New Zealand-born violinist Geneva Lewis returns to the country for the first time to join the Auckland Philharmonia in Barber's Violin Concerto.
Geneva Lewis Photo: Motti Fang-Bentov
Geneva Lewis has forged a reputation as a musician of consummate artistry whose performances speak from and to the heart. Lauded for the “remarkable mastery of her instrument” (CVNC), Geneva is the recipient of a 2021 Avery Fisher Career Grant and Grand Prize winner of the 2020 Concert Artists Guild Competition. Other recent accolades include Kronberg Academy’s Prince of Hesse Prize, as well as being named a Performance Today Young Artist in Residence and Musical America’s New Artist of the Month.
Interview with Geneva Lewis from the APO website
Interview with Geneva Lewis from the Three to Seven show.
KORNGOLD: Overture to a Drama
Overture to a Drama from 1911 was Erich Korngold’s first full orchestral work and was produced when he was just 14 years old.
Born the son of the preeminent Viennese music critic, Julius, Korngold was surrounded by music from day dot. His early compositions wowed Mahler who declared him a genius but it’s been noted that unlike Mendelssohn and Mozart who were "able to inject their youthful brilliance in the ambient music of the day…Korngold appears to have inhabited his own harmonic environment from his earliest years."
The English composer Christopher Palmer wrote:
"Somehow Korngold knew: knew how to compose, how to play the piano, how to score, all brilliantly and all apparently without any untoward expenditure of effort. How Korngold found, evolved or summoned his style into being is a question which can never properly be answered in terms which the scientific mind would find satisfactory."
BARBER: Violin Concerto
The origins of the Barber violin concerto are surrounded by much legend.
It was commissioned by Samuel Fels - a soap tycoon - for his ward Iso Bresilli, a gifted violinist who’d graduated from the Curtis Institute as Barber’s contemporary.
Bresilli never played the work and the narrative of the "musician-who-turned-down-the-masterpiece-through-his-own-inadequacy" began to take root. However, as with most stories, the nuance is less spectacular.
Bresilli was initially very excited by the concerto’s first two movements, but less happy when the third was delivered. It came later than agreed due to Barber needing to leave a Europe on the brink of war and having an ill father.
In a letter to Fels explaining his side of the story, Barber wrote of Bresilli’s three reasons for not accepting the final movement: "He could not safely learn it" in time for its performance; "it was not violinistic"; and "it did not suit musically the other two movements, it seemed to him rather inconsequential. He wished another movement written…. But I could not destroy a movement in which I have complete confidence, out of artistic sincerity to myself. So we decided to abandon the project, with no hard feelings on either side."
Barber wrote that he was "sorry not to have given Iso what he had hoped for." Barber retained the first half of the commission fee, Fels kept the other and Bresilli relinquished the performance rights. The two young men remained friends despite the disagreement and the world got a violin concerto.
BACH: Largo, from Violin Sonata No 3
An encore from Geneva Lewis.
DVORAK: Symphony No 9 in E minor, 'New World'
When we think of Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9 it’s most likely the yearning cor anglais melody of the second movement, forever intertwined with the words “goin’ home”, that spring to mind.
The myth that this melody sprang from an African American spiritual is pervasive but wrong.
The word setting came at the hand of a student of Dvorak nearly 30 years after the symphony’s 1893 Carnegie Hall premiere.
That student, William Arms Fisher, wrote in his published sheet music of the adaptation:
"The Largo, with its haunting English horn solo, is the outpouring of Dvorak's own home-longing, with something of the loneliness of far-off prairie horizons… and a sense of the tragedy [that] sings in the "spirituals." Deeper still it is a moving expression of that nostalgia of the soul all human beings feel. That the lyric opening theme of the Largo should spontaneously suggest the words 'Goin' home, goin' home' is natural enough, and that the lines that follow the melody should take the form of a spiritual accords with the genesis of the symphony."
Martin Lee, in one of the last appearances in his long career with the APO, plays the solo in this performance.
Recorded by RNZ Concert, Auckland Town Hall, 23 February 2023
Producer: Tim Dodd
Engineer: Adrian Hollay
