FROM: TOM NEENAN
RE: CONCERT, FRIDAY, MARCH 13, 8:00 pm
DATE FEBRUARY 20, 2015
ST. MATTHEW’S MUSIC GUILD WELCOMES LA PHILHARMONIC MEMBERS
JIN-SHAN DAI AND DANA HANSEN IN YOUTHFUL MUSIC OF BRITTEN, SCHUBERT AND WALKER
St. Matthew’s Music Guild continues its 2014-15 season in Pacific Palisades with a program featuring Britten’s Double Concerto For Violin And Viola, with violinist Jin-Shan Dai and violist Dana Hansen. Dai and Hansen are both member of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s string section. The program also includes the Lyric For Strings by George Walker and Schubert’s Symphony No. 2 in D major.
JIN-SHAN DAI has performed extensively throughout North America, Europe, and Asia. He joined the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the beginning of the 2010/11 season. Previously, he was a member of the Toronto Symphony from 2004 to 2010, and made his debut as a soloist with that orchestra in 2008 playing Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. A native of China, Dai studied at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing before moving to the U.S. at the age of 17 to continue his studies. Dai is the recipient of numerous prizes and accolades, among them top prizes in the 2000 Emerson International Chamber Music Competition and the 2000 Van Rooy National Violin Competition. Dai performs frequently as a chamber musician, and has collaborated with such artists as Mstislav Rostropovich, Lowell Liebermann, and members of the Emerson String Quartet.
DANA HANSEN is a Massachusetts native. She began violin studies at the age of five and viola at the age of fifteen. After graduating from Harvard College with a cum laude degree in Modern European History, she attended the Juilliard School, where she received her Master’s degree in 2003. In Boston, she studied viola and chamber music with James Dunham and Robert Levin. At Juilliard, she studied with Misha Amory and Heidi Castleman. During summers, she attended the Aspen, Taos, and Tanglewood music festivals. She was a member of the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra before joining the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 2004.
Britten composed his Double Concerto at the age of eighteen and its maturity and technical virtuosity has drawn comparisons with the composing prodigy Felix Mendelssohn whose Overture To A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Octet are also youthful masterpieces. The work is in a Romantic vein with modernist overtones, using some patented Britten compositional techniques including rocking ostinatos, mildly dissonant harmonies and, above all, a vocal approach to instrumental writing.
Britten was born in Suffolk, England in November 1913. From an early age he showed prodigious talent and in 1932 completed his Opus 1 Sinfinoietta, a work that shows the nineteen-year composer’s talents and understanding of modern music. A haunting work, the Phantasy for Oboe and Strings followed, and, in 1937, the British composing community sat up and took notice with the publication of the Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge (Bridge was Britten’s teacher).
The Double Concerto was also completed in 1932 but left unfinished. It was published in 1998 as completed by Colin Matthews. Matthews writes that, “the sketches are complete in practically every detail” and that it is “puzzling that he never made a full score of the work . . .and seems to have made no effort to get it performed.” It may be that Britten felt the work was not adequately “modern” at a time when Stravinsky, Bartok and Schoenberg were all the rage in academic circles.
Michael Steinberg points out that the concerto begins with “an arresting gesture: a mildly dissonant chord played four times, its urgency growing with its repetitions . . .Here the seasoned Britten-lover smiles, for this is unmistakably music the composer remembered, revisited, and reused (not literally) twenty-one years later in . . .the Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings.” The second movement, titled Rhapsody, is lyrical and supremely vocal in its writing for the two solo instruments. It is music that clearly foreshadows Britten’s achievements in opera, with the two protagonists exchanging beautifully arching phrases and engaging in musical pirouettes of the most delicate kind. With the last chord of the Rhapsody still sounding, the timpani takes up a new tempo and leads into a finale that is characterized by the kind of “2x3 vs. 3x2” rhythms made famous more than fifty years later by Leonard Bernstein in the song “America” (from “West Side Story”). Gradually the piece winds down and ends very softly, like a distant memory.
George Walker composed his Lyric For Strings in 1946 while Walker was as student at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. It premiered under the title “Lament” and was inspired by the death of Walker’s grandmother. The first performance was given by the student orchestra at Curtis and was followed by its public premiere by the National Gallery Orchestra in Washington D.C. as part of an annual American Music Festival.
Schubert’s Symphony No. 2 in D was composed between 1814 and 1815 while Schubert was still a teenager. Its opening movement is based on Beethoven’s incidental music for the Creatures of Prometheus, which was completed in 1801 and gave rise to the finale of the “Eroica” Symphony. The symphony is in the four movements with the first, third and fourth fulfilling the expected roles of sonata-allegro, minuet and trio, and bustling finale. Schubert’s only orchestral set of variations forms the second movement and is based on a charming and tuneful melody given over primarily to the first violins and the oboe.
Tickets for the concert are $35 and available at the door or online through the Music Guild’s website: www.MusicGuildOnline.org. St. Matthew’s Church is located at 1031 Bienveneda Ave., Pacific Palisades. For further information: 310-573-7422.
Contact: Thomas Neenan
310-573-7787, ext. 127