Café Concerts

Café Concert: Benjamin Verdery

listenerservices@wqxr.org (WQXR Radio) — Wed, 22 May 2013 18:00:00 -0400

Behold the many sides of Benjamin Verdery.

Seated in the WQXR Café with his baritone guitar in hand, Verdery lets introspective pieces by Bach and Randy Newman spill forth with a hushed introspection.

But speaking behind a microphone, Verdery becomes garrulous and animated, expounding on squeaky strings, the music of Elvis Presley and teaching in the age of YouTube.

Verdery is nothing if not steeped in the world of classical guitar: he travels the globe appearing at specialized guitar festivals, delivering week-long master classes from Maui to Amsterdam, and overseeing the guitar department at Yale University, a post he has held since 1985. His website contains the requisite sections devote to instruments, gear and teaching tips.

Verdery has a populist streak too. As artistic director of the guitar series at the 92nd St Y, he curates a series of guitar recitals and performs there himself, as he will on Thursday in a solo concert of works by Albeniz, Bach and Ezra Landerman as well as arrangements of songs by Prince and Presley.

Adapting pop songs for the classical guitar, Verdery says, isn’t as straightforward as it may seem. He says that an arrangement like “Kiss” by Prince (listen above), is conceived as a kind of collage.

“I generally gravitate towards something that sounds really exciting and cool on the classical guitar,” he told host Jeff Spurgeon. “With the Prince, who doesn’t want to do that?” Verdery will transcribe bits of the tune, then adapt the bass line or the drum part into a thicker accompaniment parts. “There I have to do some composing because I’m not singing. It’s so joyful.”

Verdery ends his Café Concert with "In Germany Before The War," a 1977 song by Randy Newman inspired by the Fritz Lang film M, which featured Peter Lorre as serial killer Hans Beckert. Newman has said the brooding song was intended as a metaphor for a nation about to enter a period of horror and transgression.

It’s finding unlikely songs like this or working with younger composers that seems to keep Verdery going. "The astounding thing is the instrument still fascinates me,” he said. “As you get older pieces seem to grow with you, especially the great ones.

“[Pianist] Dinu Lipatti said, ‘You don’t pick pieces, pieces pick you. As you go through life, even the simplest pieces can mean so much. You’re always humbled – by both the instrument because it still sounds fresh and unusual – and by the music.”

Video: Amy Pearl; Sound: Edward Haber; Interview: Jeff Spurgeon; Text & Production: Brian Wise

Café Concert: Brooklyn Rider

listenerservices@wqxr.org (WQXR Radio) — Mon, 06 May 2013 00:00:00 -0400

The four men of Brooklyn Rider arrived at the WQXR Café on a recent morning feeling groggy and jet-lagged, having returned three days earlier from a tour to Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macau. But it was time to rally. Their set list would feature exuberant pieces inspired by the music of Eastern Europe, ancient Persia and beyond.

Travel -- in a metaphorical sense -- has been an ongoing theme for this genre-bending string quartet, whose members cut their teeth in Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Ensemble. The group's sixth and most recent album, “A Walking Fire,” is named after a poem by the 13th-century poet Rumi, and it includes Bartok's String Quartet No. 2 as well as several new pieces. Among them is Culai by Lev “Ljova” Zhurbin, a Russian-born, New York-based composer who has collaborated with the quartet on several occasions. Here is the movement "Love Potion, Expired."

With its rollicking, jagged rhythms, the work is a tribute to Nicolae "Culai" Neacsu, the late violinist and vocalist of the Gypsy string ensemble, Taraf de Haiidouks. It's also consistent with Brooklyn Rider's embrace of non-Western styles.

In an interview on WNYC’s Soundcheck, violinist Colin Jacobsen noted how Debussy was profoundly influenced by the Javanese gamelan music he heard at the Paris International Exposition in 1889. Similarly, Bartok drew on the folk music he heard while traveling the countryside of Hungary and Romania with a tape recorder in the early 1900s. Brooklyn Rider has not only played those composers' works, but also collaborated with artists like the Chinese pipa player Wu Man, the Japanese shakuhachi player Kojiro Umezaki and Kayhan Kalhor, the Iranian master of the kamancheh, or Persian fiddle.

Jacobsen's own Three Miniatures for String Quartet, featured on "A Walking Fire," was inspired by the Islamic art galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which reopened in 2011. The work particularly draws on a miniature painting tradition "in which epic stories of love, heroism and allegories of human folly are played out in tiny portraits of incredible detail and texture." The movement “Majnun’s Moonshine” opens the quartet's café concert and can be heard in the audio above.

To round out their set, the quartet performed Zhurbin’s arrangement of Doina Oltului (“Song of the River Olt”), a traditional Romanian song. With its bent notes, rhythmic bowing and heavy offbeats, the piece seemed to momentarily transform the cafe into a rustic village tavern.

Video: Amy Pearl & Kim Nowacki; Sound: Edward Haber; Text & Production: Brian Wise

Café Concert: Isabelle Faust

listenerservices@wqxr.org (WQXR Radio) — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 14:35:32 -0400

VIDEO: Isabelle Faust Plays Bach's Partita No. 3 in C Major

In an age when crossover-slanted, heavily promoted violin babes are a staple of record industry marketing, Isabelle Faust’s career seems cut from a different cloth. Though the German violinist has made nearly 20 albums since the late 90s, her photo appears on the cover of just a few. A casual Internet search turns up a Wikipedia page that is only in German and a few profiles in industry trade magazines.

In Europe, Faust has appeared as a soloist with many premier orchestras and chamber music series. In 1993, she became the first German to win the Paganini Competition of Genoa. Four years later she received UK-based Gramophone magazine’s “Young Artist of the Year” award.

Faust came to Philadelphia in the early 1990s to study at the Curtis Institute of Music and made her American debut with the Utah Symphony in 1995. But she only made her first appearance with a top U.S. orchestra in 2008, with the Boston Symphony. Her debut with the New York Philharmonic came last week, as part of its “Bach Variations” festival.

Why the slow burn? While admired by violin aficionados, Faust is also notably self-effacing and unpretentious. She waxes enthusiastic about learning Beethoven from the manuscript scores and discovering neglected composers.

“I am convinced that there’s lots of music that nobody really knows or nobody really cares to play and which is still either very, very interesting music or very high quality music,” she told Jeff Spurgeon at a recent public talk at the David Rubinstein Atrium. "Sometimes it happens and then I think one should defend this music and also educate the public.” She pauses and laughs. “That sounds very severe.”

Faust’s early recordings were not of splashy violin showpieces but works by Bela Bartok, Karl Amadeus Hartmann, Andre Jolivet and Morton Feldman. Last year she recorded the sonatas and partitas of J.S. Bach, the third of which she played in the WQXR Café. Faust admits they present a particular challenge. “I do play those sonatas and partitas in one evening, which is a challenge for everybody, for the violinist and also for the public,” she said. “I do find the public needs to come closer to me and it’s difficult to come to the public with this music. It’s such an inner music.”

Faust’s violin is a 1704 Stradivarius nicknamed the "Sleeping Beauty." "It's called the Sleeping Beauty because it was forgotten about for 150 years,” she told the South China Morning Post. “Then around 1900, it was found again."

Video: Amy Pearl; Sound: Chase Culpon; Text & Production: Brian Wise

Café Concert: Pekka Kuusisto

listenerservices@wqxr.org (WQXR Radio) — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 16:30:41 -0500

Watch the following two videos of Pekka Kuusisto and see if you notice something unusual about them. Not the fact that the puckish Finnish violinist sits perched on a stool, as if in a neighborhood pub, or the fact that his striped uniform creates a visual harmony with the radiator and blinds in the background. It has more to do with the wispy, folksiness he brings to the Sarabande from Bach's Partita in D minor for solo violin.

Rather than presenting one of those "warm," "expressive" sounds violinists are supposed to make, Kuusisto gives it a breathy flair that’s entirely personal, and which he chalks up to the time of day. "Because it’s pretty early in the morning, it’s probably going to be a bit more improvisatory than if we were at Carnegie Hall at 8 o’clock in the evening,” he said. “That would be more serious.”

Kuusisto, 36, has made his reputation as a sound stylist who plays both traditional and electronic violins, as an ambassador for his native Finland who has played the Sibelius Violin Concerto hundreds of times, but also as an advocate for his country’s folk melodies.

For the second selection, the Finnish tune “Piupali Paupali," Kuusisto’s violin becomes a makeshift mandolin, and he delivers lyrics that are half-nonsense and half-narrative (about a boy’s trip to a shoemaker). The style of violin playing “is not really Finnish but it’s one of these songs that most people in Finland would recognize,” he explained. The tune was Americanized when Finns moved to the Upper Midwest and Canada and it became common to accompany the melody with a banjo or mandolin.

Kuusisto, who gained international attention in 1995 when he became the first Finn to win the International Jean Sibelius Violin Competition, is tough to pigeonhole. This month he’s premiering a Violin Concerto by the electronic artist Owen Pallett (a.k.a. Final Fantasy) and is premiering Four Iconoclastic Episodes with New Jersey guitarist and composer Steve Mackey. The night before his Café Concert he appeared at the Greenwich Village club Le Poisson Rouge to give a recital that included works by Bach, Nico Muhly and his own “Music for swallowed microphone” (a piece as unconventional as the title suggests). That show can be heard archived on Q2 Music.

Video: Kim Nowacki; Sound: George Wellington; Text & Production: Brian Wise

Café Concert: The Endellion String Quartet

listenerservices@wqxr.org (WQXR Radio) — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0500

When the members of the Endellion String Quartet were leaving the WQXR studios after their Café Concert, a curious question arose: Where could they find a Checker cab on the street?

The iconic, boxy taxis, of course, have long been absent from New York City streets but the musicians could be forgiven for the oversight. The London-based quartet was in town for their first New York appearance since 1995. The longtime absence is something of a puzzle, as group has maintained an active presence in the UK. The quartet has released major recording projects that have received awards from the British press, appeared on BBC radio and television, performed at the Proms in London and toured through Europe and beyond.

Making up for lost time, the quartet is performing all of Beethoven's string quartets at the Metropolitan Museum of Art over the course of six concerts through February 24. So why the absence? "Because you didn’t ask us,” said David Waterman, the quartet’s cellist, with a laugh. “We used to play here quite often in our early days because we were the winners of the YCA Competition.” The ensemble won the 1981 Young Concert Artists competition in New York and appeared here regularly throughout the 1980s and early '90s.

In the WQXR Café, the ensemble performed a movement of Beethoven's Quartet Op. 130. "For us as a quartet, it’s one of the great pinnacles of the work we do,” said Endellion violist Garfield Jackson, referring to the Beethoven cycle. “It is a mountain to climb and at the moment, because we haven’t done the first concert yet, I feel we’re staring up from base camp.”

The Endellion was formed in 1979 by four London freelancers who convened at a chamber music festival in St. Endellion, England. The ensemble has had only one personnel change since, when Ralph de Souza replaced Louise Williams in 1986. To what do they owe their longevity? “I think laziness is a very useful thing,” said Jackson, half joking. “It takes energy to fight. I think none of us are very good at wasting our energy fighting. Personally I need as much as I can to play concerts.”

Taking a more serious tact, he adds, “I think over the years, you learn where to nudge and push and where not to waste one’s energy. Time does build a confidence to do it the way that seems to suit the people involved.”

While some quartets of the past kept a single-minded approach by forbidding one another to take outside performing or teaching engagements, the members of the Endellion say they've adopted a more carefree attitude. They have sought to reduce the intensity of their performance schedule over time and encourage each other to do performing outside the group as well as teaching and conducting. And unlike some famed quartets that travel and eat meals separately, "usually we eat together,” said Waterman. “Normally we’ll arrange to meet for lunch or supper or whatever."

"It does seem that it’s been a general trend to reduce intensity rather than crank it up.”

Video: Amy Pearl; Sound: George Wellington; Production & Text: Brian Wise; Interview: Naomi Lewin

Café Concert: Jan Vogler

listenerservices@wqxr.org (WQXR Radio) — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 17:47:49 -0500

VIDEO: Jan Vogler Plays from Bach's Suite No. 3

Jan Vogler is often identified as a German cellist but in many ways, he’s a quintessential New Yorker: he lives on the Upper West Side with his wife and two daughters, enjoys jogging in Central Park and biking along the West Side Highway, and speaks impeccable English in an enthusiastic, rapid patter. He married his wife, the violinist Mira Wang, downtown at City Hall.

Vogler, 48, has also infiltrated the city’s classical music institutions since moving here in 1997. Last year, he released his third album with Brooklyn chamber orchestra The Knights, featuring Beethoven's Triple Concerto. He is a frequent soloist with the New York Philharmonic, having made his breakthrough recording of the Dvorak Cello Concerto with the ensemble in 2005. He is to appear with the orchestra again in Bloch’s Schelomo on Feb. 21-22.

But Vogler is also of a generation of musicians trained in the isolation of the former East Germany, a place that “felt very small," as he explained. Born in Dresden, Vogler was the son of a respected cello teacher whose students included Western diplomats who would cross into East Germany for lessons. Some would smuggle in CDs, tapes and books by Western artists.

“My father had the best library you can imagine in East Germany – all the American authors, all the French authors,” Vogler recalled. "We felt the world was very great and very big. But we were captured in a rather small space. I was always dreaming of speaking many languages and traveling the world.”

He continued: “We had to be careful. We grew up in two worlds. At home we were in a very liberal and open household. [But] we were trained very early, when you leave the house you’re in a different world.”

After fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Vogler spent several summers at the Marlboro Music School and Festival in Vermont, that ultra-American training institution where he met Wang. They began performing together, and recorded a 1999 album of cello and piano duos (the cover photo shows them posing on the Brooklyn Bridge).

Around the same period of the late '90s, Vogler recorded two of Bach's cello suites, on a CD with three suites by Max Reger. But only recently did he begin performing all of Bach’s landmark suites in public. “It took me a long time to decide to play in concert all six," he said. "I did this last summer and I discovered first how thrilling it is for the performer. But also it seemed not boring for the audience.”

Part of the impetus for tackling the complete Bach suites was a new cello: a Stradivarius called the "Ex Castelbarco/Fau," which Vogler acquired last spring on a long-term loan. A recording of the suites is due out in March. In the meantime, he performed three movements from the Suite No. 3 in C Major in the WQXR Café (all three videos play in order below).

What does the Stradivarius bring to the equation? “The clarity, the articulation and just the maturity of the Strad,” he said. “I don’t know what it exactly it is. It was just working.”

Video: Amy Pearl; Sound: Edward Haber; Text & Production: Brian Wise

Café Concert: Jennifer Koh

listenerservices@wqxr.org (WQXR Radio) — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0500

VIDEO: Jennifer Koh performs in the WQXR Café

Somewhere along the way in her 20-some year career, Jennifer Koh jumped off the violin soloist treadmill in favor of less familiar paths and creative channels.

She fashioned an ongoing recital series called “Bach and Beyond” that involves juxtapositions of Bach’s solo sonatas and partitas with contemporary works by composers like Phil Kline, Missy Mazzoli and Kaija Saariaho.

She gives her New York Philharmonic subscription debut this week not with a beloved warhorse like the Tchaikovsky or Brahms Concerto but Lutoslawski’s Chain 2, a dark, knotty work composed for Anne-Sophie Mutter in 1984.

And she has struck up a working relationship with the veteran theater and opera director Robert Wilson, which will expand this November in a staged version of Bach’s solo violin music in Paris.

