Geneva Lewis, violin with Evren Ozel, piano | Program

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GENEVA LEWIS, VIOLIN WITH EVREN OZEL, PIANO

FRIDAY, JANUARY 27, 2023

Fazil Say (b. 1970)

Sonata for Violin and Piano, Op. 7 (1997) Melancholy Grotesque Perpetuum mobile Anonymous Melancholy

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

Violin Sonata No. 10 in G Major, Op. 96 (1812) Allegro moderato Adagio espressivo Scherzo: Allegro—Trio Poco allegretto

INTERMISSION

Douglas Lilburn (1915-2001)

Béla Bartók (1881-1945)

Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 1, Sz. 75 (1921) Allegro appassionato Adagio Allegro

Sonata for Violin and Piano, Op. 7 (1997)

Fazil Say (b. 1970)

A renowned pianist and composer, Fazil Say synthesizes multiple genres with the art and folk music of his native Turkey, resulting in a unique voice that communicates across borders. Say said in 2013, “I strongly believe that art and music will form a bridge between Western and Eastern cultures, blending and transforming these cultures.” This blend of influences places Say’s music in the lineage of 1970s and 1980s postmodernity—especially late Soviet composers like Schnittke, Pärt, and Ligeti.

Just as these composers forged a third path between the approachable (if at times propagandizing) socialist realism of the communist East and the experimental (if at times esoteric) avant-garde formalism of the capitalist West, Say’s music also strikes a balance between experimentation and immediacy.

The Violin Sonata consists of five short movements—the last a repetition of the first—and draws on folk tunes and instruments from Turkey. In the first movement, “Melancholy,” an atonal motive in the piano provides an atmosphere of instability over which the plaintive violin sings. In “Grotesque,” the piano is muted with heavy objects on the strings to mimic the thud of a kanun, a Turkish drum, while the violin’s pizzicato resembles the Turkish oud, a modern lute; thus, the experimental “prepared” piano (like John Cage) remains nonetheless folk-inspired and of the people. The show-stopping “Perpetuum mobile”—perhaps a nod to Arvo Pärt’s work of the same name—draws on the horon, a Black Sea dance that gives way to driving compound meter (3+3+2+2), common in Turkish music. “Anonymous,” returns to calm, quoting the folk song “Odam Kireçtir Benim.” The pianist again mutes the strings, this time to imitate a bağlama, a long-necked plucked string instrument. Say’s Violin Sonata pulls off the seemingly impossible feat of being both avant-garde and populist, transcending false binaries by drawing on the composer’s authentic lived experience.

Violin Sonata No. 10 in G Major, Op. 96 (1812)

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

By 1812, when Beethoven completed his Violin Sonata No. 10 in G Major, he had fully developed his so-called Symphonic Ideal, in which the music implies narratives of psychological development. But when he attempted to bring this compositional style into intimate domestic settings by way of chamber music, the reviews were often mixed. Thus, the strikingly conservative style that starts his Violin Sonata No. 10 may well be the composer’s response to the social expectations surrounding chamber music. Yet this work is a Trojan horse: From the Classical refinement of the first two movements emerges a powerful Romanticism that barrels out of control as it takes over. The first movement recalls the Classical sentimentality of the late 18th century. The first and second themes are both light in character and moderate in speed, distinguished mainly by metrical shifts rather than emotional contrast. The second movement maintains this gentle style with a beautifully operatic aria that includes a written-out (rather than improvised) cadenza. To the requisite A-B-A structure, Beethoven tacks on a coda nearly a third of the entire movement in length, introducing new thematic material that shifts from sentimental to impassioned. The movement ends ironically, with the violin adding a dissonant C-sharp in an E-flat major environment—the same contrast in the revolutionary first theme of his Third Symphony—to set up a modulation to G minor in the Scherzo. Beethoven the Romantic has arrived in this short movement: The opening section builds up the drama only to be undercut by a slow melodic Trio. In the final movement, Beethoven the iconoclast takes over. The music relishes its emotional extremes in a fragmented motivic style, disrupted by a slow B-section in the form of a mini self-contained aria. Fragments of the opening signal a disguised recapitulation before yet another expansive coda introduces even more new musical ideas in a manic and associative string that Beethoven abruptly cuts off, as if slamming the door on the Romantic spirit he unleashed.

Violin Sonata (1950)

Douglas Lilburn (1915-2001)

Born in the city of Whanganui of New Zealand’s North Island, Douglas Lilburn dedicated himself to composition after his first tone poem Forest won the Percy Grainger Award in 1936. The following year, he went to London and studied with Ralph Vaughan Williams, whose influence continued to be felt in his music through his first symphony of 1951. After returning to New Zealand in 1940, he eventually joined the new music department at Victoria University of Wellington, where he remained until his retirement. Over his career, his style evolved away from the Romantic toward atonality in the 1950s and 1960s, before venturing into progressive electro-acoustic composition. While Lilburn’s late electronic compositions show a commitment to experimentalism, his early style—in the camp of not only Vaughan Williams and Grainger but also Sibelius and even Copland—was intentionally conservative, holding on to the waning embers of Romanticism in contravention of the objective Neoclassicism and serialism of the time.

