MCDERMOTT & HUANG IN CONCERT
Anne-Marie McDermott, piano - Paul Huang, violinPaul Huang performs a special violin recital with Bravo! Vail’s Anne-Marie McDermott on piano and featuring works by Pärt, Corigliano, Prokofiev, and Mozart.
Did you know?
This wide-ranging recital of works for violin and piano includes three very different sonatas: an elegantly balanced one by Mozart, a deeply expressive one by Prokofiev (played at his own funeral), and a constantly engrossing modernist one by John Corigliano.
Featured Artists
Paul Huang
Anne-Marie McDermott
Paul Huang
violin
Recipient of the prestigious 2015 Avery Fisher Career Grant and the 2017 Lincoln Center Award for Emerging Artists, violinist Paul Huang is considered to be one of the most distinctive artists of his generation. The Washington Post remarked that Mr. Huang "possesses a big, luscious tone, spot-on intonation and a technique that makes the most punishing string phrases feel as natural as breathing," and further proclaimed him as "an artist with the goods for a significant career" following his recital debut at the Kennedy Center.
Known for his "unfailing attractive, golden, and resonant tone" (The Strad), Mr. Huang's recent highlights have included acclaim debut at Bravo! Vail Music Festival stepping in for violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter in the Mozart’s Violin Concerto No.4 with Chamber Orchestra Vienna-Berlin, Rotterdam Philharmonic with Lahav Shani, Detroit Symphony with Leonard Slatkin, Houston Symphony with Andres Orozco-Estrada, Baltimore Symphony, and Seoul Philharmonic with Markus Stenz, and recital debuts at the Lucerne Festival in Switzerland and Aspen Music Festival.
In fall 2021, Paul also became the first classical violinist to perform his own arrangement of the National Anthem for the opening game of the NFL at the Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte, North Carolina, to an audience of 75,000. An exclusive recording artist with France's Naïve Records, his debut album “Kaleidoscope" was released worldwide in October of 2023. His recording of Toshio Hosokawa's Violin Concerto Genesis with Residentie Orkest Den Haag will be released on NAXOS in June of 2024.
During the 2023-24 season, Mr. Huang appears with the National Symphony Orchestra of Taiwan with Jun Markl, Pacific Symphony with Matthew Halls, and makes debuts with Dallas Symphony Orchestra and NHK Symphony with Fabio Luisi, Vancouver Symphony with Otto Tausk, and San Francisco Symphony with Mei-Ann Chen. Other highlights will include engagements with the Colorado Springs Philharmonic, Brevard, and Augusta Symphonies.
2023-24 season recital, chamber music, and festival performances will include Mr. Huang’s return to both the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and Camerata Pacifica, and his much-anticipated recital return at the Kennedy Center (Washington Performing Arts Presents) and his recital debut in Singapore at the Victoria Concert Hall. Mr. Huang will also return to Bravo! Vail, North Shore, and Rockport Music festivals. In January 2024, Mr. Huang will launch the 2nd edition of "Paul Huang & Friends" International Chamber Music Festival in Taipei, Taiwan, in association with the National Symphony Orchestra of Taiwan.
Mr. Huang's recent recital engagements included Lincoln Center's "Great Performers" series and debuts at the Wigmore Hall, Seoul Arts Center, and the Louvre in Paris.
A frequent guest artist at music festivals worldwide, he has performed at the Seattle, Music@Menlo, Savannah, Caramoor, La Jolla, Santa Fe, Moritzburg, Kissinger Sommer, Sion, Orford Musique, and the PyeongChang Music Festival in South Korea. His chamber music collaborators have included Gil Shaham, Cho-Liang Lin, Nobuko Imai, Mischa Maisky, Jian Wang, Lynn Harrell, Yefim Bronfman, Kirill Gerstein, and Marc-Andre Hamelin.
Winner of the 2011 Young Concert Artists International Auditions, Mr. Huang made critically acclaimed recital debuts in New York at Lincoln Center and in Washington, D.C. at the Kennedy Center. Other honors include first prize at the 2009 Tibor Varga International Violin Competition Sion-Valais in Switzerland, the 2009 Chi-Mei Cultural Foundation Arts Award for Taiwan’s Most Promising Young Artists, the 2013 Salon de Virtuosi Career Grant, and the 2014 Classical Recording Foundation Young Artist Award.
Born in Taiwan, Mr. Huang began violin lessons at the age of seven. He is a recipient of the inaugural Kovner Fellowship at The Juilliard School, where he earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees under Hyo Kang and I-Hao Lee. He plays on the legendary 1742 “ex-Wieniawski” Guarneri del Gesù on extended loan through the Stradivari Society of Chicago and is on the faculty of Taipei National University of the Arts. He resides in New York.