Koh came to know Wilson when she appeared in the title role in a new touring production of Einstein on the Beach, Philip Glass’s landmark opera that came to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in October.

“I was quite scared going into the rehearsal process because I’ve never acted or done anything in that way,” Koh, 36, told Jeff Spurgeon. “I’ve never played a character. In fact, for me, performing and being a musician is about being more myself there than anywhere else in a sense and being more purely human.

“I didn’t even know where stage right was. They were like, 'walk on to stage right' and I was like, 'which direction is this?’”

In the five-hour opera, Koh doesn’t just perform Glass's churning "Knee Plays" but dons the full Einstein costume, complete with silver wig and mustache. Wilson's acting coaching made a strong impression on Koh.

“In a way, I’ve been searching for a long time for this idea, [whether] doing 'Bach and Beyond,' or creating these projects," she said. "In the end it’s ‘how do you create an experience, and really create a journey for your audience?’ What Bob does with Einstein, with time, it changes your conception of that.”

Koh’s career got off to a start more typical of a child prodigy: she made her debut with the Chicago Symphony at age 11, studied at Oberlin College in her teens, and took home a silver medal at the 1994 Tchaikovsky Competition, the latter while wearing a poofy green dress. But in recent years she's shown an increasingly adventurous streak, as the choice of the Lutoslawski for her Philharmonic debut suggests.

"I believe it’s a great piece and it deserves to be heard more,” she said. “And more than that, the reason I’m happy to do it in New York is that so many of my composer colleagues and friends are in the city and there’s something about his music that is such an important voice that does need to be heard.”

In the WQXR Café, Koh performs selections the final two movements of Ysaÿe's Sonata No. 2, a piece that she performed last year at an event for South Korea's First Lady Kim Yoon-ok, hosted by US First Lady Michelle Obama.

“I remembered that I was so excited when I met her at the receiving line that I almost knocked over the first lady of Korea,” Koh recalled. "I just hopped towards Michelle Obama to give her a hug. Then I had to give my apologies to the first lady of Korea. She was very lovely.”

Video: Amy Pearl; Sound: Ed Haber; Text & Production: Brian Wise; Interview Jeff Spurgeon

Café Concert: Chilly Gonzales

listenerservices@wqxr.org (WQXR Radio) — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 17:41:32 -0500

VIDEO: Chilly Gonzales performs in the WQXR Café

If Franz Liszt were alive today, he may find a certain kinship with Chilly Gonzales. The German-based Canadian pianist and composer is the current holder of the world record for longest solo concert, at 27 hours, 3 minutes and 44 seconds. He has crowd-surfed at a BBC Symphony concert in London, challenged the rocker Andrew W.K. to a piano battle (and won), and has pioneered his own brand of “orchestral rap.”

A self-proclaimed "musical genius," Gonzales has made a two-decade career out of straddling musical styles and genres. His ridiculously prolific resume includes producing albums by big-name pop artists like Feist, Drake and Daft Punk; getting his music on the first iPad commercial; and writing solo piano pieces that evoke the melancholic grace of Satie or Franck.

Gonzales’s Café Concert stressed the classical side of his creative output, featuring his original songs (watch a mash-up of his "Otello" and "Minor Fantasy" below). And while many pianists would shutter at playing on a (slightly creaky) upright, Gonzales embraced the task. “I luckily have a lot of experience playing pianos,” he told Jeff Spurgeon. “Once in a while you can’t figure certain women out; you can’t figure certain pianos out either. You do your best. In this case, I managed to flirt a little bit and make a few jokes and had her laughing pretty quickly.”

Gonzales was in New York to perform his Piano Concerto No. 1, backed by an 11-piece chamber orchestra at Lincoln Center’s David Rubinstein Atrium. Despite the concerto's formal title, he insists that his compositions are “songs,” not “pieces,” even as he acknowledges the influence of French and Russian romantic composers.

“We’re not in the 19th century anymore. We’re in the 21st," said Gonzales, who was born Jason Charles Beck. “For me, for example, the obsession with structure was a huge thing for classical composers, but that’s not really an issue for me. I grew up watching MTV. There’s nothing wrong with verse-chorus-verse-chorus. That’s the currency of our generation these days.”

Gonzales studied classical music at McGill University in his hometown of Montreal, graduating in the same class as the songwriter Rufus Wainwright. He says he never quite fit the formal conservatory mold. “I was traumatized by the institutions but fell in love with the meaning of the music,” he said, noting his love of Liszt and Tchaikovsky. “My favorite composers tend to be ones who were conscious of the audience. And for better or for worse, they had personalities that meant that they needed some sort of approval of the audience, but on their own terms.”

He continued: “I’ve always focused on the noble profession of being a showman. To me, being an entertainer – which is what I prefer to call myself rather than artist – is a way of saying entertainment doesn’t have to mean pandering to the lowest common denominator.”

Gonzales admits that his Guinness World Record performance, set in Paris in 2009, was an attempt at “selling the idea of me as a musical genius and what I’m capable of doing.” He said that the hardest part of the event was not staying awake but maintaining the quality of his performance. He got through it by “letting the adrenaline flow to not only keep me awake but communicating with the audience at all times.”

With his many creative channels (he's also a filmmaker), is Chilly Gonzales a bit desperate for attention? And what do his audiences think? "I have an oppositional personality that likes to surprise people," he said. "I find I generally need to have an approval of an audience – but on my own terms. It's not enough for me to play into traditional expectations for how to please people. So I always need to be shaping and redefining that relationship."

Video: Amy Pearl; Sound: Chase Culpon; Interview: Jeff Spurgeon; Text & Production: Brian Wise

Café Concert: Julian Rachlin

listenerservices@wqxr.org (WQXR Radio) — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 15:26:10 -0500

VIDEO: Julian Rachlin and Itamar Golan play Brahms

There’s a kind of ceremonial air when violinist Julian Rachlin arrives at WQXR for his Café Concert. Looking tanned and nattily dressed, he’s clutching a double case containing both a violin and viola.

Keeping his jacket on, Rachlin reaches for the violin, a 1704 Stradivarius known as the "Ex-Liebig." He consults with his longtime pianist, Itamar Golan, speaking in a mixture of Russian and English, while his Austrian girlfriend (whom he speaks with in German), sets a timer on her iPhone. The two musicians run through their piece for the day’s program: the first movement of Brahms’s Violin Sonata No. 1.

After making some adjustments – tweaking tempos, phrases and a couple of repeats – the rehearsal is over. Rachlin and Golan begin the lush, G-major Sonata, its hushed introspection giving way to dramatic outbursts followed by passages of tranquil lullaby.

Rachlin and Golan, who are in town for a pair of all-Brahms recitals at the 92nd Street Y, have been performing together since 1996. “Of course, the Brahms sonatas were always part of the recitals but we’ve never done the complete cycle,” said Rachlin. “I think it’s a very natural wish for a musician to play the whole cycle, to travel a whole journey with one composer.”

Rachlin was born in Vilnius, Lithuania in 1974, and moved with his family to Vienna four years later. The violinist has made the Austrian capital his home ever since, studying at the Vienna Conservatory and later becoming the youngest soloist ever to play with the Vienna Philharmonic, under Riccardo Muti. His teenage years were difficult at times: a major label record contract went south unexpectedly and the business of classical music revealed its troublesome side.

Rachlin recovered from the prodigy period, and has developed a more rounded career that includes chamber music, concertos, occasional conducting and a teaching post at the Vienna Conservatory. Work as a UNICEF goodwill ambassador and occasional ski holidays fill out much of Rachlin’s time.

Until recently, the violinist ran a September chamber music festival in Dubrovnik, Croatia, called Julian Rachlin and Friends. While it drew some notable names and critical praise, the festival’s 12th edition was its last, for now at least. Rachlin said it fell victim to a difficult funding climate for the arts in Croatia. “I had the opportunity of calling my musician friends and forming the right teams together for the chamber music,” he said. “I also learned how difficult it is, to fight for sponsors, to get the funds together and to run a festival. But it was a great school for me to see how the classical music world runs behind the curtains.”

Video: Amy Pearl; Audio: Edward Haber; Production & Text: Brian Wise

Café Concert: The Canellakis-Brown Duo

listenerservices@wqxr.org (WQXR Radio) — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 11:51:20 -0500

VIDEO: The Canellakis-Brown Duo performs a Bulgarian Folk Tune

The cellist Nicholas Canellakis and the pianist Michael Brown are a duo with a double life. Together, the two musicians perform in chamber venues around New York City, and have a residency at Barbès, a bar in Brooklyn. They hold advanced degrees from top music schools – Canellakis studied at the Curtis Institute of Music and Brown attended the Juilliard School – and devise programs that span eras and styles.

But to really get a sense of the two artists’ personalities, watch their online comedy series "Conversations with Nick Canellakis." The interviews are set up under the guise of super-polite classical music discussions but then inevitably degenerate into something more petty and craven, revealing undercurrents of jealousy and career opportunism.

In one episode they condescendingly ask the pianist Jonathan Biss for his resume and wonder aloud why he took the subway to his Carnegie Hall debut. In another we see their bumbling attempts to hit on the young pianist Yuja Wang. Then there’s a sit-down with the Emerson Quartet in which Canellakis wishes he'd instead landed the Guarneri Quartet, while purporting to give career advice to outgoing cellist David Finckel.

Directed by Canellakis, the satirical videos have acquired cult status in classical music circles and have been compared to Mike Myers' old "Wayne's World" sketches on "Saturday Night Live," or Sasha Baron Cohen's Ali G character (minus the ambush-style interviewing technique).

Canellakis has cited Larry David, Louis C.K. and Zach Galifianakis as comic inspirations. His previous filmmaking credits include a satire of “The Shining,” set in the darkened halls of Curtis Institute (see parts one, two and three).

But there is also serious side to the two musicians’ careers. Canellakis performs with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and was previously a member of Carnegie Hall's Academy; Brown, who was a first prize winner of the 2010 Concert Artists Guild competition and is also a composer, has recordings of Schubert and George Perle's piano music in the works.

In the WQXR Café the duo presented an arrangement of a "Ganka's Dance," a Bulgarian folk tune in 11/8 time that is a staple for Balkan folk bands. “There are a lot of different versions,” noted Canellakis. “I fell in love with it and decided to make a virtuoso cello piece out of it.”

Video: Amy Pearl; Sound: George Wellington; Production & Text: Brian Wise

Café Concert: Maya Beiser

listenerservices@wqxr.org (WQXR Radio) — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 17:24:00 -0400

VIDEO: Maya Beiser performs in the WQXR Café

Maya Beiser has been pushing her cello to the edge of avant-garde risk-taking since the early 1990s. Composers as diverse as Steve Reich, Osvaldo Golijov and Tan Dun have written works especially for her, and she was a founding member of the Bang On A Can All-Stars. Her Twitter account is called "Cello Goddess" and one of her crossover successes is an arrangement of the Led Zeppelin tune "Kashmir."

Yet Beiser's biggest calling cards these days are theatrical works that involve videos, electronics, lighting effects, spoken poetry and all manner of sounds from her instrument. Many tackle dense literary themes or social-political issues.

The latest is "Elsewhere: A CelloOpera," a commission from the Carolina Performing Arts series which arrives at at BAM’s Fisher Theater on Oct. 17. Scored by Eve Beglarian, Michael Gordon and Missy Mazzoli, the piece is directed by Robert Woodruff and incorporates film, dance, spoken text and vocals.

"Elsewhere," was partly inspired by a poem by the surrealist Belgian poet Henri Michaux called "I am writing to you from a far-off country," about a woman witnessing the end of the world. Beglarian wrote a piece for Beiser in 2006 that incorporates the poem and it turns up here. The other main influence is the Old Testament tale of Lot's wife, who was turned into a pillar of salt. Four dancers portray the stories, while Beiser speaks portions of Michaut’s text along with those of Erin Cressida Wilson.

"The whole idea is of a woman who is taking destiny in her own hands,” Beiser told host Jeff Spurgeon. “It’s been a theme throughout my life, maybe because I’ve lived elsewhere.”

Beiser's comment is something of an understatement. She was born in 1963 and raised in a kibbutz in Israel by a French mother and Argentinean father. She reveals that her iPod remains heavy on Middle Eastern folk tunes and songs by the Israeli singer Ofra Haza.

In the WQXR Café, Beiser presented a portion of Khse Buon, by the Cambodian-American composer Chinary Ung. The piece is a dark threnody drawing upon Cambodian folk melodies, sustained drones and otherworldly sounds. "He wrote this piece in the aftermath of the Cambodian genocide after the Cambodian genocide after the Khmer Rouge tried to destroy the culture,” she said. “He spent ten years trying to collect all these tunes that were lost. This was the first piece he wrote after that time.”

Among Beiser’s upcoming projects is a concept album of rock songs from the 1970s, including Pink Floyd’s "Wish You Were Here." “I’m trying to do it in a different way,” she said. “It’s not going to be symphonic Pink Floyd.”

Listen to Jeff Spurgeon’s full interview above.

Video: Amy Pearl; Audio: Wayne Shulmister and Merritt Jacobson; Text & Production: Brian Wise

Café Concert: Classical Jam

listenerservices@wqxr.org (WQXR Radio) — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 16:16:51 -0400

VIDEOS: Watch Classical Jam Perform in the WQXR Cafe

Many arts managers pay lip-service to the importance of bringing classical music to new audiences. Classical Jam, a freewheeling ensemble of five New York soloists and chamber players, wants to make it happen.

A day after playing a set in the WQXR Café (below), the quintet traveled uptown for a free show at the David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center where the audience consisted of squirming toddlers, grizzled Upper West Siders and post-brunch hipsters, possibly intrigued by the group's earnest yet catchy name. The program spanned J.S. Bach, improvisation and a tribute to subway bucket drummers.

The members of Classical Jam – flutist Marcos Granados, violinist Jennifer Choi, violist Cyrus Beroukhim, cellist Wendy Law and percussionist Justin Hines – met a decade ago as conservatory students (collectively they are graduates of Juilliard, the Oberlin Conservatory, Indiana University and the New England Conservatory).

Law said she formed the group to bring classical music to new audiences, especially those who feel they don't identify with it.

“About five or six years ago, I was just sick and tired of people telling me that classical music is dying and I thought there must be a way of trying to engage people in new ways,” she said. “It’s through how we program the music. So we thought we can compose the music ourselves, we can choose different genres of music but all under the big umbrella of classical music.”

Classical Jam’s Lincoln Center concert was typical of their broad repertoire, featuring a tango by Piazzolla, a jazzy take on Bach’s The Art of Fugue, an original composition by Hines and, a particular audience-pleaser, the Brahms Hungarian Dance No. 5 played along to a video of the shaving scene from Charlie Chaplin's film “The Great Dictator.”

At a few points in the program, audience members were invited to participate, singing a theme or thwacking a drum on stage. The light educational slant comes with the territory; members of the ensemble are teaching artists at such organizations as the New York Philharmonic and the 92nd Street Y.

Several pieces in Classical Jam's repertoire also feature improvisation -- usually not part of the classical musician's toolkit but in keeping with the group's founding spirit. "One of the things about Classical Jam is we’re trying to push ourselves to redefine what ‘classical’ improvisation is,” said Granados. "So we’re not jazzers but we keep on trying to find out what that means.”

