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Evening Music

Thursday, August 19, 2004
  • George Enescu's violin

    A violinist remembers

    In 1940, the great violinist George Enescu (born this day in 1881) revisited memories of the famous gypsy fiddler Nicolas Chioru—and his own childhood—by composing “Impressions d’enfance.”

In our first hour, Gidon Kremer and the Vienna Philharmonic under Nikolaus Harnoncourt bring us Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5. And you can hear Joshua Bell play the concerto live at the Mostly Mozart Festival on August 20th or 21st. Violinist Leonidas Kavakos and pianist Peter Nagy perform Enescu’s ten-movement “Impressions d’enfance,” evoking a stream at the bottom of the garden, a caged bird, a cuckoo clock, and a cricket, and other childhood memories.

Villa-Lobos’s “Bachianas brazilieros” No. 8 is played by the Cincinnati Symphony under Jesus Lopez-Cobos; it brings us a combination of sensual Brazilian dance rhythms and melodies and rigorous Bachian contrapuntal textures and forms.

We remain south of the border with music from the biopic “Frida” (about Mexican artist Frida Kahlo), but then hightail it off to Russia for Rachmaninoff’s piano Concerto No. 1, Byron Janis soloist, Kirill Kondrashin conducting the Moscow Philharmonic. And in Russia we stay, because we are still honoring Shostakovich, this time with his final String Quartet, No. 15, its six subdued and mostly somber uninterrupted movements played by the Keller Quartet.

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