Violin Diva

Friday, October 23, 2009, 8 pm

Glenn Gould Studio, 250 Front Street West

LARA ST. JOHN, Violinist

Canada’s violin sensation kicks-off a new season

HAYDN Quartet op 42 orchestral version

VAUGHAN-WILLIAMS The Lark Ascending

PIAZZOLLA The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires

TCHAIKOVSKY Serenade  

Canadian-born violinist Lara St. John has been described as "something of a phenomenon" by The Strad and a "high powered soloist" by the New York Times. She has performed as soloist with the orchestras of Cleveland, Philadelphia, Minnesota, Seattle, Brooklyn, Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, the Boston Pops and many more in North America. In Europe, she has played with the NDR Symphony (Hanover), Zurich Chamber Orchestra, Ensemble Orchestral de Paris, Bournemouth Symphony and the Amsterdam Symphony, among others. In Asia, solo appearances have included the Hong Kong Symphony, Tokyo Symphony, China Philharmonic in Beijing, Guangzhou Symphony and the Shanghai Broadcasting Orchestra. Lara has also performed with the Queensland Orchestra in Australia.

The Los Angeles Times has written, “St. John brings to the stage personal charisma, an unflagging musical imagination and genuine passion.” Recitals in major concert halls have included New York, Boston, San Francisco, Ravinia, Washington DC, Prague, Berlin, Toronto, Montreal and in the Forbidden City.
 

Lara St. John's latest recording with the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela and conductor Eduardo Marturet: Vivaldi - The Four Seasons and Piazzolla - The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires reached No. 2 on the iTunes charts on its first day and Maestro José Antonio Abreu, the founder of the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela and El Sistema writes: "This stunning recording features the extraordinary violinist Lara St. John. She and the musicians of the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra give an inspired performance under the baton of Eduardo Marturet. "The Cleveland Plain Dealer said "Lara St. John is as captivating in the seductive scenes of the Piazzolla as she is crisp, caressing and colorful in Vivaldi's atmospheric paeans to nature" and Audiophile Audition stated "Do we need another Four Seasons? With playing and sound like this, yes we do!"
 

Lara’s sixth recording, Hindson, Corigliano, Liszt (arr. Kennedy/St. John) was released in 2008 with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra of London, featuring two world premiere works; the Matthew Hindson Violin Concerto and the Martin Kennedy/St. John arrangement of Totentanz by Franz Liszt, as well as 'The Red Violin Suite' by John Corigliano. In writing of his impressions of the recording, John Corigliano commented: “I'm thrilled to be included in a new recording by the brilliant and always surprising Lara St. John. She is a real maverick, as a performer and in her choice of repertoire. An opulent and virtuosic new violin concerto and my Red Violin suite are coupled with a newly arranged version of a 19th century pianistic tour de force in her latest stunning release.”
 

Lara's fifth recording, Bach: The Six Sonatas and Partitas for Violin Solo described as "awe-inducing" by The Toronto Star, and "wild, idiosyncratic and gripping" by the Los Angeles Times, was released in the autumn of 2007 where it climbed to No. 2 and was the year’s best selling double album on iTunes.

Her third recording, Bach: The Concerto Album appeared in the “strongly recommended” section of Gramophone, which stated, "It is difficult to argue with such a technically dazzling and unfailing musical interpretation". In June of 2005 the recording was released on iTunes where it immediately became No. 1 in the classical category. Lara has also recorded for Sony Classical.
 

Her debut CD, Bach Works for Solo Violin, has sold over 50,000 copies and received resounding acclaim. The Chicago Tribune described Ms. St. John as having “superb technique and an irresistible vitality,” while US News and World Report called the recording “an exquisite performance.” Her second album, Gypsy, was described as “a sizzling display” by Gramophone, and The Strad called her "an electrifying player, as deeply satisfying in Bach as she is bewitchingly seductive in Waxman's Carmen Fantasy.”
 

She has been featured in People, US News and World Report, on CNN's Showbiz Today, NPR's All Things Considered, Fox News, CBC and a Bravo! Special: Live At the Rehearsal Hall.
 

Lara began playing the violin when she was two years old. She made her first appearance as soloist with orchestra at age four, and her European debut with the Gulbenkian Orchestra in Lisbon when she was 10. She toured Spain, France, Portugal and Hungary at ages 12 and 13, entered the Curtis Institute at 13, and spent her first summer at Marlboro three years later. Her teachers have included Felix Galimir, David Takeno and Joey Corpus. She performs on the 1779 “Salabue” Guadagnini thanks to an anonymous donor and Heinl & Co. of Toronto.

PROGRAM NOTES

 

Quartet Op.42 in D Minor by Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)

It has been suggested that Haydn's D minor Quartet, Opus 42, was written in response to a commission from Spain, mentioned in a letter of 5th April 1784. Certainly quartets had been requested by the Countess-Duchess of Benavente and Osuna and by the Duke of Alba and Haydn apparently sent two string quartets to the agent of the Countess, The poet Tomas de Yriarte, as part of a larger number of works for which he had a contract. The only quartet that survives from the period in question, late 1784 and early 1785, is Opus 42, which is in four movements rather than the three implied in Haydn's letter, but is relatively short and straightforward. The first movement is a charming Andante, followed by a D major Minuet that takes the violin into a high register and is coupled with a D minor Trio. There is a slow movement in B flat major and the last movement is a fugato, opened by the second violin.