Video: Amy Pearl; Sound: George Wellington; Production & Text: Brian Wise

Café Concert: New York Polyphony

listenerservices@wqxr.org (WQXR Radio) — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0400

VIDEO: New York Polyphony Perform Byrd and a modern lullaby

Making recordings of quiet, spiritual music from the 16th century isn't so easy in 21st-century New York. So to record its last album, "Endbeginning," the all-male vocal ensemble New York Polyphony traveled to a medieval church in rural Lanna, Sweden. There the noise floor – the technical term for background noise – was exactly zero. In New York City, it's around 40 decibels.

“We recorded our first two CDs here and we competed constantly with New York City as you can imagine,” said Craig Phillips, the group’s bass. He remembered losing one pristine take to a car horn outside the church. The group will be going back to Sweden next January to make their next album, a program of English masses by Byrd, Plummer and Tallis.

“Don’t tell anybody because we’re still New York Polyphony,” joked Philips. “We're not Scandinavian Polyphony.”

When the ensemble came to the WQXR Café, the production team did its best to silence the station's own auditory distractions – the refrigerator ice machine, the humming of the water cooler. Despite the prosaic surroundings the ensemble evoked an otherworldly place with a program of sacred Renaissance music as well as a lullaby by Philips (“Sleep Now,” written under his pen name Alexander Craig).

This performance marked New York Polyphony’s second Café Concert and its first with a new lineup: Last fall, Geoffrey Silver, the group’s tenor since its founding in 2006, left and was replaced by the tenor Steven Caldicott Wilson (rounding out the ensemble is the countertenor Geoffrey Williams and baritone Christopher Dylan Herbert).

Below is the ensemble's performance of the Agnus Dei from William Byrd's Mass for Four Voices. The piece was composed in 1592, a time when the Catholic Mass was outlawed in England. As a result, it had to be performed in small, private settings. The café may not be such a stretch after all.

Video: Amy Pearl; Sound: Edward Haber; Text & production: Brian Wise

Café Concert: James Ehnes

listenerservices@wqxr.org (WQXR Radio) — Sun, 15 Jul 2012 21:25:11 -0400

VIDEO: James Ehnes Plays Bach's Third Partita

How does he do it? That’s the inside joke, the company line, the way many deal with a normal guy like James Ehnes doing abnormal things like performing concertos with major orchestras, starting a string quartet, the Ehnes Quartet, and taking over this summer as artistic director of the Seattle Chamber Music Society.

And he proposed to his now-wife at a New York Philharmonic concert several years ago while TV cameras rolled.

How does he do it? "A lot of times there’s a very distinct difference between someone’s professional life and their personal life,” Ehnes, 36, told host Naomi Lewin. “When we get up on stage as musicians there’s a certain performance aspect of that. Off the stage, apart from a few serious divas that seem to affect the perception for everyone, musicians are such regular people.”

The Seattle Times recently wrote that Ehnes "came off as such a regular, affable fellow that his pyrotechnic talents on the violin were almost shocking in their wizardry."

Born in Manitoba, Canada, the son of a trumpet professor and dance school director, Ehnes began playing violin at age four. By the time he graduated from the Juilliard School in 1997 he had already released his first recording, of Paganini’s 24 Caprices, for Telarc. Another two dozen recordings followed, including his latest, a collection of violin and piano pieces by Bartok.

One of Ehnes’s calling cards is the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto, the most popular violin concerto around after the Brahms Concerto. Ehnes notes that while it was considered unplayable after it was written in 1878, today it’s a “rite of passage” for every violinist, and he’s played it since age 13.

"Sometimes one’s interpretation of a piece develops but often for me, the way I feel about a piece stays the same but I’m different and so my interpretation is different,” he explained. “It’s a funny thing. I can listen to old tapes of myself. I think, ‘that’s me, but that’s who I used to be.’ It’s like an old photograph. Even though I feel the same way about a piece, my way of getting it out is going to be fundamentally different.”

Ehnes performs the Tchaikovsky with the New York Philharmonic on Monday night in Central Park, followed by an appearance in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx on Tuesday (WQXR will broadcast that concert on Thursday).

The parks concerts hold a special place in Ehnes's life: he proposed to his then-girlfriend Kate following his 2003 Central Park performance. They married the next summer and recently had their first child. Ehnes recalled the moment:

“I did some ring shopping that day. I called my friend at the Philharmonic and said, ‘I have this idea that I want to propose to Kate tonight.’ I hadn’t seen the setup yet. He said, ‘oh yeah, there’s this spot off the side of the stage under some trees. It’s very beautiful. You get a view of the skyline to the south.’”

He popped the question just as a camera from NY1 was rolling nearby, and the couple came home to see the moment during the newscasts every half hour. “It was certainly a special night. It’s a nice sense of déjà vu to be back in the park with the Philharmonic in the very same piece.”

Video: Amy Pearl; Sound: George Wellington; Text & production: Brian Wise

Café Concert: Avi Avital

listenerservices@wqxr.org (WQXR Radio) — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 14:02:04 -0400

VIDEO: Avi Avital plays in the WQXR Café

When you think mandolin, bluegrass pickers and old-timey music frequently comes to mind – Bill Monroe, Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas or Chris Thile. But when Avi Avital sat down to play in the WQXR Café, the sounds of a Bach cello suite filled the air. Then came the strong mournful strains of Ernest Bloch's Nigun, a variation on an ancient Hebrew melody written for the violin.

For self-identified traditionalists of either camp – classical music or the mandolin – it's a bit of a visual and aural shock to the system. But consider that the mandolin has long had a place in classical music, from Vivaldi's concertos to music by Mozart, Beethoven, Mahler and Schoenberg, among other composers. And Avital is no traditionalist.

Born in 1978 in Beersheba, a town in southern Israel, Avital is the son of Moroccan parents who immigrated to the country in the 1960s. At age eight, he heard a neighbor play the mandolin and soon convinced his mother to sign him up for lessons. His first teacher was Simcha Nathanson, a Soviet violinist who had a second career as a mandolin instructor in Israel. He started a youth mandolin orchestra which, by the time Avital joined, was 40 members strong and had two recordings to its name.

“This bizarre story of a violin teacher coming to a little town in the 1970s, starting a mandolin orchestra and teaching the mandolin was always kind of an advantage for me,” said Avital. “We never looked at the mandolin as just a mandolin so we never thought of it as a limited instrument.”

But after Avital graduated from the Jerusalem Music Academy, he realized that needed to expand his horizons. “I asked myself, ‘can I call myself a mandolinist without really going to Italy and searching for the origins and playing some of the original repertoire and looking into the instrument’s history?’”

After military service, Avital headed to Italy, where he studied with Ugo Orlandi at the Conservatorio Cesare Pollini of Padova. Avital went back to basics, learning "all the techniques and original repertoire" and even switching from an Israeli-made instrument to an Italian one.

But a pure focus on the Baroque mandolin repertoire wasn’t going to satisfy Avital either. He knew that to build a career for himself he’d need to branch out. He eventually wound up in Berlin, absorbing its eclectic arts scene while splitting his time between concertos with orchestras, recitals and collaborations like the Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Project. In 2006, he commissioned Avner Dorman's Mandolin Concerto, which was nominated for a Grammy Award and has evolved into his signature work.

This month, he releases his debut on Deutsche Grammophon, an unusual recording of transcriptions of Bach's concertos for violin, flute and oboe.

“The nice thing about being a mandolin player is the path I'm walking on is being constructed while I walk on it,” said Avital. “I’m trying a lot of different styles. I enjoy very much playing with orchestras. I have a jazz project with [bassist] Omer Avital and some other jazz players. I have a Balkan trio with accordion and percussion here in New York. I’m trying to keep everything very wide.”

Video: Amy Pearl; Sound: Edward Haber; Production & Text: Brian Wise

Café Concert: Michael Slattery

listenerservices@wqxr.org (WQXR Radio) — Wed, 16 May 2012 17:32:39 -0400

Video: Michael Slattery and Todd Almond play Dowland

John Dowland is often considered the pinnacle of refined Elizabethan music. He artfully combined melancholy lyrics with dance rhythms that showed off his instrument, the lute. Modern British musicians have claimed him as their own, from Benjamin Britten to Sting.

But there is a bit of research suggesting that Dowland was actually born in Ireland, enough to have inspired the young tenor Michael Slattery to dream up "Dowland in Dublin," a provocative recording in which the composer's art songs are retooled to suggest Irish fiddle tunes.

Whether or not he was born near Dublin, as one theory goes, or Westminster, England, "he did have some very close connections to Ireland," noted Slattery, an American of Irish descent. "He was a Roman Catholic, he had an honorary degree from Trinity College and he dedicated a song in his collection, A Pilgrim's Solace, to a merchant of Dublin in Ireland, referring to him as 'my loving countryman.' He also came from an Irish family."

In reworking the songs, Slattery and the Canadian early music ensemble La Nef found another historical precedent: just as Irish fiddle tunes from the early 17th century were left as skeletal melodies (and not orchestrated), so too were some of Dowland's songs. By forgoing formal accompaniments, it is possible to consider how a traditional Irish session player would approach these songs.

In the WQXR Café, Slattery and pianist/arranger Todd Almond retooled "His Golden Locks" for upright piano and the Indian shruti box.

"The thing is, John Dowland is so beautifully composed you don't really need to do anything to it at all," said Slattery. "But, I've always felt there's such perfection to his orchestrations that sometimes [singers] can't get beyond the formality of it. Some of his songs have not really had the opportunity to be treated as folk songs even though they are well-suited to that treatment."

Does this unorthodox approach bother hardline early-music purists? In a word, yes. "It's funny, it's still a controversial thing to do."

Video: Amy Pearl; Sound: George Wellington; Production/text: Brian Wise

Café Concert: Steven Isserlis

listenerservices@wqxr.org (WQXR Radio) — Wed, 09 May 2012 16:59:51 -0400

VIDEOS: Steven Isserlis plays Tsintsadze and Kabalevsky

Steven Isserlis, the English cellist and a guest in the WQXR Café, said that he’d like to write a book about what it’s like to be a professional musician. He's not the first with that idea but one expects he’d have a lot to say.

Isserlis can wax lyrically about the joys of playing the Beethoven cello sonatas, the religiosity he finds in the cello music of Bach, and why a rarity like Kabalevsky's Second Cello Concerto is "a real winner of a piece."

A prolific writer whose output includes two children's books, Isserlis blogs on such diverse topics as Hitler's musical tastes and Victorian literature. A fan of the Beatles, he is an acquaintance of Paul McCartney and styles his hair not unlike the Fab Four once did. In conversation Isserlis is as witty and opinionated as his writing, as spirited and assured as his musical performance.

Isserlis is most animated when talking about Beethoven, a composer he resisted for the first half of his career. Five years ago, he dove in with a day-long Beethoven marathon at the Wigmore Hall. This week, he performs more Beethoven with fortepianist Robert Levin over four programs at the 92nd St. Y. Further Beethoven cycles are planned this year in San Francisco and Tokyo, as well as a recording with Levin.

"I had this resistance to Beethoven and I don’t know why,” Isserlis told Naomi Lewin. “It’s the most wonderful, life-enhancing music. You resist it and then you give into it. It just takes you over. It’s a very important part of my life now.”

Isserlis’s late-life conversion seems to mirror a similar decision to record the Bach cello suites in 2007 – some three decades into his career. The Bach album earned much critical acclaim. "It’s like some women never feel ready to have babies and then there comes a time,” he said. “I finally got up my courage to do it.” The decision came with some encouragement from his then-90-year-old father. "It was really what kicked me into the studio,” said Isserlis. “He came and sat in the studio when I recorded the Sixth Suite, which was his favorite.”

Isserlis was born into a musical family in London (his parents and two sisters are musicians). At 14, he moved to Scotland where he studied with Jane Cowan, a revered cello teacher who had students read Goethe's Faust because she thought it would help them play Beethoven better. In the mid 1970s he studied at Oberlin College Conservatory in Ohio. His big breakthrough came in 1989, when composer John Tavener wrote The Protecting Veil for him, which became one of the major cello works of the late 20th century.

Now 53, does Isserlis ever tire of the touring treadmill, with orchestras asking for the same limited bunch of concertos? "Audiences do come for famous pieces,” he acknowledges. But he quickly insists that he has struck a healthy balance.

“I can’t imagine ever getting tired of Elgar, Dvorak or Schumann, because they are masterpieces and I love them and they always say new things to me.”

Video: Amy Pearl; Sound: Jason Isaac; Production & text: Brian Wise; Interview: Naomi Lewin

Café Concert: Nathan Gunn

listenerservices@wqxr.org (WQXR Radio) — Wed, 02 May 2012 12:48:25 -0400

VIDEO: Nathan Gunn sings Kurt Weill

You’ve encountered the scene in countless cartoons and comedies: an opera singer lets loose an earthshaking high note and champagne flutes shatter, monocles crack and the chandelier explodes as the power of his or her voice wreaks havoc on the concert hall. Whether or not this parody is really based on reality, listeners in the WQXR Café said they half expected to see a shattered glass or two when Nathan Gunn performed the music of Kurt Weill recently.

Gunn unleashed his full, rich baritone with a stadium-filling sound but he also filled the room without overwhelming it. It's all a process of ongoing calibration, he explained afterwards. "The venues that I usually sing in are usually so big that there’s never any big in it. It’s just audible,” he said. “So for me to be able to make big is fun.”

Gunn added that he and his pianist, Julie Gunn (who is also his wife), will sometimes transpose down a piece to a lower key for smaller spaces, a common practice that takes some of the edge off the sound. Conversely, some keys just yield a stronger effect. "The reason why I think a lot of the opera arias were written in the keys that they were is because you use that higher part of your register, it’s louder,” he noted. “It’s just more audible."

These days, Gunn, 42, can be heard in venues of all sizes, from the War Memorial in San Francisco (3,146 seats) and New York's Metropolitan Opera House (3,800 seats) to the intimate Café Carlyle, where he sang a three-week cabaret run last year. His versatility means he can sound comfortable in roles like the Count in Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro and Lancelot in Camelot as well as the title character in Britten’s Billy Budd, a signature role that he performs at the Met this month (his 2009 recording of the opera with the London Symphony Orchestra won a Grammy).

As much Gunn's his voice has received acclaim, opera fans have frequently made note of his dapper appearance, which earned him a place in People magazine’s “sexiest men alive” issue in 2008 (he shared the honors with Gordon Ramsay and Todd Palin, among others). It was Gunn's famously shirtless production of Iphigenie en Tauride at Glimmerglass Opera in 1997 that helped to set off a new breed of baritone known as the “barihunk." Opera directors have capitalized on this fact ever since.

Still, Gunn is more likely to be found rehearsing and teaching than posing for any calendars: both he and his wife are on the music faculty at the University of Illinois, where they teach voice and accompaniment, respectively. After the Café Concert, the couple chatted with WQXR staff members about the nuances of piano timbres and improvisation. Below watch the Gunns’ performance of “This is the Life,” from the 1948 musical Love Life, with music by Kurt Weill and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner:

Video: Amy Pearl; Sound: Edward Haber; Production & Text: Brian Wise

Café Concert: Tim Fain

listenerservices@wqxr.org (WQXR Radio) — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 17:18:48 -0400

VIDEO: Tim Fain Performs Philip Glass's Partita

Few violinists can claim to be film stars. Jascha Heifetz had a few roles in the 1930s and 40s. Joshua Bell was a body double in “The Red Violin," from 1999. Tim Fain is a violinist who has had an actual on-screen role, and accompanying Natalie Portman no less, in the 2010 thriller "Black Swan."

The intense, dance-rehearsal scene featured Portman (and her body double) dancing to Fain’s performance of a Bach partita and a version of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake (his left hand even gets an extended close-up shot).

