The Violin: Ferryman to Hades

Like Athena, who, according to ancient myth, was born fully grown and armed, springing forth from Zeus’s head with a shout that shook the heavens, the violin too was born more or less fully developed when it appeared sometime in the mid-16th century.


Little bits and pieces have changed over the more than four and a half centuries since its first shout shook the heavens, and it is certainly a more powerful and penetrating instrument than it was in the Renaissance, but it is essentially the same instrument that it was then.
Because of its incredible versatility and broad range of expressive possibilities, the violin has inspired countless composers to write concertos for it. Two of those concertos can be heard this week, giving you a glimpse into its many facets.
A new violin concerto by Giya Kancheli, entitled Styx, will be performed by one of the most famous violinists of our time, Gidon Kremer, with the Hungarian Telekom Symphony Orchestra on Wednesday, December 17. Alexander Markov will play Sibelius’s Concerto in D minor with the Budapest Concert Orchestra (MÁV) on Friday, December 12. Both concerts are at the Academy of Music.
The Styx was the river of the netherworld in Greek mythology, the crossing point between the living and the dead. The ferryman Charon carried the dead across the Styx to Hades, land of the shades. In this contemporary concerto, the violin is like Charon, ferrying the listener to another world. The seven-part piece also involves the Hungarian Radio Chorus.
The composer, Giya Kancheli, was born in Tbilisi, Georgia in 1935 and is considered one of the most radical Georgian composers. His works incorporate folk music.
The soloist, Gidon Kremer, was born in Latvia in 1947 and studied under David Oistrakh in Moscow. After winning a series of prestigious violin competitions (Queen Elisabeth, Paganini, Tchaikovsky) starting in 1970, he became not only a master of the standard repertory, but a champion of contemporary violin music. Many violin works have been written for and dedicated to him. Furthermore, he popularized the music of Astor Piazzolla. His extensive discography on Deutsche Grammophon as chamber musician and soloist has received many prizes.
Also on the program with Styx the Hungarian Telekom Symphony Orchestra will play Schönberg’s orchestration of Brahms’s Piano Quartet in G minor. This orchestration captures Brahms’s own orchestral style, but also becomes quite quirky at the end with the very un-Brahmsian percussion. The Telekom SO’s Music Director, András Keller, will conduct.
The Violin Concerto in D minor by Jean Sibelius (1865-1957) was written in 1903 and is the Finnish composer’s farewell to Romanticism. It is notoriously difficult to play and perhaps encapsulates Sibelius’s frustrated dream to be a virtuoso violinist. It’s the concerto he would have liked to have been able to play, but could “only” compose. It is rather dark and rugged, but brilliant and exciting.
Alexander Markov, the soloist in the Sibelius, was born in Moscow in 1963. Like Kremer, he was a winner of the Paganini International Violin Competition. He emigrated to the USA with his parents and became an American citizen in 1982. He has performed with leading orchestras such as the Budapest Festival orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra and the BBC Orchestra, under conductors such as Iván Fischer, Lorin Maazel and Charles Dutoit. Of Markov, Yehudi Menuhin said, “He is without doubt one of the most brilliant and musical of violinists .…”
The Budapest Concert Orchestra (MÁV)’s concert also includes Mozart’s early Symphony in G minor, K. 183, and Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 in D major. The latter is one of the most popular symphonies from the late Romantic era. Though an early work for Mahler (and given its premier in Budapest in 1888 when he was the conductor of the Hungarian Opera House) the First Symphony encompasses all the traits that would come to define Mahler: gentle, almost naïve folk-like melodies, the love of Nature, country dances and waltzes, grotesque elements, extreme orchestration, soul-wrenching suffering and heroic triumph. With all the elements dear to the Romantic heart, it remains dear to the modern concert audience.
This concert will be conducted by Imre Kollár, who became the principal conductor of the Debrecen Philharmonic Orchestra in 1994.

Kevin Shoplan

12.12.2008