 

The Lark Ascending -  Romance by Ralph Vaughan Williams  (1872-1958)    

 

By the time British composer Ralph Vaughan-Williams began The Lark Ascending in 1914 he had written works as varied and individual as the ballad opera Hugh the Drover, the Walt Whitman settings in Toward the Unknown Region and the magnificent Sea Symphony, incidental music for The Wasps of Aristophanes, A London Symphony, the beautiful A. E. Housman song cycle On Wenlock Edge, the Five Mystical Songs on poems of George Herbert, and most significant of all, the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, which is the great declaration of independence of English music in the twentieth century. When he set the score of The Lark Ascending aside, it was to join the Special Constabulary, then an ambulance unit of the Royal Army Medical Corps.

The title The Lark Ascending is George Meredith's, some lame verses that the composer's fancy went far beyond. The Lark Ascending is a work of haunting stillness. The orchestra is small. Strings suggest some harmonies and, from their muted chord, the violin rises in unmeasured flight. It settles into lilting song. After a more dance-like section, the earlier music returns. At the end, the violin, whose melismas are the lark's song, spirals ever higher.  

 

The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires by Astor Piazzolla (1921-1992) 

 

The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires is an extraordinarily interesting work. In its final shape, it takes a tango-inspired work by Piazzolla and combines it with elements easily recognizable from Vivaldi's model. Not only does it share with Vivaldi the general concept of depicting four seasons in music; it also presents a solo violin featured within an orchestral texture in highly virtuosic style. Yet initially, this work was written for a folk ensemble, not at all for virtuoso violin. In the late 1990's, Leonid Desyatnikov arranged the classical chamber music version for full string orchestra with solo violin, and included obvious allusions to Vivaldi's Four Seasons.

Desyatnikov's linkages to Vivaldi are ingenious. For instance, when it is summer in Argentina, Piazzolla's homeland, it is winter in Italy, Vivaldi's homeland. To recognize this, Desyatnikov took Piazzolla's Summer movement and skillfully wove direct quotes from Vivaldi's Winter movement into the texture of the music. For those familiar with Vivaldi's music, the insertion is obvious and creates a delightful "Ah-HA" moment of recognition.

Piazzolla was an experimenter. Expressive dissonances and abrupt shifts in tempo and meter are elements of his style that demand the audience's concentration and yet continually delight the imagination. Desyatnikov has taken those elements and transferred them into the world of the virtuoso violin concerto. Various special effects on the instruments required to perform this work continually entertain and amaze us. The extraordinarily difficult solo violin part is played sometimes using the bow hair, and at other times the wooden part of the bow. In all four movements, the string instruments turn into an extended percussion section, and then revert to a more traditional style.

In Vivaldi's The Four Seasons, each season includes three short movements. Piazzolla's variation gives each season only one movement. Each of Piazzolla's seasons, however, contains several sections that depict different moods within the single movement. The Summer movement, for example, contrasts the sassy, rhythmic tango with remnants of the Italian Baroque. An extended, melancholy cello solo dominates the first section of the Fall season. Slow, sultry, yet intensely rhythmic, Winter gives the solo violinist the perfect opportunity for cadenza-like displays of virtuosity. Even more quotes from Vivaldi, this time from his Summer, are woven seamlessly into Piazzolla's intensely emotional Winter tango. In contrast, Spring in Buenos Aires is filled with excitement and a rhythmic electricity that propels the work to its brilliant conclusion.

Serenade by Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)

 

Tchaikovsky adored Mozart, whom he once referred to as "the Christ of music." He said it was a performance of Don Giovanni he heard when he was 10 that first made him aware of music’s great power to express emotion.

 

In what may have been a need for creative balance, in 1880 Tchaikovsky decided to write an orchestral serenade in tribute to Mozart's serenades at the same time he was working on his overwhelming 1812 Overture. He finished the Serenade quickly, and was much happier with it than with the overture. He wrote to his patroness Nadezhda von Meck, "the overture will be very showy and noisy, but will have no artistic merit because I wrote it without warmth and without love. But the Serenade, on the contrary, I wrote from inner compulsion. This is a piece from the heart." The Serenade was premiered in St. Petersburg in 1881 and was an immediate success.

 

The Serenade is not classical in content. It feels just as romantic as Tchaikovsky's other works, and does not sound like Mozart. But it is nonetheless classical in form and spirit, especially in its opening and closing, thanks to the elegant opening theme of the first movement, which is repeated at the end of the last movement, forming a sort of memorial arch that enfolds the more romantic music heard in between.  

 

The first movement, Pezzo in forma di Sonatina, develops from a stately introduction into an Allegro with vigorous scale passages that flash through the brilliant orchestral colors available from strings alone. The Allegro is energetic yet never hectic; the sparkling passagework decorates the lyrical movement of the Allegro theme without hurrying it. 

 

The second movement Waltz is Tchaikovsky's replacement for Mozart's minuets. One can easily hear the Tchaikovsky of the famous ballets in this movement, which was in fact used by George Balanchine for his ballet ‘Serenade’ in 1936. Each string section in turn leads the waltz melody, and the movement ends in a gentle pianissimo. Like the first two movements, the Elegy is based on a scale passage, which gradually gains in intensity. The lower strings are more prominent than usual, participating in a lovely melody which is perhaps more reflective than melancholy or truly elegaic. 

 

The Finale is subtitled Tema russo. It includes two actual Russian folk tunes transcribed by the composer and musicologist Mily Balakirev. A slow tune sung by Volga carters appears in the Andante introduction, and Tchaikovsky uses a vigorous dance for the second theme, scoring it with quick, balalaika-style pizzicato plucked figures. His third theme is a sweeping, lyrical motif that provides a striking contrast with the brisk dance. The first movement Andante theme reappears to round out the four-movement structure; but then Tchaikovsky deftly transforms the descending section of this stately theme into the hot-blooded descending scale from the folkdance, to finish the Serenade with a last burst of joy.

 

$49 adult, $39 senior, $19 student

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