Fain told the assembled audience at his WQXR Café Concert that he repeated the scene some 60 times, as director Darren Aronofsky captured every possible angle. “What you see me playing on screen is what you hear in most instances,” he explained.

“What we did on that was we filmed 20 rehearsal takes and 20 more takes with Natalie's double and then at the end of the day it was 'let's get everybody off the set here and just record music.' So we'd have a few times in the space while we have it fresh right there. It ended up sounding good enough that we'd use it right in the movie.”

Fain grew up in Los Angeles, studied violin at the Curtis Institute of Music and the Juilliard School, and won an Avery Fisher Career Grant. Before "Black Swan" he was featured as the violin double for Richard Gere in the 2005 family-in-crisis drama "Bee Season." "Richard Gere knew his stuff, which is not surprising,” noted Fain. “He actually called me off on one little place where I was using a little more vibrato in my performance than he was doing on screen.”

Fain got the "Black Swan" gig thanks to his friendship with Benjamin Millepied, who served as the movie's choreographer; Fain was an on-stage violinist in the 2005 New York City Ballet piece "Double Aria," which Millepied choreographed.

The choreographer worked with Fain on the violinist’s latest project too, a multimedia violin recital called "Portals," with which he is currently touring (it comes to the Copland House in Mount Kisco on May 20). Billed as a "musical exploration of the human longing for connection in the digital age," it blends films by Kate Hackett, a piano accompaniment by Nicholas Britell, and readings by Fred Child of some of Leonard Cohen’s poems.

At the center of "Portals" is Philip Glass's Partita for Solo Violin. Fain performed the 35-minute work at the Met Museum on April 21 (Q2 Music has a stream of the performance), and he presented a portion of it in the WQXR Café. "We worked so intensely on the piece to get it just so,” he said of his collaboration with Glass. “Now it feels like it fits my hands so wonderfully.”

Video: Amy Pearl; Audio: Edward Haber; Production & Text: Brian Wise

Café Concert: Quartet New Generation

listenerservices@wqxr.org (WQXR Radio) — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 13:05:03 -0400

ViDEO: Quartet New Generation Plays the Clockwork Toccata

Remember recorders? Those long plastic tubes with eight holes in them that can grate on a listener's ears after minimal milliseconds? That, at least, is one view of the instruments that are handed out in elementary schools, and used more for teaching kids about music than producing beautiful sounds.

The fact is, there are virtuoso recorder ensembles, among them, the Quartet New Generation (QNG), from Berlin. The all-female quartet plays on around 40 different types of recorders -- ranging from a few centimeters in length to over six feet tall. Their repertoire runs the gamut: Renaissance and Baroque dances, arrangements of Bruckner and Shostakovich, avant-garde theater pieces by living composers.

In the WQXR Café, the ensemble played Fulvio Caldini's Clockwork Toccata, a buoyant minimalist jigsaw puzzle reminiscent of Steve Reich. QNG member Susanne Fröhlich admitted that not every composer is so naturally adept at writing for the ensemble. "It’s a big challenge to write for our instrument because there is not so much original literature," she said. "Composers have to be really flexible and really open to listen to everything we show."

The QNG began in 1998 as an ad-hoc student group at the Amsterdam Conservatory. The members, all from Germany and Austria, clicked and they soon began winning chamber-music competitions, like the Concert Artists Guild prize in New York. They built a particular niche on the new-music circuit, appearing on the 2010 Bang on a Can Marathon and at the MATA Festival this week in New York. They've also cultivated a outre image, with glamorous press photos and theatrical pieces like Chiel Meijering's Cybergirls Go Extreme (played with colorful wigs and robotic dance moves).

Despite these achievements, concert venues don't always know what to expect. "We have a range of 40 instruments with us," said Fröhlich. "The smallest is about half a foot and then we have a recorder that’s about six-and-a-half-feet tall."

"When presenters book us and think about a recorder quartet they think about four or eight instruments," added QNG member Heide Schwartz. "When they pick us up with a car sometimes it’s a little problem. Then we have to go twice or some of us have to walk and we put the luggage in the car."

Video: Amy Pearl; Sound: Edward Haber; Text & Production: Brian Wise

Café Concert: Alexandre Tharaud

listenerservices@wqxr.org (WQXR Radio) — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 15:47:43 -0400

VIDEO: Alexandre Tharaud plays Clément Doucet's Chopinata

When classical composers explore jazz, it is sometimes portrayed as a form of musical dress-up. Think of the jazz-tinged classical pieces of the 1920s: Ravel's Violin Sonata, Stravinsky's Ragtime, Milhaud's La creation du monde. But some historians and musicians increasingly believe that genuine creative fusions emerged from this era, many of which have yet to be discovered by a larger audience.

Alexandre Tharaud, a French pianist, has a particular fascination with the music that was performed at Le Boeuf Sur le Toit, a Right Bank cabaret founded by Jean Cocteau and Louis Moysés in 1921. It became the epicenter of cabaret society during the 1920s and a haunt for jazz musicians and classical composers. One could hear the pianist Jean Wiéner playing Bach, Clément Doucet vamping through Cole Porter, or Marianne Oswald singing the songs of Kurt Weill. Serge Diaghilev and Maurice Chevalier were regulars at the bar.

“From the opening night and many years, you could hear jazz in this cabaret-bar,” Tharaud explained. “They were long concerts – four or five hours all night.” In the WQXR Café, Tharaud opted for something more concise. He played Chopinata, one of several clever jazz tributes to classical works that Doucet wrote during this period.

All too often, this is music that gives classical pianists awful headaches as they struggle to deny all their training and play off the beat. But for Tharaud, a sense of swing may be in the genes. The pianist says his grandfather was a violinist who played both classical and jazz in Parisian concert halls and clubs during the 1920s.

This fall, Tharaud will release a recording devoted to music from the heyday of Le Boeuf Sur le Toit. He'll also perform a recital of more traditional piano literature on Carnegie Hall’s Distinctive Debuts series. For a pianist whose career has been centered mainly in Europe, and has recorded a series of major-label albums from Scarlatti and Bach to Chopin, Tharaud may be a revelation for New Yorkers.

Video: Amy Pearl; Sound: Edward Haber; Interview: Terrance McKnight; Production & Text: Brian Wise

Café Concert: So Percussion

listenerservices@wqxr.org (WQXR Radio) — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 17:20:20 -0400

VIDEO: So Percussion Plays Music by Cage and Treuting

Seashells have been used as musical instruments for many hundreds if not thousands of years. The Triton shell ("Triton's trumpet") serves as a trumpet in Melanesian and Polynesian culture. The Queen Conch has a flugelhorn-like effect in music of the West Indies.

The composer John Cage had a rather different idea for the humble shell. His 1976 work Inlet consists of the amplified sound of water being sloshed around in several conch shells of different sizes, some quite massive, others merely palm-sized. A tape of burning pine cones is heard in the background. At one point a performer blows into a conch shell which sounds something like a foghorn.

Musicians from the Brooklyn quartet So Percussion brought this otherworldly work to the WQXR Café recently, making ample use of our water cooler and instilling a certain Zenlike coolness in the room. Inlets was one of a handful of ecological pieces Cage wrote in the seventies, others being Child of Tree (1975), which calls for the amplification of a potted plant, and Il Treno (1978) for "prepared trains."

Cage, who was a devotee of the percussion family and dedicated his career to challenging the very notion of what music is, will be the focus of So Percussion’s concert at Zankel Hall on Monday night.

The program is part of a series of concerts the percussion group is giving around the world to mark the 100th anniversary of Cage's birth. Among the pieces it is touring is 24 x 24 by member Jason Treuting, which echoes Cage's extravagant pots-and-pans sound collages with a variety of instrumental and spoken sounds.

"If you think of Haydn as the grandfather of the string quartet, for us, we think of Cage as the grandfather of the percussion tradition," said member Adam Sliwinski on WNYC's Soundcheck. Considering his eccentric reputation, Sliwinski added: "If you're a percussionist, Cage is your old master, which is a funny word to apply to a guy like him."

Video: Amy Pearl; Sound: Edward Haber; Text: Brian Wise

Café Concert: Ryu Goto

listenerservices@wqxr.org (WQXR Radio) — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 17:53:28 -0400

VIDEO: Ryu Goto Plays Kreisler and Ÿsaye in the WQXR Café

Ryu Goto opened his Café Concert with Fritz Kreisler's Liebesleid (Love's Sorrow), a bittersweet waltz that evokes a kind of aristocratic grace from another era. But Goto is hardly a violinist stuck in the past.

As he launched into his second piece, Ÿsaye’s Sonata No. 6, he seemed to adopt a martial arts-like stance in his posture – a byproduct his years of training towards a black belt in karate. “It’s probably influenced by karate,” the 23-year-old violinist acknowledged. While avoiding finger injuries, Goto said karate has provided him with a necessary sense of balance and "mental maintenance."

Having a well-rounded childhood was key for an artist who hails from a kind of classical royalty. The son of two violinists, Goto was born in New York and began playing at age three. His teachers included violinists Yoko Takebe (the mother of Alan Gilbert), Cho-Liang Lin, and his own mother, who remains an active presence in his career. His sister is Midori, the celebrated violinist who rose to child stardom in the 1980s.

Goto’s burgeoning solo career has been carefully groomed both in the U.S. and Asia, and he has been particularly active in Japan, his family’s homeland. Yet he didn’t follow the straight-and-narrow path of a child prodigy either. Instead of entering a conservatory, he studied physics at Harvard University, where he took on a full slate of extracurricular activities, including golf, lacrosse and guitar (he told one interviewer that he developed a freer style of playing by watching Jimi Hendrix).

Goto admits that “my mother was much more liberal with my education like that than with my sister." At the same time, the younger Goto said he learned from watching his sister and “what it means to be a professional, what it means to be a violinist."

“I got the impression that being a musician isn’t the be all and end all,” he continued. “But she’s gone above and beyond that kind of categorization. She’s become almost something more – a humanist kind of thing.” Goto alludes to his sister’s involvement with nonprofit organizations including her own Midori and Friends, a nonprofit organization providing concerts for underprivileged and hospitalized children.

In 2010 Goto launched the Ryu Goto Excellence In Music Award, an annual $1000 scholarship for high school-age musicians in New York City. The program is administered with the New York City Department of Education.

Does Goto ever hope to combine his background in physics with music? “I was a very bad student so I probably wouldn’t be qualified to talk about physics,” he said, laughing. But he has put his love of karate to professional use. The composer Tan Dun enlisted him as a soloist in his Martial Arts Trilogy, a multimedia work with orchestra. Last summer he gave the piece's New York premiere at Lincoln Center’s Damrosch Park.

“It certainly helped that I have an image ready for this piece,” he said of his training, adding, “I love the movies and I’ve done karate forever.”

Video: Amy Pearl; Sound: Edward Haber; Text: Brian Wise

Café Concert: Xuefei Yang

listenerservices@wqxr.org (WQXR Radio) — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 17:49:41 -0500

VIDEO: Xuefei Yang performs in the WQXR Café

“Piano is the most popular instrument in China because of the Lang Lang effect,” said the classical guitarist Xuefei Yang, referring to her famed pianist countryman. “But most Chinese people live in apartments where it's hard to practice the piano. The guitar is much nicer to practice in your apartment. It's compact."

Yang's belief in the guitar isn't merely pragmatic but inspired by a broader sense of purpose. “I feel it’s important for the guitar to get involved in the main musical family. Classical guitar is a little bit on the edge of the music family.”

As a proselytizer for her instrument, Yang has work to do. Part of the classical guitar's legitimacy problem lies in its limited repertory. While the piano and violin have centuries of music at their disposal, the first concerto for guitar, by Mario Castenuovo-Tedesco, dates only from 1939. Rodrigo's famous Concierto de Aranjuez from 1940 has become the most performed concerto of the 20th century, but still, one can only hear the Rodrigo so many times.

Hence Yang’s latest album, a collection of transcriptions of J.S. Bach, which includes two of his violin concertos, the harpsichord concerto in D minor, and three short solo pieces. Yang said the recording was born out of her desire to expand the Baroque repertoire beyond a few Vivaldi lute pieces. "I really wanted to play something substantial,” she said. “So I found the violin concerto scores and I found they’re very playable on the guitar.”

Bach himself was arguably the greatest transcriber of all time -- of others' music as well as his own. Yang still had her doubts as to whether she could master these virtuosic concertos but “my strong desire play them helped me to overcome the difficulty.” She teamed up with the Elias String Quartet, deciding that a string quartet would better balance with her instrument’s relatively soft sound than an orchestra.

The Beijing native was born in 1977, just as the Cultural Revolution had come to an end. She was the first guitarist in China to enter a music school (the Beijing Central Conservatory) and, according to her biography, the first to launch an international professional career. Yang went on to win a scholarship to study at London’s Royal Academy of Music and since graduating in 2002 she has released six studio albums (including five for EMI) and spent much of her time on the road touring.

Her performance in the WQXR café is a snapshot of her expansive interests, incorporating an arrangement of a work for pipa (Huiran Wang’s Yi Dance) and a tango-flavored piece (Tango en Skaï by Roland Dyens).

Yang hopes she help inspire more young people in China to take up the guitar. “We Chinese believe in the 30-year cycle,” she said of the nature of trends. “Everything has a cycle. After the night it’s going to be morning again.”

Video: Amy Pearl; Audio: Edward Haber; Text: Brian Wise

Café Concert: Brentano String Quartet

listenerservices@wqxr.org (WQXR Radio) — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 15:18:39 -0500

VIDEO: The Brentano Quartet Plays Schubert and Adolph

Franz Schubert's short, hectic life was full of "what ifs" -- unfinished sketches, abandoned works and fragmentary thoughts. Many of these leftovers were quite extraordinary despite their obvious limitations.

Among them is the Quartettsatz in C minor, a piece whose first movement Schubert completed in 1820 but whose Andante he abandoned for unknown reasons. Sensing its value, the Brentano String Quartet commissioned the New York composer Bruce Adolph to write a response in his own style, and he responded with Fra(nz)g-mentation, a dense yet witty homage to the original. During a recent visit to New York the Brentano played the two works back to back in the WQXR Cafe.

“This Quartettsatz is a piece we’ve played a lot and really love,” explained Mark Steinberg, the Brentano’s first violinist. “We wondered a lot why he didn’t finish the quartet because I think it’s as great as the other late quartets. Then I found out he had started a second movement and I thought it would be so nice to play that in a concert and give this piece the kind of scope that another Schubert quartet might have.”

Steinberg and his fellow quartet-mates didn’t want to ask a living composer to simply mimic Schubert, so they asked Adolph to write music in his own style that would "make the piece more complete in a sense."

The commission became the backbone of "Fragments," a project celebrating the Brentano’s 20th anniversary season, which runs through 2012. Along with Schubert, the group took abandoned pieces by Bach, Shostakovich, Haydn and Mozart, and commissioned several composers to write individual responses to them. Along with Adolphe, Charles Wuorinen, John Harbison, Stephen Hartke and Vijay Iyer contribute to the project, joining an older work by Sofia Gubaidulina.

“We really wanted to create a dialogue between the past and the present and that’s a major theme of the program,” said Steinberg.

Several venues contributed to the commissioning project, including Carnegie Hall, where the Brentano will perform the pieces over two concerts, the first taking place on Thursday night. “Fragments” is just the latest in a series of grand conceptual projects that the Brentano have undertaken over the quartet’s 20-year history, including “Bach Perspectives,” a 2003 venture in which they commissioned 10 contemporary composers to write responses to Bach's magisterial Art of Fugue.

