Tchaikovsky's one and only Violin Concerto, Opus 35 in D Major, requires the touch of genius. "Even the violinist it was written for," Corrick Brown says, "rejected it as being too difficult to play." Brown, Conductor Laureate of the Santa Rosa Symphony, chuckles at the thought. "Imagine telling Tchaikovsky to 'keep it simple.' "
Israeli-born, Texas-raised Nurit Pacht has the musical gifts to take on this virtuoso challenge. And Sonoma County will have the good fortune to watch her do so.
On Saturday, August 11, Nurit Pacht joins the Santa Rosa Symphony for Sonoma State University's evening of rich, romantic classical music known as Midsummer Night on the Green. Jeffrey Kahane will conduct the Santa Rosa Symphony in an all-Tchaikovsky concert beginning at 6:30 p.m.
Current Symphony conductor Jeffrey Kahane says he was "knocked out" when he first heard Pacht's playing. He found her approach "extremely imaginative and intense; not typically modern but creative and very free."
Pacht has had to develop the technical and emotional depth such a challenging piece demands. She made her first public appearance on national television in a solo performance on PBS at the age of 12 years old. Now 28, she has since been featured in concerts in more than a dozen countries, gracing many of the world's great concert halls from New York's Metropolitan Museum to Washington's Kennedy Center, Moscow's Bolshoi Ballet, Vienna's Musikverein and London's Wigmore Hall.
Her musical interests are wide-ranging. She has performed with avant-garde collaborators, Philip Glass and Robert Wilson. In 1998-99, she traveled to India to play violin-sarangi duets composed for her by Pandit Ram Narayan, a world-renown sarangi virtuoso.
Everywhere she performs on her one-of-a-kind concert violin (fabricated in 1678 by Nicola Amati), listeners are left breathless. Charles Michener wrote in a 1997 New York Observer review: " Ms. Pacht delivered a program of Beethoven, Ravel and Bruch that I expect to lodge in my memory as a sort of 'I was there' encounter with an extraordinary talent at the beginning of major things."
She has been hailed as "a great artist" (Le Monde) who "possesses?he fabric of the greatest violinists of the Century" (Le Journal de Geneve).
Tchaikovsky was already well known when he composed his only Violin Concerto. In fact, he wrote it in 1878, the same year that his Symphony No. 4, sometimes referred to as "Fate," was first performed in Moscow.
Not coincidentally, his Fourth Symphony will be the other masterpiece featured on August 11 at Midsummer Night on the Green.
But Tchaikovsky wasn't in Moscow for "Fate"'s opening. He was touring Europe in order to restore his fragile mental health. In Switzerland, a young violin virtuoso and former student, Yosif Kotek, came calling.
Tchaikovsky had always admired his talents so he undertook to write a concerto for him. Only a month later, he had his first draft. But because Kotek was too young to take on such an important premier, Tchaikovsky offered its debut to the leading violinist in Russia, Leopold Auer.
Auer declared the concerto "too difficult to play."
"Of course," Corrick Brown says, "Tchaikovsky had the last laugh. Auer eventually saw the error of his ways and begged for a chance to play it. By then, the Concerto in D Major had taken its place in the world's repertoire of great violin compositions."
"Tchaikovsky, Kahane and Pacht," Corrick Brown grins. "It should be an amazing evening of music."
Sonoma State University opens its gates at 4 p.m. for picnicking. Food, dinners and fine wine (courtesy of Hanna Winery) will be available. Ticket prices are: lawn, adult, $28; youth, $7; family, $70;reserve table $48,; table of eight, $375. Tickets can be purchased by calling (707) 546-8742.
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