Happy New Year! 2022 was a very busy year, full of unforgettable experiences, including some new debuts (Sydney Symphony, Lucerne Festival) and many returns to old friends (for example, a return to the Salzburg Festival with Mozarteumorchester, a residency with the WDR Sinfonieorchester in Köln, and concerts with many orchestras in Europe and North America). This week, I’m performing with the Cincinnati Symphony (a tour of Europe, planned in fall of 2020, fell victim to the pandemic), and next week, a return to the Philadelphia Orchestra!

The thing that makes music different from the other arts is that it vanishes as soon as it is played. After the concert is over, there is briefly a feeling of euphoria, but then the music must be played again!

I don’t see this as a curse: it means that the work of recreating music is always continuing and always new. As a performer, you never get to rest on past laurels!

A lot has happened since my last update! My 21/22 concert season has been exciting. I loved traveling again and especially seeing my musical friends around the world!
Many of the concerts this year were reschedules of performances that had been canceled over the past two years, but there were also some new experiences and even some debuts for me. For example, my lifelong dream to play with the Berlin Philharmonic came true in October 2021, when I performed Prokofiev’s second violin concerto with Gustavo Gimeno in three concerts at the Philharmonie Berlin! This performance is available in the Berlin Philharmonic’s Digital Concert Hall.

This year I am artist in residence ("MuseumsSolist”) with the Museumsorchester Frankfurt, in my third year as "Associate Artist" with the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester Hamburg, and "Artist in Focus” with the Seoul Philharmonic — in fact I just returned from Seoul, South Korea, after performing five concerts over the span of two weeks (Mozart, Thomas Adès and Tchaikovsky) with music director Osmo Vänskä.
There were happy reunions with many of my favorite orchestras, as well as two recital tours (one in Europe and one in North America). And in-between all these concert trips I've been teaching my small class of violin students at Yale School of Music, which has been enormously rewarding.

It's great to see that live classical music is making such a strong return. In some cities, audiences have been slower to return after the pandemic than in others, but everywhere the return of live music has been greeted with enthusiasm. Even as classical music has caught up with our times, and we are producing more digital content than ever, performers and audiences have found a renewed appreciation for the live experience— there is simply nothing else like it!

Coming up over the next few weeks are concerts with the Warsaw Philharmonic, Orchestra of St. Luke’s at Carnegie Hall, Mozarteum Orchestra Salzburg, Finnish Radio Orchestra, Prague Radio Symphony, Orchestre National du France in Paris, and Munich Philharmonic!

In April of 2021, I went to the recording studio in Boston (where I had previously recorded the Paganini Caprices and Bach’s Sontats and Partitas) to embark on a new project: to record of the music of Books nos. 4, 5 and 6 of the Suzuki Method, with the pianist Kuang-Hao Huang. (The new recordings will be released in June).
When I was first asked to make the new recordings of books 4-6 (Hilary Hahn had previously recorded the new versions of books 1-3), I knew that this was a great responsibility, and might even be one of the most important recordings I will make — because of how many violin students will hear my recording over and over!

I remember when I was first learning the violin as a child. No matter what stories people like to tell, the violin is a difficult instrument to start for everybody! It was when I listened to recordings by David Oistrakh and Uto Ughi that I fell in love with the sound of the violin and felt motivated to practice more and more. I hope that these Suzuki recordings will similarly inspire future generations of violinists.

Since these are educational recordings, they needed to follow the printed fingerings and bowings of the Suzuki Books, and generally showcase good technical and musical habits - but at the same time, in addition to all that diligence, I really wanted to communicate to the listener the joy and excitement of making music. The most difficult track to record was the first movement of Bach’s Concerto for 2 violins, because I had to record both violin parts! (Separately, of course) When played together it has to sound like two violinists playing chamber music- this is really difficult because there are so many small subconscious adjustments to dynamics and ensemble that we make when playing with other musicians, communicating without words! Luckily, the many recordings I made during lockdown in 2020, when I played both the violin and piano parts of various showpieces and synchronized to my own playing (like this one), prepared me well for this Bach double concerto challenge!