Steinberg believes that by pairing new and old pieces, the quartet can help provide context for seemingly foreign contemporary sounds.

“The variety of styles that’s around right now makes it difficult to get inside the language of one composer if you don’t know them well,” he said. “So having something that’s linked to the past, that provides a way in. The best way to approach music is through other music.”

Video: Amy Pearl; Sound: Edward Haber; Text: Brian Wise

Café Concert: Fretwork

listenerservices@wqxr.org (WQXR Radio) — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 13:28:32 -0500

VIDEO: Fretwork Performs in the WQXR Café

The English viol consort Fretwork had much to celebrate as it entered its 25th anniversary season last year. It had, by most all accounts, taken an esoteric, 15th-century bowed instrument -- the viol -- and placed it higher in the public’s consciousness than could ever be imagined.

Along with two-dozen recordings of Renaissance and Baroque music, the group had worked with contemporary composers like Tan Dun, Michael Nyman and George Benjamin; collaborated with pop artists like Elvis Costello and Robbie Williams; and was frequently featured in films – among them, Jim Jarmusch's “Coffee and Cigarettes” and “Broken Flowers.”

But in March 2011, tragedy struck when Fretwork co-founder Richard Campbell took his own life at 55, the product of depression that he had been fighting for many years. Three months later, Susanna Pell, a member for 23 years, left the ensemble. Liam Byrne, a viol player and musicologist with an active freelance career in London, succeeded her, but the events left the members shaken. They made the decision to continue on as a quintet, at least for the time being.

“This last year has been obviously a very turbulent one for us,” said Richard Boothby, the group’s bass viol player and arranger. “There’s been a lot of change and with consort music that’s quite difficult. The way in which you play together can be easily upset.” He added: “It’s taken all year to reestablish equilibrium. But I think we’ve found it now.”

Fretwork makes its long-awaited debut at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall on Wednesday night with a program that Campbell was working on before his death called “Musick’s Monument.” It centers on a selection of airs, fantasias and madrigals inspired by 17th-century musician Thomas Mace’s 1676 book on the music scene, Musick’s Monument. Boothby said the performance serves as a tribute to Campbell. “Had he been alive he would have been here so it’s got poignant memories for us,” he said.

On a pragmatic level, the Carnegie program contains works in three, four and five parts but the ensemble has been forced to put aside its six-part viol pieces for now. (Unlike a string quartet, viol consorts come in varying sizes.) Among the works shelved is a new arrangement of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, which was recorded for Harmonia Mundi in 2011. “That’s been a bit difficult because we would have wanted to play the Goldbergs in Carnegie," noted Boothby, "but with five it would have been another rearrangement and we decided to do this more core repertory."

Whatever Fretwork's long-term plans bring, Boothby said the ensemble will continue with its efforts to expand the repertory for viols, which now includes some 40 commissioned pieces. In October at London’s Wigmore Hall, it will premiere a new piece by the young New York composer Nico Muhly, written jointly for Fretwork and the Hilliard Ensemble.

Meanwhile, in the WQXR Café, the group showed what makes their ensemble -- comprised of treble, tenor and bass viols -- so unique: a kind of delicate, ethereal sound that may never be achieved on modern-day instruments.

Video: Amy Pearl; Sound: Edward Haber; Text: Brian Wise

Café Concert: Shenyang

listenerservices@wqxr.org (WQXR Radio) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 16:48:50 -0500

VIDEO: Shenyang performs Chinese Art Songs

To see Shenyang in a large opera house, you might not guess that he's capable of delivering delicate art songs with subtle expressions. After all, he is a burly six-foot-four-inches tall and possesses a booming bass-baritone that has brought him success in roles like Colline in La Bohème and Masetto in Don Giovanni. He made his Metropolitan Opera debut in the latter role in April 2009, and will return to the big house in February for a reprise of the Mozart/Da Ponte classic.

Yet there is another side to Shenyang’s artistry. He has begun championing Chinese art songs, short pieces that date to the beginning of the 20th century when that country’s composers had begun to study in Western music conservatories. In the WQXR Café, Shenyang sang three songs by Huang Zi (1904-1938), a Yale-trained composer whose art songs are full of direct, lyrical melodies and yet express the inflections of the Chinese language.

Born Shen Yang in 1984, the son of a law professor and a director of a performing-arts group, he started singing at a music high school in his native Tianjin, in eastern China. A stint at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music followed, and Shenyang was soon performing at vocal competitions in Europe.

In 2007, Shenyang took a master class with soprano Renée Fleming, who was impressed with what she heard. She arranged vocal coaching for him that spring at the Metropolitan Opera and he went on to win the 2007 BBC Cardiff Singer of the World competition (beating 24 other singers in the competition from a pool of nearly 700 who auditioned).

Around this time, an arts promoter suggested that the singer combine his name to a single word in order to make it easier for Westerners to remember. He soon got professional management, though he first enrolled in the Metropolitan Opera's Lindemann Young Artist Development Program and the artist diploma program at Juilliard. The latter almost didn’t happen: Shenyang is a big admirer of German lieder (particularly the recordings of the late Hans Hotter) and he considered traveling to Germany to study.

Today, however, Shenyang is based in New York, where he is known to have built a collection of CDs that numbers in the thousands. “Recordings are like my second teacher,” he said. “When I was young I listened to Herbert von Karajan and Michael Jackson at the same time. They’re the same.”

Video: Amy Pearl; Sound: Edward Haber; Text: Brian Wise

Huang Zi: "Homesickness"

Huang Zi: "Flowers in the Morning Mist"

Huang Zi: "Plum Blossoms in the Snow"

Café Concert: Beijing Guitar Duo

listenerservices@wqxr.org (WQXR Radio) — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 09:46:12 -0500

VIDEOS: Beijing Guitar Duo plays Tan Dun and Sergio Assad

In his bestselling 2005 book, "The World is Flat," New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman described what feels like an increasingly smaller world where information, economies and supply chains are closely interconnected.

Friedman's analysis could just as well apply to the arts. Consider the Beijing Guitar Duo. The group hails from China, studied in the United States with a Cuban guitar legend, and plays music ranging from Scarlatti to Brazilian samba. It has won numerous international competitions and tours throughout the US, Europe and Asia.

Comprised of Meng Su and Yameng Wang, the duo has released two albums, the most recent being “Bach to Tan Dun.” As WQXR’s Album of the Week, the 2011 collection includes works by Scarlatti, Bach, Castelnuovo-Tedesco and the world premiere recording of Tan Dun's Eight Memories in Watercolor, arranged for the duo by Manuel Barrueco.

This global repertoire is an outgrowth of the duo's own journey. Su and Wang both grew up in the coastal city of Qingdao but met at the Central Conservatory in Beijing, where they were students of one of China’s leading guitar teachers, Chen Zhi. The two musicians already had begun solo careers when, in 2006, they met Barreuco, the noted Cuban guitarist who teaches at the Peabody Institute of Music in Baltimore. He invited them for an audition, they immediately accepted, and soon the pair began collaborating formally as a duo.

Since moving to Baltimore, the duo has made a New York debut in Carnegie Hall in 2010, signed with a management company, and received a Latin Grammy nomination for its debut recording, “Maracaípe,” which features works written by guitar master Sergio Assad. “Maybe in previous lives we were Brazilian,” joked Su, who explained that Assad’s title track was named for the lush surfing beach near Pernambuco (see below).

In the WQXR Café, the duo also performed three movements from Eight Memories in Watercolor a delicate, colorful suite by the Chinese composer Dun that incorporates several Hunan folk songs. The duo first heard the piece in its original piano version, recorded by Lang Lang, and their teacher volunteered to arrange it. Being a relatively unusual instrumental format, much of the guitar duo’s repertoire consists of arrangements; Su and Wang have also adapted piano works by Scarlatti, Bach and others.

Even as they branch out, the two guitarists hope to put a personal stamp on their concert programs by drawing from the rich musical heritage of their native culture. “Chinese music now in the world is very interesting for the world,” said Su. "From our own experience people love it."

Video: Amy Pearl; Sound: Edward Haber; Text: Brian Wise

Café Concert: Joseph Calleja

listenerservices@wqxr.org (WQXR Radio) — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 17:14:36 -0500

VIDEO: Joseph Calleja performs Puccini and "O Sole Mio"

Joseph Calleja, a Maltese tenor in his mid 30s, has a voice unlike any other in opera today. Critics point to a rapid vibrato combined with an appealing sweetness as well as that unique "ping" that comes through on the high notes.

Sitting back in the WQXR Café recently, just moments after his performance of two vocal standards (see below), the burly singer surmised that his voice is reaching a new level of maturity. "I think that the voice has matured as of late, in the last couple of years, as it should," he said. "The tenor voice develops between the ages of 30 and 35 and it’s in its in its first prime. Then you enjoy the prime until you’re 55."

Calleja recently assumed the title role of Charles Gounod's Faust at the Metropolitan Opera, and is also enjoying the buzz generated by "The Maltese Tenor," his third solo album of operatic arias. As the old-Hollywood reference of the album title suggests, some find Calleja's vocalism has a classic, golden-age character. He doesn't deny that he has modeled his approach on singers from the early and middle part of the 20th Century.

"The press is partially right," he explained. "When were these operas written? What I sing was written between 1850 and 1925 or 1930. Obviously, if I want to sing these operas the way the composer wanted them to be sung, which is, I presume, the quest and the target of any conductor and cast, then you have to go and see what these [earlier singers] did. At the same time you try and dispose of the exaggerations and liberties they took."

Calleja rattles off a list of singers who have influenced him including Enrico Caruso, Giuseppe DeStafano and Jussi Bjorling.

Yet Calleja's first exposure to opera through watching the 1951 film "The Great Caruso" starring Mario Lanza, the tenor who waded deep into popular territory in the 1950s. He went on to buy albums by the Three Tenors, Andrea Bocelli as well as more traditional operas. Calleja said his next recording will, in fact, be a tribute to Lanza. "I don't know if I would be an opera singer had I not watched that movie," he said. "Mario Lanza was a catalyst. I always had a good voice but he made me realize it's an operatic voice."

Video: Amy Pearl; Sound: Edward Haber; Text: Brian Wise

Joseph Calleja & pianist Alan Hamilton Perform "O Sole Mio"

Joseph Calleja & pianist Alan Hamilton Perform Puccini's "E lucevan le stelle" from Tosca

Café Concert: Joshua Bell and Jeremy Denk

listenerservices@wqxr.org (WQXR Radio) — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 15:44:21 -0500

VIDEO: Joshua Bell and Jeremy Denk Play Franck

Some very successful musical collaborations have been built on shaky personal relationships. Gilbert and Sullivan disliked each other and rarely met. Renata Scotto often sang beautifully with Luciano Pavarotti, but excoriated him in her autobiography.

The team of violinist Joshua Bell and pianist Jeremy Denk appears to be different. “Finding the right musical partner is like making best friends,” Bell said. “You make them throughout your life, you sometimes fall into them, but in the end you don’t have a lot of really, really great friends. You have a handful and Jeremy is one of mine.”

Denk concurs. “It’s like when you are talking with someone and you feel this kind-of instant sympathy or empathy.”

Classical musicians often are known to gush around interviewers but Denk and Bell have a track record to back up their mutual admiration society. Both attended Indiana University, but just as Denk entered the school in 1990, Bell had already graduated. The latter was on his way to a big career as a soloist and violin pin-up god.

But like two ships passing in the night, Bell and Denk kept tabs on each others’ careers. When they finally performed together – playing the Grieg Violin Sonata at the 2004 Spoleto Festival in Charleston, S.C. – sparks flew. They've been touring regularly ever since. This month they release "French Impressions," their first recording, which consists of violin sonatas by Saint-Saens, Franck and Ravel.

In the WQXR Café, Bell and Denk played the blistering finale from Franck’s Sonata in A Major. Bell surmised that he's performed the work "at least 1,000 times," which isn’t entirely surprising. Franck wrote the piece as a wedding present for Eugène Ysaÿe, who gave its premiere. Ysaÿe then taught Josef Gingold, who in turn taught Bell at Indiana (where Bell now holds a professorship himself).

The new recording also marks a turning point: Bell’s last release for Sony, “At Home with Friends,” was a smorgasbord of classical, pop, Latin jazz and film-music arrangements (Denk appeared on one track); Denk’s recent recordings have focused on knotty works by Schoenberg and Stravinsky.

The two artists decided to record "French Impressions" not in a traditional studio but at the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix, AZ. “Recording is scary because you know it’s going to be down forever,” said Denk. “Especially for this music – it’s so much is about the sound and the color and the pallet of colors from both instruments. That’s very important for us to make sure we have the right sound.”

Tune in to WQXR to hear more performances of Joshua Bell & Jeremy Denk on Jan. 10 at 8 pm.

Video: Amy Pearl; Sound: Edward Haber; Interview: Elliott Forrest; Text: Brian Wise

Café Concert: Charlie Siem

listenerservices@wqxr.org (WQXR Radio) — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 22:41:13 -0500

VIDEO: Charlie Siem Plays Shostakovich

While chatting with Charlie Siem, one gets the feeling the English violinist is yearning to quote that old shampoo commercial: Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.

But the part-time model is probably too polite to say so – and besides, he’s not really concerned about what people in the classical music field think about his sideline career, which includes being the face of the British luxury goods maker Alfred Dunhill and appearing in magazines like Italian GQ and Vogue.

“They’d be as superficial as they think I’m being if they did judge me for it,” he said of the potential skeptics. “The whole fashion element was not something I was seeking out. It happened quite organically. These opportunities were presented in front of me and I wasn’t going to say no.

“As far as I was concerned it was a Charlie Siem violin campaign, because it was using me as a violinist and promoting me as a violinist,” he added of the modeling work. "It made complete sense to me to raise my profile to do it."

Last year, Siem signed a recording contract with Warner Classics and in September, he released his second album, featuring challenging concertos by Bruch and Wieniawski as well as Ole Bull’s rarely-performed Cantabile doloros e Rondo giocoso (Bull is also a distant relative). Joined by the London Symphony, the album has earned favorable reviews from the traditional classical music press.

Siem began playing violin at age four after hearing Yehudi Menuhin on the radio. He studied with Ithzak Rashkovsky and Shlomo Mintz at the The Guildhall School of Music and The Royal College of Music in London (he also has a degree from Cambridge). His debut recording, featuring violin sonatas by Grieg and Elgar, put him on the map at BBC Radio 3 and Classic FM. Concerto appearances with the Royal Philharmonic and Moscow Philharmonic followed.

Yet it’s also clear that Siem, 25, will have to make some choices in the years ahead: the fashion world continues to come calling, and he’s recently performed at events for Lady Gaga and the designer Vivienne Westwood. Siem has worked beside pop artists like Bryan Adams, and is considering a jazz project.

“I’ve had the idea of exploring the concept of improvisation,” he explained. "I like the gypsy nature of the violin and expressing yourself in the most pure sense."

He continues: “I think classical music, of all kinds of music, has had the most flamboyant history of all. It’s had characters far beyond any pop characters. When you think of Franz Liszt, when you think of Paganini, and all these weird characters. Or Mozart for Christ sakes! It’s really the ultimate in theatricality and drama. So if nothing else I’m just incorporating in our modern times an element of that sort of thing.”

