The concert will take place on Friday, May 20, beginning at 8pm, and features Beethoven’s concerto alongside Dvořák’s Symphony No. 6.
For tickets and info, visit a2so.com/beethoven-and-dvorak.
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This will be your 16th soloist appearance with the A²SO. As Concertmaster, what’s special about stepping out to perform, and what makes each experience as fresh as the first?
As with any performance, it’s all about sharing the music with others — expressing its beauty, its meaning, its depth. But playing a concerto puts me in a whole different role, so it is a very different headspace than other types of performing. There’s much more freedom yet it’s also much more work.
The innovative, almost symphonic breadth of Beethoven’s concerto places unique demands on the soloist. What makes performing this concerto different from works of Beethoven’s contemporaries or immediate predecessors?
The Beethoven concerto is this remarkable combination of grandeur and delicacy. It’s so big in scope and, in a way, very heroic. Yet it also needs to be very light, almost gossamer at times, and is often quite intimate. I’m drawn to the fragile aspects as much as the grand.
I revered this piece my whole life, and many of the great teachers of my generation considered it the greatest of all the violin concertos. At the same time, I sometimes found it a bit ponderous and heavy (but I was too embarrassed to ever admit it!) So I didn’t actually learn it until many years after I’d been out of school, when I was asked to perform it. Then I grew to love it in a very personal way, as much as anything in the repertoire.
I will be playing the Kreisler cadenzas which are so wonderful. But when I played the third movement last year for an A²SO online concert, my son Charles accompanied me AND he wrote me a cadenza for that movement (he is a pianist and a composer). We didn’t get around to a first movement cadenza yet, but the next time I play the Beethoven concerto, I hope to have one written by Charles!