Beethoven and London at the BPO -
Violinist Tianwa Yang returns to the BPO to perform Beethoven
BY JAN JEZIORO
Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra music director JoAnn Falletta returns to the podium at Kleinhans Music Hall for a pair of concerts this weekend, on Saturday at 8pm and Sunday afternoon at 2:30pm. The program includes Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 61, the greatest concerto for violin in the repertoire, and the colorfully programmatic Symphony No. 2 in G major, “London” by Ralph Vaughan Williams, the dean of 20th century English composers.
Chinese born violinist Tianwa Yang, who now resides in Germany, returns to the perform with the BPO for the first time since October 2010, when she was the soloist in The Butterfly Lovers Violin Concerto, one of the most famous modern works of Chinese music. Composed in 1959 by two composers, Chen Gang and He Zhanhao, the work only gained popularity in the late 1970’s after drastic restrictions imposed by the Cultural Revolution on all aspects of Western culture started to loosen.
Raised in Beijing, Tianwa Yang began studying violin at the age of four, winning six competitions as a young child. At the age of ten, she was accepted to study at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing and within one year Hong Kong media described the young artist as “a pride of China.” Yang recorded the complete 24 Paganini Caprices at age 13, making her the youngest artist to ever record these virtuosic showpieces. Following up on that early triumph, her recent release, and the latest of her 15 CD’s released on the Naxos label, of the even more challenging complete solo sonatas for violin by Eugène Ysaÿe immediately won several awards.
Yang has performed in concert halls across Europe, Australasia and North America. Recently, she gave her Canadian debut performances in Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, Calgary with the Hong Kong Sinfonietta and she debuted in New York’s Rose Theater as part of the same tour. Upcoming debuts include those with the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Edmonton Symphony Orchestra, Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra and Slovak Philharmonic, Bratislava.
Joseph Joachim, the greatest violinist of 19th century Germany, once famously declared that while “The Germans have four violin concertos (i.e. those by Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Bruch and Brahms) the greatest, most uncompromising is Beethoven’s”. Amazingly, the violin concerto was less than totally successful at its 1806 premiere performance by Franz Clement, Beethoven’s young friend who was widely regarded as one of the finest violinists in Europe, and who was also a fellow composer. Beginning in 1844, the then twelve-year-old prodigy Joachim, who first performed the work at the Philharmonic Society in London under the baton of Felix Mendelssohn was instrumental in reviving Beethoven’s masterpiece (talk about a historic performance that would make any music lover drool!) and more than a century later, there are very few classical music lovers who would challenge Joachim’s ranking as to the primacy of Beethoven’s work. Although the present situation in our country could not have been anyone’s wildest prediction at the time this concert program was finalized, I’m certain that many members of the audience, including this writer, will find some solace in the broadly affirmative humanity of Beethoven’s music.
Ralph Vaughan Williams was inspired to compose his Symphony No. 2 in G major, “London” shortly before the outbreak of World War I by his friend and fellow composer George Butterworth, who was subsequently killed on the Somme in 1916. Although the work received its successful premiere in March of 1914 in Queens Hall in London, an acoustically superb venue which would not survive the Blitz in World War II, Vaughan Williams afterwards sent the score to the conductor Fritz Busch in Germany, and it disappeared in the upheaval caused by the outbreak of World War I. The composer later reconstructed the score from the orchestral parts in 1915, but it went through several more revisions before being published for a second time in 1936, in its final form. Vaughan Williams initially insisted that his symphony was not a programmatic work, but rather absolute music. However, he allowed the English conductor Albert Coates to provide detailed descriptions of the work’s movements for a 1920 performance, which the musical public has generally been more than happy to accept as a verbal guide to what is happening musically. Interestingly, the work has only been programmed twice previously by the BPO, most recently in 2004 under the baton of then associate conductor Ron Spigelman.
Tickets and mInformation: 885-5000 or www.bpo.org