Video: Amy Pearl; Sound: Edward Haber; Interview: Jeff Spurgeon; Text: Brian Wise

Café Concert: Cypress String Quartet

listenerservices@wqxr.org (WQXR Radio) — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 10:36:19 -0500

Video: The Cypress Quartet Performs in the WQXR Cafe

Even in a classical music field infatuated with anniversaries, the 15-year mark can be a knotty matter for a touring ensemble. It's not as splashy as ten or twenty, and doesn't have a meaning attached to it like the diamond or silver. The San Francisco-based Cypress String Quartet turns 15 this year with an unusual venture: a nationwide radio tour. The ensemble joined us in the cafe as part of the first leg of that journey to perform music by Beethoven, helping to cap WQXR's Beethoven Awareness Month.

To support the radio tour, the group started an account on the funding Web site Kickstarter.com, and set a goal for $2,000. It currently has 11 backers and has raised over $1,000. "We live in San Francisco so we can't leave any bit of new technology stone unturned," said Tom Stone, the group's first violinist.

The Cypress has long used the kind of DIY approach more common among indie rock bands than chamber groups. They came together in 1996, not as an outgrowth of a music conservatory program, as many quartets are, but through an open casting call. "The other violinist and I both studied with the same teacher and we had the idea that when we finished school we'd put a quartet together," said Stone. "We talked to Jennifer [Kloetzel, the cellist], who is recommended to us by a mutual friend, and talked to her about this crazy idea we had."

The crazy idea, said Kloetzel, was "there was no job and no guarantee. We were all finished up with grad school. I had friends in New York who said, 'if you do this you're going to fall off the face of the earth.' It was a leap of faith for all of us."

The members all moved to San Francisco and started rehearsing together in living rooms and garages for five hours a day, talking about their dreams and surviving on Ramen noodles. By mutual agreement, they didn't take other outside work, in order to stay fresh and focused for quartet rehearsals. And perhaps most unconventionally, the group didn't hop on the competition circuit, generally considered a direct career springboard for string quartets. "The first couple years were hard," Kloetzel said. "But eventually callbacks started to come in."

She added: "At this point in our lives we were chomping at the bit to get out there and sink our teeth into Beethoven together."

In those early days their approach emphasized passion over strict discipline, said Stone. "Now we're more interested in the form and the bigger picture," he said. "As we've matured and gotten to know the pieces better we've backed up and our vision of them is broader in a way." In March the quartet will release the third in a three-volume set of recordings of Beethoven's late pieces.

Since its early days, the Cypress has released 13 albums and worked regularly with living composers -- commissioning over thirty works together, and often pairing new pieces with old favorites. Stone noted that two high-profile premieres are on the docket: a new work by the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Jennifer Higdon (October 2012) and another by the New York composer George Tsontakis (2013).

Given that string quartets are famously fractious organisms, the Cypress has one strategy for maintaining good rapport: staying in hotel rooms far apart from one another. "It really is annoying being in a hotel room next to a colleague and they're practicing and you're trying to nap," said Stone.

Video: Amy Pearl; Sound: Edward Haber; Text: Brian Wise

Café Concert: Daniel Hope's 'East Meets West' Ensemble

listenerservices@wqxr.org (WQXR Radio) — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 13:28:31 -0500

Video: Daniel Hope and Musicians Perform in the WQXR Cafe

East and West met, in a manner of speaking, in the WQXR Café recently. The occasion was a performance by Daniel Hope, the English violinist, Gaurav Mazumdar, a virtuoso on the Indian sitar, and Vishal Nagar, a tabla player. Their collaboration was built on the idea that two distinctive cultures can share unlikely yet often reciprocal inspirations.

Hope is a concert violinist who regularly appears with major orchestras and on recital stages but starting 12 years ago, he became infatuated with a project of his teacher, the American violinist Yehudi Menuhin. In the late '60s, Menuhin joined forces with the sitarist Ravi Shankar, touring major concert halls and recording the seminal album “West Meets East.” That project introduced many Western audiences to North Indian classical music for the first time.

When Hope, then in his early 20s, told the elder musicians that he wished to reconstruct those legendary sessions, they not only gave it their blessing but Shankar recommended Mazumdar, his student of some 25 years. Hope said that Mazumdar “arrived not only with great patience but great virtuosity and tremendous musical spirit and was willing to take the time to teach me.”

Of course, much has changed since the era when Indian ragas were enjoyed by hippies seeking transcendence through Eastern spirituality and hypnotic sound worlds. Hope’s project – which included a 2004 recording called “East Meets West” – is rooted in a more scholarly concept. He explained how there is reason to believe that an ancestor of the violin was the ravanastron, a bowed fiddle made of cut coconut shell, goat hide and horsehair dating back thousands of years to Sri Lanka.

“My whole idea of this was to look at the journey the violin has made,” Hope explained. It traveled “in a sense from India via the Orient via the Roma, into Europe, where the Italians then ‘miraculously’ discovered the violin and sent it back.” The instrument’s re-integration into modern Indian music came from British colonizers, who sent out marching bands in the 19^th century. “So the violin has, in a sense, gone full circle.”

Hope says that he continues to discover the subtleties of Indian ragas, navigating their mix of notated structure and free improvisation. More practically, he’s adjusted to the idea of playing while sitting on the floor. “It’s quite a considerable adjustment,” he said. “You have to learn to get comfortable sitting down and you don’t have as much space to move your arms, so the sound production is very different. It’s important to try and match the sound of the sitar.

"Now I enjoy it,” he concluded. “Though I don’t think I’ll want to play the Brahms Concerto sitting down on the floor.”

Video: Kim Nowacki; Sound: Edward Haber; Text: Brian Wise

Café Concert: Miró Quartet

listenerservices@wqxr.org (WQXR Radio) — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Video: The Miró Quartet Performs Beethoven

Perhaps it’s a testament to the energy of their performances that concert promoters and critics still like to tag the Austin, Texas-based Miró Quartet as an "emerging young ensemble."

The group has been active since 1995, and it has had the same membership for most of that period (its fees have gone up, one would assume). The quartet recently experienced its first personnel change since 1997, as second violinist Sandy Yamamoto left in order to spend more time with her two young children, and William Fedkenheuer, a former member of the Borromeo String Quartet, was hired in July after a nine-month search.

The members of the foursome – who also include violinist Daniel Ching, violist John Largess and cellist Joshua Gindele – are in their 30s. By the standards of classical music, that is young. But Gindele notes that there’s nothing like late Beethoven to make a string player ponder age.

"I don’t know why – maybe it’s just because I’m getting grayer. I find more sadness and less anxiety in the work," said Gindele, after a performance of the first movement of Beethoven's Quartet Op. 132 in the WQXR Café. "With the first movement I used to have the idea that it was a little bit anxious and there was a constant tension. Now I feel like it’s a little more settled and a little more back in its chair and a little more espressivo instead of driven."

Gindele adds that Beethoven himself “was definitely facing his own mortality at this point. He had a horrible intestinal illness that he did not think he was going to recover from."

The other members of the Miró agree that the Op. 132 carries a certain weight of time. “All these late quartets are truly autobiographical but in some ways this one has more of a personal message,” said Ching. “I feel like Op. 132 is really driven by something emotional – by what he felt like he had to get out.”

Beethoven composed the work in 1825, as his own deafness had thoroughly advanced two years before his death. Some credit this quartet as T. S. Eliot's impetus to write his poem cycle Four Quartets. In a letter, the author envisioned the piece as “the fruit of reconciliation and relief after immense suffering,” adding, “I should like to get something of that into verse before I die.”

This week at Lincoln Center, the Miró performs Op. 132 preceded by a 75-minute dramatic recitation of Four Quartets by the English actor Stephen Dillane, done from memory. Fedkenheuer, the new violinist, is unable to attend the performances due to a family obligation and violinist Tereza Stanislav is filling in. Nevertheless, the quartet is familiar with the production, having performed it at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in 2009. “It’s easier to grasp a long, complicated, somewhat heavy poem when you both have something non-verbal afterwards,” said Largess.

Video: Amy Pearl; Sound: Edward Haber; Text: Brian Wise

Café Concert: Mikhail Simonyan

listenerservices@wqxr.org (WQXR Radio) — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 17:27:15 -0400

Video: Mikhail Simonyan Performs Tchaikovsky

He has played for Prince Charles in Buckingham Palace, launched a foundation in war-torn Afghanistan and just released his first album on the prestigious Deutsche Grammophon label, a collection of Barber and Khachaturian. But Mikhail Simonyan would probably rather be jumping out of an airplane.

“If I wasn't a classical violinist, I would have wanted to spend more time on adventure sports,” said the 25-year-old from Siberia.

Simonyan also has also taken flying lessons and is known to ride a motorcycle rather than take a cab to concerts. He has attracted the most attention for an initiative he started in 2010 called "Beethoven, Not Bullets," to assist students at the Afghanistan National Institute of Music. “We all understand that the infrastructure needs to be rebuilt in that country -- the roads, the buildings,” he said. “But sometimes the government forgets about the cultural side. So what this program does is provide something on a much higher spiritual level.”

Afghanistan National Institute of Music is Afghanistan's only music school, run since 2007 by Dr. Ahmad Sarmast, a native Afghan who studied music at Monash University, Australia, and the Moscow State Conservatory. The money raised by Simonyan's initiative is designed to cover tuition for general and music education at the school and also provide a stipend for families, who in many cases were dependent on their children working in the streets to support them.

The violinist visited the school in 2010 and said he hopes to return next year.

Simonyan was born in 1985 in Novosibirsk, Russia, the same city where violinists Maxim Vengerov and Vadim Repin grew up. He began playing the violin at age five and by 13, was making his debut in the Szymanowsky concerto with the American Russian Youth Artists Orchestra. It was his first visit to New York and it prompted him to relocate to America rather than pursue his studies in Moscow or St Petersburg. His mother moved from Novosibirsk to be with him for his first few years of study at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.

After releasing a solo album of sonatas by Prokofiev, Simonyan devotes half of his major label debut to Aram Khachaturian (1903-1978), arguably the greatest classical Armenian composer. For the performance, Simonyan commissioned a new cadenza from the Armenian composer Artur Avanesov. “The [original] cadenzas were kind of sticking out for me because they were short and the only thing that you could prove was your fingers could move fast,” he said. The new cadenza brings out the spirituality inherent in Armenian music," he added.

The album’s title, “Two Souls,” is meant to suggest his own personal dualities: “Khachaturian and Barber, Armenian and American. My mother was Armenian and I grew up here in the States.”

Does this interest in national identity and musical ambassadorship translate to other aspects of his life? “I love politics,” Simonyan said. “Oh boy, I do.

“Hats off to Putin,” he continued, unafraid of raising a controversial point. “He’s doing a lot of great stuff with the classical music industry there and building up the country. I think they have ways to go. Now they’ve figured out Moscow and St. Petersburg and now they need to spread that into the region."

Simonyan recently moved to Armenia's capital of Yeveran and is slated to get married in December.

“It’s great to live in Armenia," he said. "It’s a very small nation and I think it’s great that I’m starting a family there and I get to know that country. I tell you - coming back from the tours and getting into Armenia, you get into a completely different world.”

Video: Amy Pearl; Sound: Edward Haber; Text: Brian Wise

Café Concert: David Finckel and Wu Han

listenerservices@wqxr.org (WQXR Radio) — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 18:18:33 -0400

Video: David Finckel and Wu Han Perform Shostakovich

Like any concert programmers, David Finckel and Wu Han are intensely aware of the concerns about the survival of classical music.

As co-artistic directors of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, they tread a delicate line, overseeing a series known for its strikingly traditional subscriber base, where annual programs like a December Brandenburg Concertos marathon are steadfast fixtures on the New York concert calendar.

The loyalty is rooted in seeing familiar artists too, said Finckel. “People who come have a relationship and an understanding of the people who play with the Chamber Music Society and we find that it’s a very endearing character that our audience has. Many have come to Chamber Music Society for all 42 years of its existence.”

Yet the husband-and-wife team also say they are aware of the need to build future audiences and move their organization forward. While critics have sometimes harped on the Society for its conservative character, last season it introduced "Late Night Rose," a casual-format series in the Rose Studio that offers chamber music with a glass of wine by candlelight. In January, the organization presented its first live concert video stream on its web site and for mobile apps. (WQXR broadcasts the Society’s concerts on Mondays at 10 pm.)

The Society is also looking noticeably younger these days, with roughly half of the current artist roster under age 40. “I could easily theorize as well that the presence of younger performers on stage is something that draws a young audience as well,” said Finckel. “One could certainly say that young people are apt to come hear someone that’s close to their age because they empathize with them.”

Wu Han, a concert pianist, and Finckel, a cellist who performs in the Emerson String Quartet, came to the Society in 2004. Along with their personal relationship, the couple perform together frequently, run a festival in Silicon Valley called Music@Menlo and have released a series of recordings on their own record label, Artistled (next up is a collection of clarinet trios with David Shifrin). They are frequently inclined to couch familiar works in novel, sometimes thematic contexts.

One set of programs this winter will be inspired by great patrons of different eras – from Prince Lobkowicz, who commissioned pieces by Haydn and Beethoven, to the American heiress Winnaretta Singer, who commissioned Stravinsky, Faure, Debussy and many others. Another program, on March 13, will bring together players from the world’s leading string quartets (the Vermeer, Guarneri, Brentano, Orion, Emerson, and Juilliard) in a kind of super-group.

Finckel himself will perform in the latter concert as a representative of the Emerson Quartet. “The only concern I have about this program is that when we get into the rehearsals there’s going to be so much storytelling that we won’t have a chance to rehearse," he said, laughing. "So that’s why I made the program really difficult.”

Video: Kim Nowacki and Amy Pearl; Sound: George Wellington; Interview: Jeff Spurgeon; Text: Brian Wise

Café Concert: Vilde Frang

listenerservices@wqxr.org (WQXR Radio) — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 18:08:08 -0400

Video: Vilde Frang performs live in the WQXR Café

What a young artist chooses to play to introduce him- or herself to a city immediately sketches his or her persona for an audience. For a violinist, is it Tchaikovsky? Mozart? Stravinsky? Is she going to be meditative, ebullient, dazzling?

Norwegian violinist Vilde Frang made her US recital debut at Lincoln Center recently in a program of works by Albéniz, Bartok and Strauss, the former composer of which she brought to the WQXR Café. “El Puerto and “Sevilla” were arranged by Fritz Kreisler and, in their Spanish charm and colorful dance rhythms, ignore the stereotype of the isolated Scandinavian country that gave us Grieg, Munch and cool, ambient jazz.

“I do feel very at home in playing Grieg,” said the 24-year-old Frang. “In a way, Grieg was a very natural composer for me to choose for my latest CD. I also feel at least as much as home in Bartok and Strauss. It’s very much about what really appeals to you. And if the music has a strong message it just reaches you no matter where you’re from.”

The Oslo-born musician comes from an artistic family. Her father and elder sister are both double bassists, while her mother is a painter. Her early path was typical of a young prodigy: She made her solo debut with the Norwegian Radio Orchestra at the age of 10, with the Oslo Philharmonic at 12 and around the same time toured Europe and Asia.

Frang first played with the prominent violinist Anne Sophie Mutter at age 12, after the two met at the Bergen International Festival, and went on to perform Bach's Double Concerto with her on tour in 2008, which included a stop at Carnegie Hall. She speaks in reverential tones about her mentor, who has provided musical instruction as well as career guidance. “She’s been a key person in my life,” said Frang, who moved to Hamburg in 2003 to study with Mutter. “What she has done is not only from a musical point of view – but she’s supported me financially.” Frang plays a Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume violin lent by Mutter.