I have joined the faculty of Yale School of Music! Starting this September, I will teach a handful of students at Yale. Yale School of Music is a graduate school, and it is tuition-free, which is rare in the United States. Classical music is never an easy field to forge a career, and often conservatories and universities overpromise how easy it will be to make a living in the field. In fact, some excellent musicians who went to the Juilliard School when I was a student there are still paying off their student debt today! And that was when tuition was half of what it is now… By being tuition-free, Yale School of Music demonstrably puts each student’s interest first, without leaving them burdened by enormous debt.

Moving to Connecticut and becoming a “Connecticutian”, after 16 years of living in New York City, is a big change, but it is beautiful there. And it is not far away from NYC.

Of course, I plan on continuing my performing career, and believe that my teaching activities at Yale will form a symbiotic relationship with these performing activities — I know that my own performance would draw inspiration from my teaching, and believe that my teaching in turn will be grounded and enhanced by my performances.

I just returned from Hamburg where I played with the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester and Krzysztof Urbański. I am in my second year as “Associate Artist” with the orchestra (a kind of multi—year residency), and amazingly they have stayed very active with recordings and radio concerts despite the heavy pandemic restrictions in place in Germany. Although the Elbphilharmonie hall was empty in front of us, it was a thrilling and exhilarating feeling to know that as we played the Tchaikovsky violin concerto we had a big audience listening to us live on the radio!

My recording of the Sonatas and Partitas by Johann Sebastian Bach is coming out on April 9 on Warner Classics! The first music video has already been released as well as a promo video, in which I introduce the album. Bach was the first composer I turned to in the early days of the pandemic, and I spent many months in 2020 studying, playing and recording these incredible works.

I had first encountered Bach when I was 7, playing the Preludio and Gavotte as well as the g-minor Adagio. Growing up, I spent many hours looking at the reproduction of Bach’s beautiful manuscript (completed 1720), searching for clues and answers. I remember wondering why he didn’t make all our lives easier by just writing for violin with accompaniment, so violinists wouldn’t have to play all those double-stops! I wasn’t the only one: 19th century violinists usually performed these works with piano accompaniment, and it was widely believed that they were unsuitable for the concert stage without this addition (among others, Schumann wrote piano parts for the entire set.) When performances and recordings of the works became more common in the 20th century, they reflected the era’s general approach to performing baroque music: heavy, slow, severe. Perhaps because of the wealth of religious music that Bach left behind, he was often imagined as an austere religious recluse. “Bach never smiled”, teachers would remind their students. Playing and listening to Bach was hard, but it was good for you!

Everything changed with the advent of “historically informed” playing traditions, which took as their starting point the instruments and bows of the baroque era, and rediscovered the playfulness, lightness and eccentricity of baroque music. For me, it was a revelation to play these works with a baroque bow! Baroque bows vary a lot in terms of length and weight, but can generally do anything modern bows can do, although it is easier to produce buoyant, light articulation with a baroque bow, and harder to produce a loud, sustained sound. It felt liberating to play Bach with a baroque bow: I could strike the strings with more energy without worrying about the sound becoming too rough or expressionist. Passages of three- and four-note chords felt more fluid. The dance movements danced more and the slow movements sang more.

The pinnacle of the whole set has to be the Ciaccona (Chaconne): on top of a descending bassline, repeated 64 times, Bach erects towering structures, creates moments of anguish and sorrow, and leads us to moments of introspection and bliss. It feels like a journey through life itself. It is not hyperbolic to say that the Chaconne might be the greatest piece ever written for the violin!

But there are other parts of the cycle, mainly the third sonata, which I think I had underestimated when I had previously worked on the Sonatas and Partitas. The third sonata feel like a kind of resurrection after the tragedy of the Chaconne, and the fugue of the third sonata is pure joy and exultation. It is hard to bring this joy to the performance, since this fugue goes right to the limit technically of what’s possible to do on the violin.

Although Bach wrote such amazing music, he didn’t write much about himself or about his music. As such, he has been a canvas onto which writers, scholars and musicians have projected all sorts of far-fetched ideas. But we do know that Bach had 20 children, of whom 10 lived to adulthood. This tells me is that he knew more joy in his life, and more loss, than most people ever do! His home must have been a rambunctious and busy factory of music composition. (His wife and sons helped copy his music, and several of his sons became celebrated composers.) All his music is suffused with emotion and exudes a life-affirming joy. His mastery of counterpoint can create the illusion that his music is scholarly and austere - but it is not so! We can hear an extraordinary yet humble human being talking to us through the centuries.