Anne-Marie McDermott
piano
Pianist Anne-Marie McDermott is a consummate artist who balances a versatile career as a soloist and collaborator. She performs over 100 concerts a year in a combination of solo recitals, concerti and chamber music. Her repertoire choices are eclectic, spanning from Bach and Haydn to Prokofiev and Scriabin to Kernis, Hartke, Tower and Wuorinen.
With over 50 concerti in her repertoire, Ms. McDermott has performed with many leading orchestra including the New York Philharmonic, Minnesota Orchestra, Dallas Symphony, Columbus Symphony, Seattle Symphony, National Symphony, Houston Symphony, Colorado Symphony, Pittsburgh Symphony, St. Louis Symphony, Atlanta Symphony, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Moscow Virtuosi, Hong Kong Philharmonic, San Diego Symphony, New Jersey Symphony and Baltimore Symphony among others. Ms, McDermott has toured with the Australian Chamber Orchestra and the Moscow Virtuosi.
In the recent seasons, Ms. McDermott performed with the Philadelphia Orchestra, Buffalo Philharmonic, North Carolina Symphony, Charlotte Symphony, Huntsville Symphony, Alabama Symphony, San Diego Symphony, the Oregon Mozart Players, and the New Century Chamber Orchestra.
Recital engagements have included the 92nd Street Y, Alice Tully Hall, Town Hall, The Schubert Club, Kennedy Center, as well as universities across the country. Anne-Marie McDermott has curated and performed in a number of intense projects including: the Complete Prokofiev Piano Sonatas and Chamber Music, a Three Concert Series of Shostakovich Chamber Music, as well as a recital series of Haydn and Beethoven Piano Sonatas. Most recently, she commissioned works of Charles Wuorinen and Clarice Assad which were premiered in May 2009 at Town Hall, in conjunction with Bach’s Goldberg Variations.
As a soloist, Ms. McDermott has recorded the complete Prokofiev Piano Sonatas, Bach English Suites and Partitas (which was named Gramophone Magazine’s Editor’s Choice), and most recently, Gershwin Complete Works for Piano and Orchestra with the Dallas Symphony and Justin Brown.
In addition to her many achievements, Anne-Marie McDermott has been named the Artistic Director of the famed Bravo! Vail Music Festival in Colorado, which hosts the New York Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Dallas Symphony in addition to presenting over 40 chamber music concerts throughout the summer. She is also Artistic Director of Santa Fe Pro Musica, The Ocean Reef Chamber Music Festival, McKnight Chamber Music Festival, and The Avila Chamber Music Celebration in Curacao.
As a chamber music performer, Anne-Marie McDermott was named an artist member of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center in 1995 and performs and tours extensively with CMS each season. She continues a long standing collaboration with the highly acclaimed violinist, Nadja Salerno Sonnenberg. As a duo, they have released a CD titled “Live” on the NSS label and plan to release the Complete Brahms Violin and Piano Sonatas in the future. Ms. McDermott is also a member of the renowned piano quartet, Opus One, with colleagues Ida Kavafian, Steven Tenenbom and Peter Wiley.
She continues to perform each season with her sisters, Maureen McDermott and Kerry McDermott in the McDermott Trio. Ms, McDermott has also released an all Schumann CD with violist, Paul Neubauer, as well as the Complete Chamber Music of Debussy with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.
Ms. McDermott studied at the Manhattan School of Music with Dalmo Carra, Constance Keene and John Browning. She was a winner of the Young Concert Artists auditions and was awarded an Avery Fisher Career Grant.
Ms. McDermott regularly performs at Festivals across the United States including, Spoleto, Mainly Mozart, Sante Fe, La Jolla Summerfest, Mostly Mozart, Newport, Caramoor, Bravo, Chamber Music Northwest, Aspen, Music from Angelfire, and the Festival Casals in Puerto Rico, among others.
Program Highlights
- Paul Huang, violin
- Anne-Marie McDermott, piano
PÄRT Spiegel im Spiegel (Mirror in Mirror) for Violin and Piano
PROKOFIEV Violin Sonata No. 1
MOZART Violin Sonata No. 24
CORIGLIANO Sonata for Violin and Piano
Program Notes
Spiegel im Spiegel for Violin and Piano (1978)
ARVO PÄRT (b.1935)
Spiegel im Spiegel for Violin and Piano
The Estonian composer Arvo Pärt didn’t begin his professional preparation in a sustained way until he entered the Tallinn Conservatory in 1957, at the age of 22. Soon he was writing film scores reflecting the styles of Prokofiev, Shostakovich, and Bartók, and in the 1960s he earned the rebuke of Soviet authorities for flirting with serialism. By 1976 he landed on a tonal technique he dubbed “tintinnabuli,” referring to bell-like resonances. The tintinnabular parts articulate the three tones of a triad while the melody part moves slowly in simple patterns that gravitate around the fundamental pitch, often in scale patterns. The interaction of tintinnabulation and melody parts is regulated by a distinct theoretical pattern devised for each composition.