For those who associate Mutter with a serious brand of music-making and controlled glamour, Frang sees a different side: “When I visited New York with her she brought me to the Guggenheim Museum and Broadway and said ‘you have to taste the cheesecake’ and she really did everything she could to show me New York from the best side,” she said. “I really had some fantastic days here.”

Frang is gradually building a reputation on her own terms. She recently released her second album on EMI, and this season she has a busy calendar that includes tours with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, the BBC National Orchestra and an Asia tour with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields.

“Right now it feels completely natural to me,” Frang said of her nonstop pace. “I was always developing myself in this direction. I feel very fortunate and very lucky that I’m able to perform a lot and to travel with my violin and do what I’m able to do.”

Video: Amy Pearl; Sound: George Wellington; Text: Brian Wise

Café Concert: Ballaké Sissoko and Vincent Segal

listenerservices@wqxr.org (WQXR Radio) — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 12:46:21 -0400

Video: Sissoko and Segal perform live in the WQXR Café

At a time when world music is awash with chaotic, cross-genre "fusions,” the duo of Ballaké Sissoko and Vincent Segal are a reminder that the best musical marriages are born from simplicity.

Sissoko plays the traditional kora, an 18-string lute-harp from his native Mali, while Ségal is a French cellist who plays in the trip-hop band Bumcello. The two first crossed paths when Sissoko approached Segal after a concert by the pop group Chocolate Genius.

At first they jammed together informally. But as Sissoko often stopped in Paris to make flight connections from Africa the two musicians sought opportunities to perform together more frequently. “What we’re doing was just improvisation, just jamming,” explained Segal, who is classically trained and has recorded and/or toured with popular artists such as Sting, Marianne Faithful, Elvis Costello and the hip-hop group Blackalicious.

If the kora and cello seems like a curious combination, it’s because it is. “We try and be acoustic as possible because a lot of people in France just think African music is percussion and dance music,” said Segal. “Of course, it’s not.” The two musicians have found that concert presenters don’t always know how to categorize them, with their sound being a hybrid of African and European idioms.

Given the kora is usually performed solo or in an ensemble with a djembe or saba (African drums), Segal needed to find a method of integrating the cello that preserved its lineage. In the WQXR Café he plucked the strings and imitated instruments like the Gnawa guimbri, a lute-like instrument from Morocco or the balafon, a xylophone-like instrument found in West Africa. Sissoko, who studied with the kora legend Toumani Diabate, unleashed streams of glistening, delicate patterns.

Sissoko and Segal have performed together on tours, and in 2009 released the album "Chamber Music." The duo stopped by the studios while in town performing at the Live@365 series at the City University of New York.

Segal noted that the duo is increasingly approached by classical presenters searching for ways to connect with new audiences. “I like when we play classical or jazz or world music but we can play as really quiet as possible,” said Segal. “We don’t do that in rock much.” He frequently turns down rock presenters who wish to book them in clubs where audiences talk throughout the performances and the ambiance is noisy.

“If you only listen to the noise of the audience we can’t play,” he said.

Video: Amy Pearl; Sound: Edward Haber; Text: Brian Wise

Café Concert: Nicholas Phan

listenerservices@wqxr.org (WQXR Radio) — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Video: Nicholas Phan performs live in the WQXR Café

The tenor Nicholas Phan says that he’s as American as dim sum and souvlaki.

A New Yorker with a Greek mother and Chinese father, Phan received an early career break as a contender in the 2003 Cardiff Singer of the World Competition in Wales. The Olympic-style event is one of the major competitions for young singers, and Phan said he was surprised to arrive at his hotel to find an American flag flown outside in his honor.

“You’re suddenly very aware you’re a representative of your country,” said Phan [pronounced paan]. “I had never thought of myself as an American or what that meant at that point. It was really interesting time. It made me realize that America is a cultural melting pot.”

Phan grew up in Ann Arbor, MI, a culturally diverse college town, but as an artist, he has always viewed himself as something of an outsider. This outlook partly draws him to Benjamin Britten, a composer whose operas (Peter Grimes, Albert Herring) are populated by outsider characters. This month, Phan, along with pianist Myra Huang, has released a new album of Britten's songs.

“He is the greatest composer of English language setting since Purcell,” said Phan, 32. “To be able to sing something in English helps you be able to connect with an audience in a really direct way.”

The centerpiece of Phan’s album is Winter Words, Britten’s setting for tenor and piano of poems by Thomas Hardy. English scholars have often mined this cycle, which was an homage to Schubert’s Winterreise, for hidden meanings and rich layers of allusion.

Phan had an epiphany about the cycle five or six years ago when a pianist friend invited him to give a recital at a small university in rural Missouri. At first, the two musicians were hesitant about introducing this complex work, and they padded the rest of the program with easy-to-swallow pieces.

Bracing for lukewarm responses after the concert, “instead what happened was every person came up to usthat night could not stop talking about how moving the Britten was for them,” he said. Audience members said "how much they loved Winter Words and they kept pointing to all of these specific things that they loved. I was really touched by this audience response and it made me realize how powerful this music is.”

Phan’s recording also includes six of Britten’s folk song arrangements (two of which he sang in the WQXR Café) and the Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo.

While Phan has yet to break into some of the top opera houses, his schedule for the fall includes major orchestra dates including the National Symphony in Washington DC, the Baltimore Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

He’ll also be writing his blog, "Grecchinois," its title an amalgamation of his multicultural heritage.

Video: Amy Pearl; Sound: Edward Haber; Text: Brian Wise; Interview: Naomi Lewin

Nicholas Phan and Myra Huang: "Come you not from Newcastle?", arr. by B. Britten

Nicholas Phan and Myra Huang: "The Salley Gardens", arr. by B. Britten

Café Concert: Kristin Lee

listenerservices@wqxr.org (WQXR Radio) — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 16:33:45 -0400

Video: Kristin Lee performs live in the WQXR Café

Plenty of violinists have evoked the sounds of other instruments: The late Yehudi Menuhin matched the sitar in his collaborations with Ravi Shankar. Mark O’Connor has brought Appalachian fiddling into orchestra settings. This week, the young violinist Kristin Lee tries something more unusual: premiering a new piece by the composer Vivian Fung that emulates the sounds of the gamelan, the musical ensemble from Indonesia known for its gently chiming percussive sounds.

The gamelan has been a source of fascination for various composers of the last century, including Claude Debussy, Benjamin Britten and Lou Harrison, but few have tried to fuse its sounds with those of the solo violin.

The genesis of Fung’s Violin Concerto dates back a couple years, when Lee was a Master’s student in Fung’s music theory course at Juilliard. After the teacher brought a visiting Balinese gamelan to her class one day in 2009, Lee was mesmerized. “I thought this was the most unbelievable thing I’ve ever heard and seen,” said Lee, 25, who studied with Itzhak Perlman and Donald Weilerstein. “I was completely hooked and obsessed.” Soon after, Lee, the concertmaster of the Metropolis Ensemble, proposed a new concerto that would evoke gamelan textures.

In 2010, Lee accompanied Fung on a week-long trip to Bali, wherein the latter was touring as a member of Gamelan Dharmaswana (Fung first went to the Pacific island nation in 2004 as part of a fellowship organized by the UCLA Center for Intercultural Studies and it has been a large part of her work ever since). A concerto soon began to take shape, incorporating the interlocking rhythms, odd meters and a quote from a Javanese folksong. The violin, being a more linear instrument, doesn’t directly imitate the gamelan as much as it joins the party, weaving in and out like a dashing interloper (watch the cadenza below).

Lee and the Metropolis Ensemble recently recorded the Concerto for Naxos, with a release scheduled for 2012. The Korean-born violinist also performs as a member of the Chamber Music Society Two at Lincoln Center, tours as a soloist and teaches violin at Queens College.

“With Kristin because we have this special bond as far as friends and musically, I think she adjusted her sound to really embody the drive that it takes for this concerto,” said Fung. “She has the folky, earthy sound that you get with a lot of the folk instruments. It’s not a traditional Bach sound. It’s a rustic sound.”

Video: Amy Pearl; Sound: Edward Haber; Text: Brian Wise

Ysaye: Sonata No. 4, First Movement:

Vivian Fung: Violin Concerto (Cadenza)

Café Concert: Jennifer Choi

listenerservices@wqxr.org (WQXR Radio) — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 14:54:25 -0400

Video: Jennifer Choi performs live in the WQXR Café

If string quartets can be compared to football teams, violinists are like the starting quarterbacks. When one leaves because of injury, retirement or free agency, and another joins, the effect can be drastic. The New York quartet Ethel has just completed such a transition: In June, Jennifer Choi succeeded Mary Rowell, who retired earlier this year for health reasons.

This isn’t the group’s first such transition. Violinist Cornelius Dufallo, formerly of the Flux Quartet, replaced Todd Reynolds in 2005. Violist Ralph Farris and cellist Mary Rowell are the remaining founding members.

Fortunately for Ethel, a quartet that is known for working outside traditional parameters, Choi has a compatible resume. The violinist has been active on New York's new-music scene for over a decade, performing in groups like the Either/Or Ensemble and the Susie Ibarra Quartet, while collaborating with composers like John Zorn and Randall Woolf. In the WQXR Café, Choi performed Capriccio by Jacob ter Veldhuis, a piece for which she gave the U.S. premiere.

“We do actually click,” said Choi of her new quartet-mates. “The fact that we all went to Juilliard and Neil and I had the same teacher, we find that it’s pretty easy to match playing styles.”

Dufallo, who goes by Neil in conversation, recruited Choi in March. "It’s a tough position to fill because it requires all the precision of a classical ensemble but also being able to improvise," said Dufallo. "We all compose. And also cross over into genres that are outside the regular conservatory training. Jennifer had all that and then some."

A native of Portland, OR, Choi studied violin at the Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio. In 1995, she and three other students from the school founded the renowned Miró String Quartet, but she left the group two years later and moved to New York to study at Juilliard. Since then, her path has veered towards pieces that involve laptops or video footage. Several of them can be heard on her 2009 debut album, "Violectrica: Works for Solo Violin and Electronics."

Choi's audition for Ethel came just as she started her first Broadway job, on the musical "Wonderland." "On the morning of opening night, Ethel had asked me to come in and read,” Choi recalled. She received an offer the next day. “I couldn’t say no,” she said. “It was just so energizing to play in a quartet again.” (The move was serendipitous: "Wonderland" closed after just 33 performances.)

Choi said she hopes to write original pieces for Ethel and bring some of her favorite composers into the fold, including Zorn. But for now, she’s giving herself a crash course on the group's expansive repertoire. “We’re going to be playing a different program every week between now and the end of the year,” she said. “That’s going to be the biggest concentration.”

Video: Amy Pearl; Sound: Edward Haber; Text/interview: Brian Wise

Jennifer Choi: "For You"

Jacob TV: Capriccio

Café Concert: International Contemporary Ensemble

listenerservices@wqxr.org (WQXR Radio) — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 15:07:11 -0400

Concert audiences tend to associate Igor Stravinsky mostly with the large, loud or flamboyant – the primal and audacious Rite of Spring, the scintillating Firebird Suite, even the dry and aphoristic Pulcinella. His periodic forays into chamber music, on the other hand, have a more checkered history. And when it comes to his slender output of string quartets? Fuggedaboutit, say detractors.

But members of the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) think otherwise. The new-music group arrived in the WQXR Café to present two of Stravinsky’s works for string quartet including an arrangement of Bach's Prelude and Fugue in C sharp minor from Book 1 of The Well-Tempered Clavier. It’s a piece that sounds so lush and romantic that it scarcely resembles Bach at all.

"Because it was transcribed by Stravinsky we felt a little freer to just be ourselves,” said first violinist David Bowlin. “You have to mimic a piano in the way you play it,” added Erik Carlson, the group’s second violinist (also in the ensemble were violist Maiya Papach and cellist Katinka Kleijn).

ICE is performing two Stravinsky-filled programs this month as part of the Mostly Mozart Festival. Stravinsky is a long way from Mozart both chronologically and stylistically, of course, yet both composers shared certain values: a Classical clarity and economy, as well as a cheeky sense of humor. Stravinsky’s Three Pieces for String Quartet, from 1914, also bears the stamp of folk music, an ingredient that periodically surfaces in Mozart.

“We were thinking, this is not classical music,” said Bowlin of the quartet’s approach. “This is rustic folk music – maybe Eastern European folk music – so a very different sound. So we didn’t conceive of the phrasing in a classical way at all. We thought it should be free and almost improvised sounding.”

Video: Amy Pearl; Sound: Wayne Shulmister; Text: Brian Wise

Café Concert: Music From Copland House

listenerservices@wqxr.org (WQXR Radio) — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 13:55:37 -0400

Aaron Copland, who died in 1990, spent the last 30 years of his life in a modernist, ranch-style house in Cortlandt Manor, NY, not far from the Hudson River. There he worked in a bright glass-walled studio that overlooked a lush, green woods.

For the last dozen years, the composer’s house has been turned into a center for scholarship and performance, most notably as the headquarters of Music From Copland House, a chamber ensemble directed by the pianist Michael Boriskin. The group champions music by Copland and his contemporaries as well as their ancestors and heirs.

Four members of the group arrived at the WQXR Café recently with music by Paul Moravec, a New York composer who has been decorated with a series of awards and major commissions. Moravec's Tempest Fantasy (2002), the work for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 2004, is based on the Shakespeare play and uses its central characters -- Ariel, Prospero and Caliban -- as the subjects of the first three movement. Here, violinist Nicholas Kitchen (of the Borromeo String Quartet), clarinetist Derek Bermel, cellist Joshua Roman and Boriskin on piano launched into the perpetual-motion opening movement with vitality and vigor.

“It’s a gas of a piece," exclaimed Boriskin after the performance.

Music From Copland House are presenting Moravec’s piece as part of a pair of concerts devoted to Pulitzer Prize winning-works at the Caramoor Festival in Katonah, NY. Among the composers represented are vintage names like Barber, Ives and Copland, as well as recent winners like William Bolcolm, Jennifer Higdon and Bright Sheng. The second installment takes place on July 31; in the meantime, tune in for a live online chat with the members of the ensemble on Q2’s The New Canon on Monday at 4 pm.

Video: Amy Pearl; Sound: Edward Haber; Text: Brian Wise

Café Concert: Jason Vieaux

listenerservices@wqxr.org (WQXR Radio) — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 16:32:18 -0400

Video: Jason Vieaux performs live in the WQXR Café

Until this year, the Curtis Institute of Music, the famed conservatory in Philadelphia, did not regard the guitar as an instrument worthy of a place in its curriculum. When the school changed its policy, it hired Jason Vieaux to co-run a guitar department. This week, Vieaux gave a Café Concert, offering a program that was in some ways a treatise on the guitar's usefulness, both as solo instrument with an original repertoire, and as a close cousin of rock music and jazz.

Of the former category, Vieaux performed two works by the usual suspects: Sevilla, a tasteful arrangement Isaac Albeniz, and Joropo, an evocative Latin dance piece by the Argentine composer José Merlin (both will be heard in a recital at the Caramoor Festival on July 21). He also switched gears to perform an arrangement of a song by the jazz-guitar legend Pat Metheny, who was the subject of Vieaux’s 2005 album “Images of Metheny.”

Vieaux, 38, is known for stretching the boundaries of classical guitar repertoire even as he works from within the system. In the 1990s he became the youngest person to ever lead the Cleveland Institute of Music Guitar Department. During that time, the guitar was enjoying a healthy expansion in higher education, as American conservatories like Juilliard, the Eastman School of Music and the Oberlin Conservatory all launched guitar departments. Curtis was a holdout -- a conservatory with primacy in orchestral, vocal, piano, and solo career training -- but under director Roberto Díaz, was seeking to encourage new areas of emphasis.