Cast as one continuous movement, Lilburn’s Violin Sonata moves through five main sections. It opens ponderously and ambiguously with ominous dissonant chords. Yet when the violin enters, its bold, declarative melody immediately shores up any instability, and it quickly builds to impassioned Romanticism. The following section shifts to a more impressionistic style like Debussy, using bright harmonies built with perfect intervals that are directionless but consonant. The section ends when the opening returns for a second time, the violin once again passionate, the piano again brooding. The fourth section is the most virtuosic, featuring jagged runs and astringent bowing— reminiscent of the Bartók Sonata also heard on this evening’s program—as it reaches a fever pitch. In the denouement, a tuneful folk-like melody brings down the temperature and ties the loose ends together as the piano brings back small motives from each of the previous sections, newly recontextualized as graceful accompaniments to a simple melody.

Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 1, Sz. 75 (1921) Béla Bartók (1881-1945)

In his lifetime, Béla Bartók witnessed a total change of the world order. Ethnically Hungarian and born in the Habsburg Empire in 1881, he lived through the First World War and saw the Old World crumble into increasingly factional ethno-states by the age of 40, when he was writing his Violin Sonata No. 1. Like many composers of his generation, Bartók felt an overwhelming disillusionment with society, which remained a guiding principle of his heavily Expressionist musical output, influenced by his anthropological study of the peoples of Hungary and brutally honest fidelity to their musical styles. Bartók embraced the “primitivism” of peasants in contrast to sophisticates in the capital cities of Budapest and Vienna. The eccentricities of folk music provided Bartók inspiration not only as source material for composition, but also and more programmatically, license to abandon social convention entirely. That inspiration is the meat of his Violin Sonata No. 1, a deeply psychological and, at times, disturbing work. The first movement is like a sketch of sonata form with a fast and intense opening theme followed by a lugubrious second theme. Yet the music seems to follow its own internal logic, the smallest idiosyncrasies and gestures growing into exaggerated kinks. In the score, the transition into the second theme reads as almost inscrutable rhythmic precision, but when heard performed, it mirrors a slow breakdown of momentum. In the second movement, the violin follows a stream of consciousness in a pensive soliloquy that the piano eventually throws into relief with shifting undercurrents; yet as one thought leads to another, fear emerges from melancholy in the form of an increasingly strident violin and percussive piano. The final movement runs frantically with ratcheting melodic lines loosely inspired atonal folk melodies. This remarkable movement so thoroughly gives voice to unnameable anxieties and pure fear that by the time it ends, the peaceful silence that follows becomes a deeply satisfying, even cathartic, release.

New Zealand–born violinist Geneva Lewis has forged a reputation as a musician of consummate artistry whose performances speak from and to the heart. Lauded for “remarkable mastery of her instrument” (CVNC) and hailed as “clearly one to watch” (Musical America), Lewis is the recipient of a 2022 Borletti-Buitoni Trust Award, 2021 Avery Fisher Career Grant, and was the grand prize winner of the 2020 Concert Artists Guild Competition. Additional accolades include Kronberg Academy’s Prince of Hesse Prize, Performance Today Young Artist Residency, and Musical America’s New Artist of the Month. Most recently, Lewis was named one of BBC Radio 3's New Generation Artists.

Since her solo debut at age 11 with the Pasadena POPS, Lewis has gone on to perform with orchestras including the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Pasadena Symphony, Sarasota Orchestra, Pensacola Symphony, and Duluth Superior Symphony Orchestra, and with conductors including Nicholas McGegan, Edwin Outwater, Michael Feinstein, Sameer Patel, Peter Rubardt, and Dirk Meyer. The 2022–2023 season includes performances with the Auckland Philharmonia, North Carolina Symphony, Augusta Symphony, Kansas City Symphony, Austin Symphony Orchestra, and Arkansas Symphony Orchestra. In recital, recent and upcoming highlights include performances at Wigmore Hall, Tippet Rise, Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, Washington Performing Arts, Merkin Hall, and the Dame Myra Hess Memorial Concerts.

