Joshua Bell Meets Max Bruch at the BPO -
Violin superstar Joshua Bell is the headliner at the BPO Opening Night Gala Concert
by Jan Jezioro
This year’s BPO opening night gala concert at Kleinhans Music Hall on Saturday September 17 at 8pm will feature the much-anticipated return of the American violinist Joshua Bell performing Max Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 1 under the baton of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra’s Music Director, Maestro JoAnn Falletta.
The entire American classical world would agree, without a doubt, that Joshua Bell is one of the top two or three currently active American violinists. Bell has appeared as a soloist on the stage at Kleinhans on numerous occasions and has recorded more than 40 CDs since his first LP recording at age 18, garnering Grammy, Mercury, Gramophone and Echo Klassik awards in the process. The very first CD that Bell recorded in 1988 featured Max Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 1, the very same work that he will be performing at this concert. Interestingly enough, when Bell performed with the BPO for the first time, thirty years ago in March 1986, long time audience members might recall that he performed this same concerto. What many BPO fans seemed to have forgotten though is that Bell performed the Bruch concerto with the BPO on one other occasion. Back in 2006, when the BPO still had a month-long residency at Artpark, Bell offered a very different interpretation of the Bruch concerto at that venue. His intimate, inner-focused reading managed to make this much programmed, classical music warhorse seem almost brand new, and for that reason alone this year’s opening night concert is an event that every genuine lover of classical music will not want to miss.
Joseph Joachim, who regularly performed each of the four greatest German violin concertos – those of Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Bruch and Brahms – called Bruch’s G-minor concerto “the richest, and the most seductive” of them all, high praise indeed from the greatest 19th Century German violin virtuoso.
In something of a reversal of the usual tradition, the Bruch concerto will close out the second half of the evening’s program, instead of closing out the program’s first half, the more usual practice. Not to worry though, since Maestro JoAnn Falletta has packed the rest of her program with sonically irresistible Spanish symphonic works, along with a Russian work that any Spaniard would be only too happy to claim as one of his country’s own. Manuel de Falla’s Suite No. 2 from The Three-Cornered Hat consists of selections from music written by de Falla for a ballet choreographed by Léonide Massine, commissioned by the highly influential Russian impresario Serge Diaghilev (think Rite of Spring). Enrique Granados enjoyed great success with his opera Goyescas, based on his 1911 two-book piano suite of the same name, inspired by the paintings of Francesco Goya, and the Intermezzo from that work is often performed by itself on symphonic programs. The European premiere of Goyescas was cancelled due to the outbreak of World War I, and the premiere took place in New York City in January 1916. After that successful event, President Woodrow Wilson invited Granados to give a piano recital at the White House, which caused the composer to miss his boat back to Spain. Sadly, he was on a British passenger ship that was torpedoed by a German U-boat, and Granados died trying to save his wife, one hundred years ago this past March. Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov composed his Capriccio Espagnol in the summer of 1887, and conducted the premiere in St. Petersburg on November 12 of the same year. The work was an instant success, and no less an authority that Tchaikovsky hailed it as “a colossal masterpiece of instrumentation.” The wildly enthusiastic St. Petersburg audience demanded, and received an encore of the entire work, and it has proved to be irresistible to classical music audiences ever since.
Tickets and mInformation: 885-5000 or www.bpo.org