“We are really entering something of a golden age right now for guitar,” said Vieaux, who will run the new department with David Starobin. “I’ve seen just in the last five years there’s a huge surge of tons of players that play the instrument great. You even hear some natural musicians in there.”

Curtis will have just four guitar students when the new program is up and running, but given that enrollment at the entire school is in the range of 150 to 170 students, it’s indicative of its selectiveness. Vieaux, who was a guitar prodigy while growing up in Buffalo, NY, and who himself entered the Cleveland Institute at age 16, is optimistic about the future for the classical guitar.

“You see a lot more competitions and festivals,” he said. “Every week out of the year there’s a guitar competition and festival combined in some corner of the world. There are a lot more opportunities for young players to play.” He paused, and added, “I like checking out what the younger cats are doing.”

Video: Amy Pearl; Audio: Edward Haber; Interview and text: Brian Wise

Café Concert: Arnaud Sussmann

listenerservices@wqxr.org (WQXR Radio) — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 17:32:17 -0400

Video: Arnaud Sussmann and Adam Golka perform live in the WQXR Café

Like the proud owner of a new car out for a spin, Arnaud Sussmann came to the WQXR Café with an instrument that had barely nudged the odometer. Two months earlier he had purchased a violin made by the respected French instrument maker Jean Baptiste Vuillaume, built around 1850. Like many Vuillaume violins, this one was a copy of a Guarneri del Gesu, specifically the "Panette" of 1730. It represented a remarkable stroke of luck for the young Juilliard graduate.

Sussmann had been on a long search for a new violin that had taken him to Italy, France, Chicago, New Mexico and around New York, in which he tried out multiple fiddles but constantly left empty-handed. He had even considered other Vuillaumes but found their sound bulky and their action sluggish. One day, he was leaving a midtown violin dealer when a Vuillaume caught his eye.

"It took me 20 seconds to know it was a great instrument,” said Sussmann, a Juilliard graduate and winner of a 2009 Avery Fisher Career Grant. “It has a very focused, direct sound and a very quick response.” There was a catch however. The dealer had already received an offer and a payment was expected the next day. “I was very sad at first,” said Sussmann. “I said, ‘look, if for some reason this doesn’t come through, please call me ASAP.' The next morning, his phone rang. The deal had fallen through. Sussmann returned to buy the violin the next day. “It was all really fast, which is how it should be when you buy a violin. It has to be love at first sight.”

Buying a fiddle is not unlike an car or house purchase. Multiple inspections and appraisals are needed. There must be a paper trail documenting the instrument’s provenance and history. And while few old instruments are without cracks or blemishes, this Vuillaume was in excellent condition, said Sussmann. “It’s got very few cracks. It all seemed to come together.”

Was Sussmann, born in Strasbourg, France, attracted to a fiddle of his own nationality? “Not at all,” he said. In fact, Sussmann considers his own playing style to be the composite of several national influences. While studying at the Paris Conservatoire his teacher was Boris Garlitsky, a Russian steeped in the Moscow tradition. In 2001, Sussmann accepted a last-minute invitation to study at Juilliard with the revered Israeli-American violinist Itzhak Perlman. He later became Perlman’s teaching assistant, where he went on to receive a Bachelor’s and Master’s Degree, and eventually embark on a busy solo and chamber-music career.

In the WQXR Café Sussmann performed two movements of the Brahms D-minor Sonata as a preview of a concert at the Caramoor Festival in Katonah, NY, on Thursday. The recital marks a decade since he arrived in the U.S. “It’s my tenth year in New York,” he said. “I feel very settled here now.”

Video: Amy Pearl; Sound: Edward Haber; Text: Brian Wise; Interview: Naomi Lewin

Café Concert: Brasil Guitar Duo

listenerservices@wqxr.org (WQXR Radio) — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 16:56:25 -0400

Video: Brasil Guitar Duo performs live in the WQXR Café

Brazilian music draws on a rich vein of influences, including African sounds, jazz and European classical influences. Those sounds come together in the music of the Brasil Guitar Duo, which recently visited the WQXR Café.

Joao Luiz and Douglas Lora came together 15 years ago while music students in Sao Paulo, where the pair grew up. Enrolled in a chamber music class but bored with collaborating with violinists or flutists, the two guitarists decided to start performing together. "The chemistry and sympathy was something natural,” said Lora. “We don’t have to work on that. But over the years we’ve worked on the sound and the subtle things that make a lot of difference.”

The duo’s complementary musical sensibilities and playing styles helped push the group to a top prize at the 2006 Concert Artists Guild International Competition. Soon tour dates began to pile up and recordings fell into place – including a two-CD set of the complete guitar duos by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, and another featuring the complete Bach Flute Sonatas with flutist Marina Piccinini.

Pondering the guitar's legacy in Brazil, Luiz refers to the arrival of the instrument in the New World in the 16th century, brought by Spanish sailors. Latin American countries developed new musical languages for the instrument, especially in Brazil. Classical influences continued to buzz around the periphery. Luiz and Lora are adamant about promoting the fact that "Brazil is much more than bossa nova."

"That’s why we play rhythms from the Northeast of the country,” says Lora, referring to signature styles like the Forró, baião, frevo and maracatu. “Bossa nova is great – everybody loves it – but there’s so much more to the country.”

Despite inheriting a duo legacy that includes the famed Assad Brothers – who also hail from Sao Paulo – Lora and Luiz have had to carve out a niche for themselves. Luiz became an arranger, recasting the work of composers including Bach, Scarlatti and Piazzolla, while Lora has composed original pieces, including the Preludio that’s featured below. Add to the mix Brazilian pieces (by Jacob do Bandolim, Pixinguinha, Djavan, Egberto Gismonti) and newly commissioned works (including an upcoming two-guitar concerto by Paulo Bellinati) and the group is striving to cast a wide net.

"We have the classical background for taking care of the sonorities and the articulations and then at the same time we play Bach in a different way," Lora explained. "We don’t play it like a German guitar player. We play it like Brazilians.”

Video: Amy Pearl; Sound: John Delore; Text: Brian Wise; Interview: Jeff Spurgeon

Café Concert: New York Polyphony

listenerservices@wqxr.org (WQXR Radio) — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 14:56:58 -0400

Video: New York Polyphony performs live in the WQXR Café

When radio programmers discuss "urban music" formats, 14th-century Gregorian chant is generally not what immediately springs to mind. Don’t tell that to the members of New York Polyphony. "We like to have something of an urban vibe to the way we’re bringing this really ancient music to modern audiences,” explained Geoffrey Williams, the group’s countertenor.

Come again?

“We sing a lot of early music but we’re more interested in creating a music experience that is contemporary and edifying to the listener,” adds Craig Phillips, the group’s bass voice. “We’re not a purist group. We’re not a period-practice group. We’d like to bring a lot of this music toward classical mainstream.”

Since its founding in 2006, New York Polyphony has developed a reputation for its crystalline performances of English Renaissance music, French medieval chant, and the occasional contemporary work, as heard on recordings like "Tudor City," a WQXR Album of the Week. But they've also honed a hip, youthful image built around well-tailored suits and publicity photos on dank subway platforms.

The group’s latest project goes even further in tapping pop sensibilities. In May the quartet announced an online Gregorian chant remix competition, an invitation to listeners to remix three chants that they recorded and made available to download: Victimae paschali laudes, Gaudeamus in omnes Domino and Beati mundo corde. The winning remix for each chant will be decided by the group and receive $500, as well as being released as a digital EP on Ariama.com, the online classical music store from Sony Music (the entry deadline is June 20). For the project, the quartet also partnered with Indaba Music, a site where musicians find collaborators for projects by uploading and sharing their music.

Dressing up centuries-old chants in modern garb is a not altogether new phenomenon: in the early '90s, a pop group called Enigma set the pure voices of monks to a synthesized backbeat, becoming an international pop smash and spawning various imitators. The New York Polyphony musicians stress that their project strives for something much deeper. “You could actually take the creativity to another level,” said Phillips. “Instead of just putting a dance beat with some monks singing, people have really taken it apart, they’ve rebuilt things. It’s very creative. It’s a lot higher concept.”

So far the group has received over 600 entries in their contest, including Steve Reich-style deconstructions, Indian music syntheses, various techno and dance-music styles and even a Barry White-styled reinvention.

When asked if this might be a springboard for a larger project, Phillips and Williams say they’re open to possibilities. “It might be,” said Phillips. “Next time around, maybe we could find some gifted collaborators that could find some project that we would build from the ground up.”

Video: Amy Pearl; Audio: Edward Haber; Interview: Elliott Forrest; Text: Brian Wise

Arthur Sullivan: The Long Day Closes

Orlando de Lassus: La Nuit Froide et Sombre

Café Concert: Philippe Quint

listenerservices@wqxr.org (WQXR Radio) — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 12:57:50 -0400

Video: Philippe Quint performs live in the WQXR Café

A few of history's great violinists have dabbled in Hollywood acting. Isaac Stern played another violinist, Eugene Ysaye, in the 1953 film “Tonight We Sing.” Jascha Heifetz played himself in 1947’s “Carnegie Hall.” Even Joshua Bell had a bit part in “The Red Violin,” from 1992.

Yet for sheer screen time, violinist Philippe Quint outdoes that prominent pack with his role in "Downtown Express," an independent film directed by David Grubin and produced by Michael Hausman ("Brokeback Mountain," "Gangs of New York"). Quint plays a young Russian Violinist, Sasha, who emigrates to New York to study at Juilliard but falls in love with a singer-songwriter (played by Nellie McKay), much to the chagrin of his classical cellist father Vadim (Michael Cumpsty). (The film premiered earlier this week at Symphony Space, though as of press time, Grubin is looking for a distributor.)

It’s a familiar role: Quint himself defected from the Soviet Union in 1991 to study at Juilliard, earning both Bachelor's and Master's degrees from the school. He’s since gone on to build a busy solo career, getting nominated for two Grammys. In 2008, he gained notoriety for leaving his $4 million Stradivarius in the back seat of a Newark taxicab (it was returned after the driver discovered it the next day).

“The whole process was a little bit backwards,” Quint said of the film's casting process. “The director of the film was in the process of developing a script. They were looking for folks from the Russian community who would share their experiences with coming to America and the challenges the community faces when they first arrive. I was one of the people to be interviewed.”

After Grubin learned of Quint’s personal story, the director decided to give the violinist a try. Quint is self-effacing about his limited acting experience, noting that he took lessons with the acting coach Sondra Lee, who has tutored Jane Fonda and rocker Joan Jett, among others.

“For me the greatest actors are Lawrence Olivier and Anthony Hopkins,” Quint said. “You can’t just show up without substantial training in front of the camera and say a couple of lines.”

McKay got the part of Quint’s love interest, Ramona, after Grubin saw her act in the 2006 Broadway revival of The Threepenny Opera. “It was a pleasure working with Philippe,” said McKay. “The more you think of something the more you can get in your own way. Instinctively he had such a beat on the part and he’s such a natural presence.”

McKay also played a familiar character; as a real-life singer-songwriter she has released several critically lauded albums mixing pop, jazz and cabaret influences. When she and Quint perform together in "Downtown Express," it is without the degree of lip-syncing (or violin acting) that is commonplace in many music-related films. In the WQXR Café, she looked on admiringly as Quint performed a virtuosic showpiece that he composed for the film.

"For me this project was pushing me out of the box," said Quint. "It was my first time working with a director. In some earlier interviews I would say 'conductor' instead of 'director.' I've had to correct myself on that several times now."

Video: Amy Pearl; Audio: George Wellington; Interview: Naomi Lewin; Text: Brian Wise

Café Concert: Angela and Jennifer Chun

listenerservices@wqxr.org (WQXR Radio) — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 14:21:57 -0400

Video: Angela and Jennifer Chun perform live in the WQXR Café

Encounters with violin duos are relatively rare in classical music. In fact, the two-violin section in WQXR’s music library had begun to look a little dusty -- until albums by Angela and Jennifer Chun began arriving from the Harmonia Mundi label in 2008.

A touring violin duo cannot exactly draw on a rich literature, but the Chun sisters keep their programs surprisingly varied. At the early end of the spectrum the duo plays Baroque favorites like Bach and Vivaldi's concertos for two violins. But much of their repertoire spans the past century – from Martinu, Milhaud and Shostakovich to Berio, Schnittke and Pärt. The group has commissioned pieces by George Tsontakis (Unforgettable, based on the Nat King Cole song) and Osvaldo Golijov (currently in the works).

One reason for the slender literature may be the inherent homogeneity in the sound of a violin duo. Yet the Chuns are very much a study in contrast, as Jennifer notes: "I like more analytical pieces and she likes everything more straightforward.”

“Usually she plays first violin and I play the lower part, keeping the bottom steady,” added Angela.

The Chuns began playing together from an early age in their native Seattle. They went on to study at Juilliard, at which time they made their professional debut in Bach's Double Concerto with conductor Leonard Slatkin and the National Symphony Orchestra in 1997.

In the WQXR Café, the Chuns offered an all-Hungarian set, highlighted by Ligeti's early Ballad and Dance and two of Bartók's folk-tinged 44 Violin Duos. The Chuns’ passion for Hungarian music started with a former teacher, the Hungarian violinist Denes Zsigmondy. But in recent years, another Hungarian connection has emerged: Jennifer Chun has been dating George Soros, the billionaire hedge fund manager. Although she is reticent about discussing their relationship, the two have been seen together at several high-profile events.

"I’ve visited Budapest many times and have become friends with many painters and composers and performers since then,” she said of Soros's Hungarian roots. “It just became more familiar to me.”

Will the Chuns ever run out of two-violin repertoire? “We can always switch to viola,” said Jennifer Chun. “We do violin-violin, and violin-viola. It’s just fun for us to try new combinations.”

Video: Amy Pearl; Sound: George Wellington; Interview: Jeff Spurgeon; Text: Brian Wise

Café Concert: Inbal Segev

listenerservices@wqxr.org (WQXR Radio) — Wed, 25 May 2011 17:29:13 -0400

In 1990, a 17-year-old Inbal Segev left her native Israel to come to the U.S. to study at Yale University with the famed cello pedagogue Aldo Parisot. She went on to further studies at Juilliard and has been a New Yorker ever since, having settled on the Upper West Side with her husband and three children.

Yet Segev admits that there’s always been a side of her that feels like an expat and her eclectic musical tastes reflect that accordingly. In the WQXR Café she applied her 1673 Francesco Ruggeri cello to a suite of Celtic folk tunes, bringing out the hypnotic, insistent drone that one normally hears in bagpipe melodies. “I’m a pretty conservative player,” Segev admits. “But I like to explore new things and I like to use new elements and give new breath to old programs.”

Segev’s global inspirations go further. She has performed frequently with Fernando Otero, an Argentinian pianist and composer who won a Latin Grammy Award recently, and who is currently writing a “tango-infused” cello concerto for her. He'll join her to perform several of his own pieces in a recital at Le Poisson Rouge on June 1.

And in the 2012-13 season Segev will premiere a concerto by fellow Israeli Avnver Dorman. She notes that Dorman also plans to borrow a melody from an Arabic composer for the piece. “It’s not as a political statement,” she cautions, but adds that the piece will be “a little Middle Eastern, with folk-Arab melodies.”

Video: Amy Pearl; Sound: Edward Haber; Text: Brian Wise