Deeply passionate about collaboration, Lewis has had the pleasure of performing with such prominent musicians as Jonathan Biss, Glenn Dicterow, Miriam Fried, Kim Kashkashian, Gidon Kremer, Marcy Rosen, Sir András Schiff, and Mitsuko Uchida, among others. She is a founding member of the Callisto Trio, which serves as artist-in-residence at the Da Camera Society in Los Angeles. The Callisto received the Bronze Medal at the Fischoff Competition as the youngest group to ever compete in the senior division finals. They were recently invited on the Masters on Tour series of the International Holland Music Sessions and performed at the celebrated Concertgebouw in Amsterdam.

An advocate of community engagement and music education, Lewis was selected for the New England Conservatory’s Community Performances and Partnerships Program’s Ensemble Fellowship, through which her string quartet created interactive educational programs for audiences throughout Boston. Her quartet was also chosen for the Virginia Arts Festival Residency, during which they performed and presented master classes in elementary, middle, and high schools.

Lewis received her Artist Diploma and Bachelor of Music as the Charlotte F. Rabb Presidential Scholar at the New England Conservatory, studying with Miriam Fried. Previously, she studied with Aimée Kreston at the Colburn School of Performing Arts. She is currently studying at Kronberg Academy with Professor Mihaela Martin. Past summers have taken her to the Marlboro Music Festival, Ravinia Steans Institute, Perlman Music Program’s Chamber Workshop, International Holland Music Sessions, Taos School of Music, and the Heifetz International Music Institute.

Lewis performs on a violin by Zosimo Bergonzi of Cremona, c. 1770, courtesy of Guarneri Hall NFP and Darnton & Hersh Fine Violins, Chicago.

EVREN OZEL

American pianist Evren Ozel began his musical studies at age 3 in his hometown of Minneapolis. He has won numerous honors and awards, including scholarships from the Chopin Foundation of the United States and YoungArts Foundation, first prize at the 2016 Boston Symphony Orchestra Concerto Competition, second prize at the 2016 Thomas and Evon Cooper International Competition, and second prize and the Mozart and Chopin special prizes at the 2018 Dublin International Piano Competition. Most recently, he received second prize and special prizes for best mazurka and best polonaise at the 2020 US National Chopin Competition, securing the honor of representing the United States in the International Chopin Competition in Warsaw, Poland, in October 2021, where he was a quarter-finalist.

Ozel has performed with orchestras including The Cleveland Orchestra, Jacksonville Symphony, Minnesota Orchestra, RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, and Boston Pops, among others. In 2018, as a freshman at New England Conservatory, he won both the Honors Piano Competition and the NEC Chamber Concerto Competition, which gave him the opportunity to play on the Jordan Hall stage with the school’s conductor-less orchestra.

An avid chamber musician, Ozel was selected by Mitsuko Uchida to participate in the prestigious Marlboro Music Festival. There, he performed with Jonathan Biss, Alice Neary, Marcy Rosen, and Joseph Lin, among others. Three of his performances at the festival have already been featured in the archived Historic Recordings from Marlboro. In 2019, he participated in ChamberFest Cleveland, where he was featured in their Rising Star program, performing alongside artists such as Franklin Cohen, Peter Wiley, and Hsin-Yun Huang. Of his performance of Franck Sonata with Nathan Meltzer, Cleveland Classical wrote, “Meltzer and Ozel attended to every contour of the music with care, crafting a longform melodic idea that flowed effortlessly from phrase to phrase and movement to movement. It was a privilege to witness.” Other chamber experiences include invitations to play with Jupiter Symphony Chamber Players and Chamber Music Live at Queens College. Ozel was also a member of the Gruppetto Trio, which was selected as a New England Conservatory Honors Ensemble in the 2018–2019 school year.

Other summer festival experiences include the Internationale Mendelssohn-Akademie Leipzig in 2018 as a Mendelssohn Fellow, taking master classes with Pavel Gililov and Matti Raekallio, and the Oxford Piano Festival in 2015, where he had master classes with Ferenc Rados, Menahem Pressler, and Sir András Schiff. He has also been selected to perform in master classes for Richard Goode, Paul Lewis, Mitsuko Uchida, Garrick Ohlsson, Robert Levin, Hugh Wolff, Lang Lang, and others.

Ozel’s 2022–2023 season includes solo recitals for Chamber Music Detroit and Asheville Symphony’s recital series, as well as Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with the Midland Symphony Orchestra, and duo recitals for Washington Performing Arts and Philadelphia Chamber Music Society with violinist Geneva Lewis.

Ozel is currently in the Master of Music program at New England Conservatory in Boston, where he has been studying with Wha Kyung Byun since 2014. He is represented by Concert Artists Guild as one of the Ambassador Prize winners of their 2021 Victor Elmaleh Virtual Competition.

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COMING UP AT THE THEATER

DANCE

PILOBOLUS BIG-FIVE-OH!

Wednesday, Feb 1, 2023

7:30 PM Shannon Hall at Memorial Union

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Shannon Hall at Memorial Union

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