Happy New Year! 2011 was a really exciting year for me, starting with a new CD being released, debuts with the Baltimore, Cincinnati and Atlanta symphonies, and return engagements with the Cleveland Orchestra and New York Philharmonic. In the fall fall I played my second recital at the Kennedy center, went on a tour of Brazil with the Sao Paulo Symphony and Yan Pascal Tortelier, and got to play with some really exciting young conductors for the first time: Kazuki Yamada in Strasbourg, José Luis Gomez in Grand Rapids, and Christian Vasquez in Monte-Carlo.

 

My fall was overshadowed however by the passing of Michal Schmidt, who had been my manager for the past 10 years. I joined her roster when I was just 17, still living on a remote farm in Tuscany. If I'd never met her, I probably would not have come to New York seven years ago to study, and I'd be a very different violinist and person. She was more than just a manager - she was a mentor and a friend, and since she died in October, I haven't played a concert without thinking of her, her passion for music and love for her artists.

 

In a few days, I'm going to Amsterdam to play Tchaikovsky, then to St. Paul to play Ligeti, and then on to Prokofiev 2, Paganini 1, Barber and Britten, with a few recitals in-between!

 

The 2011/12 season has started! I'm excited about all the exciting places I'll go to this year, and also about all the interesting and varied repertoire - between now and May, I'll play 13 different concertos and 2 recital programs! I'm particularly looking forward to playing the Ligeti violin concerto in January with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. I believe it's one of the most important violin pieces of the 20th century (also one of the hardest!), and I'm really thrilled to get the opportunity to perform it.

In August, I played my first performance of the Adès violin concerto at the Chautauqua festival. It was a huge task to learn, but it was powerful and exhilarating to perform, and I'll definitely make the piece a permanent addition to my repertoire.

 

Last weekend, I played with the New York Philharmonic and Alan Gilbert at Caramoor. It was a repeat performance of the Mozart 5 we did in July in Vail, CO, and it was even more fun this time around. Although it was a wet, rainy day, and all of us (players, audience, myself) braved rain, flooded streets and weekend traffic to get there, it was a very special night. Alan is a sensitive and inspiring collaborator, who brings out the best in everybody he plays with - and as a violinist himself, he knows the concerto inside and out.

The week before that, I was in Fort Worth playing Lalo Symphonie Espagnole with my friend Miguel Harth-Bedoya and the Fort Worth Symphony. I felt that I was with old friends, and realized that I played with them 4 times in the last 5 years! The Lalo is a piece that is both fun to play and to hear, and is very rarely done nowadays. I'll play it again in December, in Monte-Carlo.

Coming up next are concerts in Indianapolis, Raleigh and Grand Rapids, and then a 3-week tour of Brazil with the Sao Paulo State orchestra!

 

I just returned from a wonderful week of concerts in Aspen and Vail, Colorado.

In Aspen, I played Bach double concerto and Schnittke concerto grosso no. 1 (also a double violin concerto) with the wonderful violinist Julia Fischer, and the Aspen Chamber Symphony conducted by Vasily Petrenko. I loved playing with Julia, it was a really fun and inspiring collaboration. Interestingly, the Schnittke is unusual among double concertos, in that it has the soloists, after playing together nicely at first, eventually turn against each other in the cadenza. As Vasily pointed out, it sounds like two people having an angry fight, snapping and barking at each other. In the last movement the cembalo starts playing a tango, and the two violinists join in the dance, perhaps still harboring some lingering resentment. The Bach couldn't be more different - the dialogue between the two violins is always harmonious and loving, and it's impossible for the performance to work if the violinists don't get along!

 

The day after, I played Mozart concerto no. 5 with Alan Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic in Vail. It was just as amazing to play with them as last year. Half-way through the second movement, my E string broke! In a recital, I would just go backstage, change the string, and return. In this situation though, I couldn't leave the orchestra and 6000 people in the audience waiting, so Sheryl Staples, who was concertmaster for the concerto, handed me her Guarneri Del Gesù violin, and I was able to keep playing on it (it was a lovely violin as well). By the time we got to the last movement, somebody had put on a new E string on the Kiesewetter Strad, and I was able to finish the piece on it.

