Bringing Classical Music to the Texas Hill Country
Eberle, Fong, & Pautz after Sunday’s Concert
Blanco Performing Arts finished the season on a crescendo Sunday afternoon with violinists Kathryn Eberle and Julie Pautz and pianist Maimy Fong. The virtuosic players delighted the crowd with their unity of sound and depth of emotion. Their interpretation of Bach was especially energized, but the climax was the Navarra by Sarasate which had the audience of the edge of their seats.
This group was truly a “dream team”.
Caricature of Pablo de Sarasate in Vanity Fair
Painted by Whistler, written of by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and cartooned in Vanity magazine, the violin virtuoso Pablo de Sarasate (1844-1908) with his dashing and bushy mustache was a cultural phenomenon. For his own use he composed over 50 works, all with charming melodies that evoke folk music from his native Spain. Unlike the most famous of all violin virtuosi/composers Paganini, Sarasate preferred to employ silvery virtuosity only in service of his overriding melodicism.
Sarasate, who had been playing in public since childhood, made his Paris debut as a concert violinist in 1860, and played in London the following year. Over the course of his career, he toured many parts of the world, performing in Europe, North America, and South America. His artistic pre-eminence was due principally to the purity of his tone, which was free from any tendency towards the sentimental or rhapsodic, and to that impressive facility of execution that made him a virtuoso.
Of Sarasate’s idiomatic writing for his instrument, the playwright and music critic George Bernard Shaw once declared that though there were many composers of music for the violin, there were but few composers of violin music. Of Sarasate’s talents as performer and composer, Shaw said that he “left criticism gasping miles behind him.”
Hear Pablo de Sarasate’s Navarro, along with other violin virtuoso pieces, this coming Sunday, June 24, at 3 pm. You can get tickets by calling 830-833-4762 or purchase online our Tickets Page. The performance will be in the beautiful Uptown Blanco Ballroom, 317 Main St on the Blanco Square.
After an intermission for this Sunday’s Performance, Julia Pautz and Kathryn Eberle return to the stage (accompanied by Dr. Maimy Fong at the piano) to perform the Prokofiev Sonata for 2 Violins.
Sergei Prokofiev
From the memoirs of Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953)
A society called the “Triton” had been formed in Paris for the performance of new chamber music. Honegger, Milhaud, Poulenc, myself and others joined it. Listening to bad music sometimes inspires good ideas. ‘That’s not the way to do it,’ one tells oneself, ‘it should be done this way.’ That is how I happened to write my sonata for two violins.
After once hearing an unsuccessful piece for two violins without piano accompaniment, it struck me that in spite of the apparent limitations of such a duet, one could make it interesting enough to listen to for ten or fifteen minutes without tiring. The sonata was performed at the official opening of the “Triton” on December 16, 1932, which chanced to coincide with the premiere of my [new] ballet.
Fortunately the ballet came on half an hour later, and so immediately after the sonata we dashed over to the Grand Opéra—musicians, critics, author all together.
Before rushing off to the evening’s flashy conclusion the simplicity and ingenuity of Prokofiev’s sonata should be noted: simplicity found in haunting and ephemeral themes found in movements one and three, and ingenuity in its generating of momentum by the juxtaposition of aggressive motifs and virtuosity in headlong fast passages in the second and fourth movements.
In this sonata one plus one equals a symphony of diverse sounds. More than any other piece on the program the violins unite as a team of rivals, at times as boxers weaving in and out, as siblings interrupting and challenging each other, or as atoms uniting to create an infinitely more complex molecule.
The concert will be held in the Uptown Blanco Ballroom at 3pm on Sunday afternoon, June 24. Please call 830-833-4762 for tickets, or purchase on our website with your major credit card.
Opening the next concert on Sunday, June 24, is Leclaire’s Sonata for 2 Violins, Opus 3 no 5 in e minor, performed by Julia Pautz and Kathryn Eberle.