Looking ahead, this week I am in Denver recording a virtual performarnce of Prokofieff’s second concerto with the Colorado Symphony and Peter Oundjian. A number of other virtual concerts with orchestra are planned this spring (in Atlanta and North Carolina) as well as some concerts with audience (in Dallas, and hopefully several in Europe as well). There are also multiple virtual recitals to be released later this spring.

Like many musicians, I stopped writing dates into my website calendar — because I am so often not sure what to write! Concerts can be canceled at very short notice, and it is so painful to have to delete a concert entry. And since most events are played without audience and broadcast online, social media is the most natural place to announce them at short notice. I don’t even know the dates when many virtual concerts will take place, only the recording dates — because virtual concerts are usually (but not always) pre-recorded ahead of time and published a few weeks later. This can be confusing — in the fall of 2020 some visitors to my website thought I had traveled back to the United States in October to play in Cincinnati, when in fact those performances had been pre-recorded in September and the date on my calendar was the date the virtual event took place.
Please follow my Facebook and Instagram pages to get the most regular updates on what I’m up to and when those performances will be broadcast, uploaded or published!

Thankfully, we can finally see the end of the pandemic in our sights, and I am optimistic that we can enjoy live music this summer in some places, and many more places this fall!

After 7 months away from the stage, I am about to perform my first concert for a live audience — I spent the past two weeks quarantining, and started rehearsals today for my debut with the Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipzig! I’m playing Prokofiev’s second violin concerto in g minor, with Juanjo Mena conducting. We will perform this colorful, energetic piece three times (Thursday, Friday and Sunday) for socially-distanced audiences here in Leipzig. It has been one year since I last performed Prokofiev’s second concerto (with the Cleveland Orchestra in October 2019). As I have been preparing for my concerts this week in Leipzig, it felt as if that year of time shrank and only a few months had elapsed.

As much as I enjoyed making lots of videos this summer, and as much as I appreciated the virtual concerts that I filmed and the other recording sessions, the “live experience” — sharing music with other musicians and an audience in the same room — is so different and something that I've been missing greatly. Even though many of my dates this fall have been canceled, I am thankful that some of my European concerts are happening, at times with changed repertoire (so that the stage is less crowded with fewer musicians).

Most orchestras in Europe receive a significant part of their budget from the government, so they are able to weather this storm and present concerts to much smaller audiences, without fearing immediate bankrupcy due to the missing ticket sales. The situation is dire in the United States, however, as I wrote about in my previous post. Many US orchestras that have explored putting on live concerts with reduced seating, or producing virtual seasons, had to abandon their plans, due to the uncertainty and the daunting costs.
The Cincinnati Symphony is one of the success stories - their “Live from Music Hall” is a series of virtual concerts, that are shown online as well as outside of Cincinnati Music Hall. I was originally scheduled to perform with the symphony in November and embark on a two-week tour of Europe with them. Sadly, these projects had to be canceled, but I am so happy to be part of the Cincinnati Symphony’s “Live from Music Hall” virtual concert series! Three weeks ago I filmed a performance of the concerto in A Major, Op. 5 no. 2 by Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges (before traveling to Europe to start my quarantine). It will be broadcast on October 24th at 8 PM EST.
Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges (perhaps we could call him by his initials, JBCdSG) was a black violinist, composer, fencer and revolutionary in 18th century France. He was a first and foremost a violin virtuoso, although I wonder whether his mastery of fencing (he was by all accounts one of the greatest fencers of his time) is somehow connected to the fast bow-work in his violin pieces! I started exploring his music fairly recently — and I find his A Major concerto is particularly delightful, flashy, and elegant, with a very beautiful and lyrical slow movement.

After my concerts with the Gewandhaus Orchester, I will travel to Norway to make a return to the Oslo Philharmonic for performances of Mozart’s concerto no. 4. More concerts are scheduled in November in Bochum, Cologne, Nürnberg, Gran Canaria and Copenhagen. But I am thinking one week at a time -- before the pandemic, I often booked my flights half a year in advance and enjoyed planning my schedule very far ahead of time. But after spending so many hours on the phone with airlines this spring and summer, in order to get refunds for all the trips I had to cancel, I have changed my ways!