I will play the same piece again with Alan and the NY Phil on September 23 at Caramoor, New York - hopefully without any such adventures.

 

On Monday I'm going to beautiful La Jolla for some chamber music, and then on to Chautauqua where I will play the Thomas Adès concerto for the first time, as well as Haydn concerto in C.

 

A lot has happened since my last update. I was really excited and very honored to be awarded a Borletti-Buitoni Trust fellowship in February!

I played with some really amazing orchestras and conductors in the last few months - After my debut with the Baltimore Symphony in January, I played with the Cleveland orchestra in March, and just now came back from my debut in Cincinnati! I also returned to Jacksonville and Denver to play with the orchestras there and visited a few other places for the first time, like Salt Lake City and Spokane - plus I played some recitals with my friend Joyce Yang, which was lots of fun. 

The conductors I played with couldn't have been more inspiring either. I played for the first time with Juanjo Mena, Peter Oundjian and Julian Kuerti, and reunited with Fabio Mechetti, Giancarlo Guerrero and Hannu Lintu.

 

Of course playing with the Cleveland orchestra in Miami was particularly special. There's a short little clip from my concert with the Cleveland orchestra in miami on YouTube (link)

It has certainly been an intense few months, and a lot to juggle (I played 7 different concertos in three months!), but I enjoyed every minute of it. They were all such exciting engagements, every time I came back from a trip I couldn't wait to go play the next concert.

In my 'spare time', I've been working on learning the violin concerto by Thomas Adès, an amazing and beautiful piece (written in 2005) that I'm playing for the first time in August, at the Chautauqua festival. I've been wanting to play this piece for a while now, ever since I first heard it - I feel that it really stands out among contemporary violin concertos, and that it will one day be part of the standard concerto repertoire.

Next up, I will play some recitals with Robert Kulek in Philadelphia (on April 10) and Charlottesville (April 12) - rehearsals start tomorrow!

 

I just returned from visiting my parents in Italy, where I spent a relaxing ten days. It's so good to have a break! Before that, I played the Dvorak concerto in Saarbrücken, Germany, which was a very special concert for me. The conductor, Christoph Poppen, was actually one of my first violin teachers when I was eight years old, and because of that we have a special chemistry and understanding between us. The concert was also filmed and broadcast on the the SWR3 German television channel (where it aired last week). In a production like this, the dress rehearsal is usually filmed as well, and during the rehearsal we had to bow in front of the empty hall as though there were people sitting there! The whole thing was a thrilling experience, and maybe the most fun I've had with the Dvorak concerto so far.

 

My new CD of violin-piano works by Poulenc, Stravinsky, Debussy and Prokofiev is now available for download on iTunes (link) and Amazon mp3 (link). It's called 'Echoes of Paris'. The non-digital, physical, plastic, old-fashioned CD will be released on February 8 :)

If you buy it on iTunes, you also get the booklet as a pdf download with it, so head over there and check it out!

 

I added my new cadenza  for Mozart no. 4 to the about/cadenzas section of the site, and revised some of the others, correcting mistakes and putting in a few additional markings. I want to make them user-friendly if anybody wants to check them out, but don't want to make the mistake of writing too many instructions (pulling an 'Ysaÿe', you might say). How somebody plays the cadenza depends entirely on the approach that they have for the work the cadenza fits into. So I often wrote the slurs and articulation exactly the way they are written in the corresponding parts in the concerto.

 

I'm about to go off on an intense series of concerts. First up, Brahms double concerto with my friend Alban Gerhardt. I know this is going to be fun!

