Enigmas and Discoveries: Music of Elgar, Mozart, and Julia Adolphe
Saturday, December 14, 2019, 8pm
All Saints Parish
1773 Beacon Street, Brookline, MA 02445
Julia Adolphe, Shiver and Bloom
Julia Adolphe’s music has been described as “alive with invention” (Alex Ross, The New Yorker), “colorful, mercurial, deftly orchestrated” (Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times) displaying “a remarkable gift for sustaining a compelling musical narrative” (Thomas May, Musical America). Adolphe’s works are performed across the U.S. and abroad by renowned orchestras and ensembles such as the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, North Carolina Symphony, James Conlon and the Cincinnati May Festival Chorus, soprano Hila Plitmann, pianist Gloria Cheng, and the Bravo! Vail Music Festival, among others. Current commissions include an orchestral work for the LA Philharmonic’s centennial season, choral works for the Brooklyn Youth Chorus and Peninsula Women’s Chorus, and a comic opera entitled A Barrel of Laughs, A Vale of Tears, based on the novel by Jules Feiffer with a libretto by Stephanie Fleischmann. Adolphe’s 2017 orchestral work, White Stone, premiered by the NY Philharmonic, follows on the heels of the NY Philharmonic’s 2016 premiere of Unearth, Release, Adolphe’s viola concerto composed for Cynthia Phelps, and Dark Sand, Sifting Light, featured during the 2014 NY Phil Biennial. Adolphe has received numerous awards including a 2017 ASCAP Young Composer Award, 2016 Lincoln Center Emerging Artist Award, a 2016 OPERA America Discovery Grant, and a 2015 Charles Ives Scholarship from the Academy of Arts and Letters. A native New Yorker living in Los Angeles, Adolphe pursues a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the USC Thornton School of Music.
Shiver and Bloom evokes the perceived divide between the mind and the body. A high, floating, ethereal soundscape captures the wandering thoughts of the mind while a low, grounded, striving motif suggests the physical world of the body. These two contrasting realms swerve together and apart, creating the images of the work's title. The blooming of the low strings, bassoon, and horn yearns for unity with the icier, shivering, detached gestures of the high strings, flute, and clarinet. Over the work's twelve minutes, the worlds intersect and transform one another, melding into a more holistic entity. (www.JuliaAdolphe.com)
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Violin Concerto No.2
Featuring 2019 Concerto Competition winner Eva Aronian
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a prolific and influential composer of the classical era. Born in Salzburg, Mozart showed prodigious ability from his earliest childhood, performing violin and keyboard for royalty, as well as composing from the age of five. He composed many of his best-known symphonies, concertos, and operas, and portions of the Requiem in Vienna just prior to his early death at the age of 35. Mozart composed more than 600 works, and is among the greatest and most popular of classical composers.
Mozart's five violin concertos were all composed in Salzburg while he was still a teenager. The first was written in 1773 and the other four in 1775. The second of the concertos features a mixture of bravura flourishes and thematic presentation and development for the soloist. The work illustrates Mozart's increasing mastery of form and musical development. At the time, the 19-year-old Mozart was concertmaster of the Archbishop's court orchestra in Salzburg, and therefore he may have composed the concertos for his own use as a soloist.
Canadian-Armenian violinist Eva Aronian has received prestigious accolades, most recently the 2018/19 Sylva Gelber Music Foundation Award, and top prizes at the Minnesota Orchestra Young Artists Competition (2019) and at the Orchestre Symphonique de Montreal Manulife Competition (2016). Praised as an artist “balancing emotional weight and technical virtuosity [...] conveying the music’s power with a persuasiveness matched by few and surpassed by none” by Culture Spot LA, she has graced audiences with solo and chamber music performances across Canada, the United States, France, Italy, Germany, and Norway in such halls as Carnegie Hall, Jordan Hall (Boston), Zipper Hall (LA), Maison Symphonique (Montreal), Teatro dal Verme (Milan), and the Kimmel Center (Philadelphia). Ms. Aronian most recently served as teaching assistant to Donald Weilerstein at the New England Conservatory, where she received both undergraduate and Master’s degrees. She is continuing her studies as an Artist Diploma candidate studying with David Takeno at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, England. Ms. Aronian performs on a c.1700 Giovanni Tononi violin on generous loan from the Canada Council for the Arts.
Edward Elgar, Enigma Variations
Sir Edward William Elgar was an English composer best known for his orchestral works, including the Enigma Variations, the Pomp and Circumstance Marches, concertos for violin and cello, and two symphonies. Although Elgar is often regarded as a typically English composer, most of his musical influences were from continental Europe. He felt himself to be an outsider, not only musically, but socially. He was a self-taught composer, and sensitive about his humble origins even after he achieved recognition. He struggled to achieve success until his forties, when after a series of moderately successful works his Enigma Variations became immediately popular in Britain and overseas.
Elgar composed his Variations on an Original Theme, Op. 36 between October 1898 and February 1899. It is an orchestral work comprising fourteen variations on an original theme. Elgar dedicated the work "to my friends pictured within", each variation being a musical sketch of one of his circle of close acquaintances. Those portrayed include Elgar's wife Alice, his friend and publisher Augustus J. Jaeger and Elgar himself. In a program note for a performance in 1911 Elgar wrote:
This work, commenced in a spirit of humour & continued in deep seriousness, contains sketches of the composer's friends. It may be understood that these personages comment or reflect on the original theme & each one attempts a solution of the Enigma, for so the theme is called. The sketches are not ‘portraits’ but each variation contains a distinct idea founded on some particular personality or perhaps on some incident known only to two people. This is the basis of the composition, but the work may be listened to as a ‘piece of music’ apart from any extraneous consideration.