Jean-Marie Leclair
The music of Jean-Marie Leclair (1697 – 1764) has all the stylistic elegance and charm of the ballet music of Jean-Baptiste Lully, music director for Louis XIV, and uniquely captures the idiomatic grace of the Italian composers Vivaldi and Locatelli.
As an artistically gifted young man Jean-Marie Leclair held his first professional job not as a composer or musician, but as a ballet dancer for the Lyon Opera. After marrying a ballerina and holding multiple jobs as a dancer and ballet master in Italy, he apparently realized he could extend his career by pursuing work as a violinist and later a composer.
Thus began his meteoric rise over the next decade culminating in a position at the court of Louis XV to whom he dedicated his Opus 3 violin sonatas.
His personal playing style was described as precise, technically delicate, and cerebral which tidily also describes his Opus 3 compositions. The movements of the e minor sonata roll along in a style as graceful as the courtly dances of the time, but simultaneously ebb and flow towards harmonic climaxes in a forward looking manner more convincing than most baroque instrumental music.
Leclair’s interesting personal story did not end with his rapid rise to the top of the musical world of his day. Following extended tenures at several royal courts in Europe, Leclair retired from public performance and met an unfortunate end, murdered with a stab to the back by his greedy estranged second wife or infuriated nephew in his home in a Parisian ghetto.
Please call 830-833-4762 for tickets, or purchase on our website with your major credit card.
The Italian violinist and composer Nicolò Paganini (1782-1840) was the most famous violin virtuoso of his era. His compositions for solo violin remain a pinnacle of the violin repertoire, and many of the most demanding techniques of present day violin performance are associated with primarily with him.
His life was plagued by illness, but his emaciated, cadaverous appearance only enhanced his charisma, and his tours of Germany (1829-31) and Paris/London (1831-32) were wildly successful.
This duet for violin and bassoon is a part of three such duets written in 1800 at the tender age of 17 for an unspecified Swiss bassoonist who complained that he had "too little difficult music to play."
Kevin Hall and Julia Pautz of the Hall Ensemble will be performing this piece at the Uptown Blanco Ballroom this coming Friday night. You can get tickets at BlancoPerformingArts.com/tickets.
“Mommy, I want to do that!” a 3 year old Julie Pautz told her mother in 1983 when she saw a group of children playing violins at a San Antonio Symphony children’s concert.
Born in Blanco, Texas, she started lessons at 4 years old and received her first violin for her fifth birthday. Longtime Blanco residents might remember her playing for fiddle contests on the square and community choir concerts, and at the Baptist church, the Gem of the Hills, and the local nursing homes.
Leaving Texas to pursue top-notch teachers at the Cleveland Institute of Music where she graduated with honors, she then continued studies on full scholarship at the following: the University of Southern California where she received the Pi Kappa Lambda award for the artistically and academically outstanding graduate student, the Colburn School in Los Angeles, Aspen Music Festival, and the New York String Orchestra Seminar at Carnegie Hall. She has just completed her fourth year with the Fort Worth Symphony.
So now the hometown girl comes back to share her love of classical music with those she grew up with.
On Friday, September 24, the people of Blanco will have the opportunity to hear the grown up Julia perform with the critically acclaimed Hall Ensemble in the opening concert of the Blanco Performing Arts Concert Series at 7:30 pm in the beautiful Uptown Blanco Ballroom at 317 Main Street, just south of the first-rate Uptown Blanco Restaurant.
Tickets are $35 for adults and $20 for youth 18 years and younger. Season tickets for this concert and for the upcoming ones featuring the Trio Copine on February 5, 2011 and pianist Christopher Guzman on March 12 for are offered at $100 for adults and $60 for youth.
The Dallas Morning News review of the Ensemble’s July 25th concert at the Basically Beethoven Festival called “Pautz a genuine virtuoso… dispensing fleet skitters and strings of double stops and darting flawlessly into the violinistic stratosphere.”
Please call 830-833-4762 to get tickets for this extraordinary event.
The Uptown Blanco Ballroom is home to the Blanco Performing Arts Concert Series. Upstairs at the former Masonic Lodge, now a part of Uptown Blanco. 317 Main … [Read More...]
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