 

I'm in Houston this week, playing Chausson Poème and Ravel Tzigane, with Hans Graf. It's one of the highlights of my season (my subscription debut in Houston actually), and I love playing the two pieces together in this pairing. It's actually my first time performing the Ravel with orchestra - I've often performed the earlier version of the work for violin and piano. At first I thought that playing it with orchestra would mean that I couldn't be as flexible rythmically, but it actually turned out to not be a problem, because it's orchestrated so intelligently. Ravel was a masterful orchestrator, and I'm really enjoying the amazing colors that the orchestra version brings to the piece.

The review of the first concert is here (link)

 

My next CD (with Robert Kulek) will be released on iTunes in December! The program is Poulenc sonata, Stravinsky Suite after Pergolesi, Debussy sonata, and Prokofiev sonata no 2. Making a CD is pretty exhausting; playing in the recording session is actually the easiest part! It's having to listen through everything afterwards looking for the best takes, the long editing process, writing the liner notes, and worst of all, the proof-reading that is really tedious. But it's finally done; Balázs from Pilvax Studio (who also made this website) designed a beautiful booklet for the CD, using photos of me and Robert that he took in Paris when we were there in April.

I decided to call the CD "echoes of Paris". (It's actually hard to come up with a title with the word "Paris" in it that is not totally corny!) Each of these four composers spent many years living in Paris, and I speculate in the booklet that maybe the reason that these pieces fit so well together on a program is because of how that city and its artistic milieu influenced their styles. The neo-classical Stravinsky and the Debussy sonata were written within a few years from one another, and both these composers influenced Poulenc greatly (and you can really hear that in his violin sonata). The Prokofiev is not an early work, but is also rather neo-classical in style, and is extremely compatible with the other pieces.

 

I've been rewriting my cadenzas for Mozart 4, which I'm playing with the Iris chamber orchestra in two weeks. I decided to start over because I had composed myself into a corner, and was completely stuck. I'm much happier now, but you don't know whether a cadenza works until you perform it in the context of the concerto.

 

I just returned from Karlsruhe, where I played the Brahms concerto with my friend Justin Brown - once again, it was absolutely wonderful to play with him. One of the nice things about our collaborations, is that it sounds better and better with every rehearsal and concert - the last concert we gave yesterday was incredibly satisfying and I felt like the piece came to life the way I wanted it to. Sometimes, when the chemistry between violinist and conductor isn't right, it can be the opposite: the first rehearsals are quite exciting, and then it becomes more stale and unnatural with each further time we play it.

This was just after another good collaboration on the Brahms in Phoenix with Michael Christie, and a recital in Indianapolis in-between the semi-final and final rounds of the new competition, which just finished. I was extremely impressed with the playing of all the laureates and many other contestants this year. All the performances are up for video-streaming on www.violin.org by the way.

It was nice and strange at the same time for me to be there once again, but this time as a spectator. I had flashbacks waiting for results and to the anxiety and pressure that I had felt when I competed four years ago. I am so happy that I never have to go through that again!

I also thought about how much has happened during the last four years, and all the concerts I've played, places I've been to and repertoire I've learned since. While it's not fun to be judged against your friends and colleagues, the Indianapolis competition does open a lot of doors and jump-started my career. Indianapolis will always have a place in my heart!

I played the recital with Rohan De Silva (who had been my pianist four years ago), and the entire jury and many of the contestants came to it. How scary, to play in front of so many brilliant and critical violinists! As Jaime Laredo joked to me afterwards, "this is the toughest audience you'll ever play for".

 

Before Phoenix I played Sibelius in Reno (my first Sibelius in 4 years) and Beethoven in Indianapolis. Tomorrow I fly to Columbus, OH to play Beethoven with Günther Herbig. After that, I'm off to New Orleans to play the Alban Berg concerto and Haydn concerto in C with Carlos Miguel Prieto. It will be my first Berg concerto actually, and I can't wait. All together, it will have been three Beehoven performances, five Brahms, two Sibelius, one Berg and one Haydn as well as one full-length recital, and all of that in exactly 30 days!