Spiegel im Spiegel (1978) was the last piece Pärt wrote before emigrating from Estonia to Berlin, where he lived until after the dissolution of the Soviet bloc. The title, meaning “Mirror(s) in the Mirror,” invites the image of the perpetual reflections one might glimpse when opposing mirrors reflect one another, as in a hair salon. Here the piano articulates rising tintinnabular triads against which the violin exhales its slow, contemplative descant. Mournful and hopeful at the same time, this deeply moving piece has been used in the soundtracks of perhaps 30 films and numerous dance and theater productions, marshaling the simplest of musical materials to impart profound calm and consolation.
Violin Sonata No. 1 in F minor, Op. 80 (1938-46)
SERGEI PROKOFIEV (1891-1953)
Violin Sonata No. 1 in F minor, Op. 80
Andante assai
Allegro brusco
Andante
Allegrissimo
On March 5, 1953, Sergei Prokofiev’s last act was upstaged by one of the few personalities capable of doing so: Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin, who followed him into eternity by only 50 minutes. All official attention would be turned towards Stalin’s obsequies. Not more than 50 people attended Prokofiev’s memorial service, at which violinist David Oistrakh and pianist Samuil Feynberg played the first and third movements from his F-minor Violin Sonata, which would have seemed appropriate in their troubled mien.
The mood of this episodic, relentlessly intense work recalls to some extent the style of late Beethoven or perhaps certain visionary items by Schubert. The piece, which lasts nearly a half hour, is divided more-or-less evenly into four movements. Prokofiev described the opening movement, with its “wind in the graveyard,” as “a kind of extended introduction to the second movement,” which has the unusual marking Allegro brusco. It does indeed have a “brusque,” aggressive character, but out of its crusty contours suddenly soars a magnificent violin theme, marked eroica (heroic) that bears an unmistakable Prokofievian imprint of lyricism and passion. Following the haunting Andante, the finale seems all the more athletic, dashing on through a perplexing alternation of contrasting meters until, in its concluding coda, it revisits the “wind-in-the-graveyard” pseudo-scales of the opening movement and ends in perplexing quietude.
INTERMISSION
Violin Sonata in F major, K. 376 (374d) (1781)
WOLFGANG AMADÈ MOZART (1756-91)
Violin Sonata in F major, K. 376 (374d)
Allegro
Andante
Rondo: Allegretto grazioso
In November 1781, the firm of Artaria & Company published a group of six violin sonatas as Mozart’s Opus 2. The set bears a dedication to the composer’s piano pupil Josepha Barbara Auernhammer, who had an unrequited crush on him. He wrote to his father that he considered her “the most aggravating female I know.” Still, he esteemed her enough to dedicate these six sonatas to her, as well as (in 1785) his famous set of Variations on “Ah, vous dirai-je, Maman,” a rite of passage for generations of piano students. The “Op. 2” Sonatas circulated widely. A 1783 review in Cramer’s Magazin der Music, published in Hamburg, called them “rich in new ideas and traces of their author’s great musical genius.” Mozart’s early works in this genre are really keyboard sonatas at heart, with the violin being almost ancillary, but here, the review continued, “the violin accompaniment is so ingeniously combined with the keyboard part that both instruments are constantly kept in equal prominence.” Indeed, the two musicians work in elegantly balanced partnership in this tightly designed sonata, tossing ideas back and forth between them. A follow-up review the next year, filed from Italy, deemed the violin-writing to be “masterly,” though “very difficult to play”—a far from unique criticism of Mozart’s music when it was new.
Sonata for Violin and Piano (1962-63)
JOHN CORIGLIANO (b.1938)
Sonata for Violin and Piano
Allegro
Andantino
Lento
Allegro
John Corigliano heard lots of violin-playing as he grew up, since his father was for 23 years the concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic. In fact, the score for his Violin Sonata carried the notation “Violin part edited and fingered by John Corigliano, Sr.” Following an early period when his music (he said) was a “tense, histrionic outgrowth of the ‘clean’ American sound of Barber, Copland, Harris, and Schuman,” he embraced a posture in which Romantic grandeur can rub elbows with an unmistakably modernist musical vocabulary, always aiming to connect with the audience. “Communication,” he insisted, “should always be a primary goal.” “The listener,” he wrote in a program note about this piece, “will recognize the work as a product of an American writer although this is more the result of an American writing music than writing ‘American’ music—a second-nature, unconscious action on the composer’s part. Rhythmically, the work is extremely varied. Meters change in almost every measure, and independent rhythmic patterns in each instrument are common. The Violin Sonata was originally entitled Duo, and therefore obviously treats both instruments as co-partners. Virtuosity is of great importance in adding color and energy to the work which is basically an optimistic statement, but the virtuosity is always motivated by musical means.”
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