “When you listen to this very simple theme, it is so from deep down and so heartbreaking.” Schumann would write variations on this theme, which, like the Violin Concerto, were suppressed until the 1930s. They are now known as the Ghost Variations. Program notes by Nina Totenberg, NPR Music
Stefan Jackiw is one of America’s foremost violinists, captivating audiences with playing that combines poetry and purity with an impeccable technique. Hailed for playing of “uncommon musical substance” that is “striking for its intelligence and sensitivity” (Boston Globe), Jackiw has appeared as soloist with the Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, New York, Philadelphia, and San Francisco symphony orchestras, among others.