For a long time, I hesitated to add concerts to my schedule on the website, because of how sad it would have felt to write “canceled” next to them later if they got canceled! But after all the cancellations, I am very happy that I can let you know about a few events that are happening.
Online concerts are obviously very different from live concerts - there is nothing like musicians and audiences being in the same room together, picking up the same sound waves and breathing the same air. But, we have to adapt to the current situation, and so many summer festivals are putting on virtual shows - some shot on location, others compilations of home videos.
There are a lot of technical challenges with this. I like to joke that when it comes to technology, prior to the current crisis most classical musicians were stuck in the 20th century, and some even in the 19th century! This pandemic is forcing everybody to make use of every technology we have at our disposal in order to still reach our listeners.

While online concerts sometimes feel more like recordings than concerts, they also have some major advantages! The listener/viewer can look much more closely at the fingerwork and everyone can feel like they are in the first row; you don’t have to suffer bad acoustics (as long as the recording quality is good), you can listen multiple times, and the concert can be viewed by people all over the world, not just audiences in the city where the festival is based. The events are also more interactive - the comments and questions I’ve received over the past months in response to my videos on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube have been stimulating and motivating!
The technical challenge has to do with the time it takes to transfer and copy, edit and render, and upload huge video files - it is enormously time-consuming. I find that for every 30 minutes of recording I do, I have to do 4 hours of file transfers, editing, uploading. Even simple things like transitions between speeches, which in a concert are fairly seamless and we never even think about, can turn into headaches when putting together videos. All over the world, musicians are turning into amateur engineers and video editors, and many professional engineers and video editors are booked up for months ahead of time.

I had been looking forward to performing the Beethoven concerto at the Colorado Music Festival in Boulder, CO on July 30th. For the virtual edition of this festival, I visited Peter Oundjian (the music director of the festival) at his house in Connecticut for a friendly chat and performance. We chatted about music, including a lot of nerdy violin questions (as a violinist himself, he was excited to talk shop). I played several movemenst of Bach (Siciliana and Presto from the first sonata) Ysaÿe, Recuerdos de la Alhambra by Francisco Tarrega (at Peter’s request who wanted to see the bowing up close!) and even played a piece on Peter’s magnificent old piano. It was so nice to reconnect with a musical friend!
This event can be watched for free — you just register here and then a link will be sent to you - it is the July 9 event.

There are more exciting online events to come:
1 - On July 25 at 8 PM, you can watch a performance on Tanglewood’s amazing virtual concert series (tickets are $12), in which I play the Debussy sonata, the second Brahms sonata and John Adams Road Movies, with pianist Orion Weiss. Click here for tickets
The video will premiere at 8 PM on July 25th, and will be available to watch through August 1.

2 - Right after, I head to Seattle for some performances with the Seattle Chamber Music Society - this is a festival where I have performed every summer since 2009, and they are putting together the same number of events as usual, with their audience watching online. I will be performing on the virtual chamber music concerts airing on August 3, 5 and 7. On August 3rd, I perform Haydn’s beautiful string quartet Op. 76 no. 5 - in the later concerts, I play in groups of Borodin and Dohnanyi works. There are few chamber music festivals where performances are consistently so polished as they are at the Seattle festival (partially through a rehearsal schedule that allots much more time for rehearsing each piece than would be the norm at most  festivals). Making music with my friends there will be a happy moment in an otherwise difficult summer!
You can purchase tickets (for either the whole concert season, or a single concert for $15) here

3 - I was looking forward to playing the Sibelius Concerto in Aspen, Colorado on August 3rd, a performance which will take place instead in 2021. In the meantime, Aspen is launching its own wonderful virtual concert series, and I am performing a recital on August 23 at 3 PM Mountain Time — 5 PM East Coast/11 PM Central European Time. (the concert will be rebroadcast on August 25)
This video will be available for free until the end of the festival, and you can watch either on Aspen's facebook page or on the Aspen Virtual Stage.
I’ll be playing Bach’s Partita no. 3, Ysaÿe’s Sonata no. 2, Rachmaninoff’s “Vocalise”, Daniel Bernard Roumain’s “Filter” and Sarasate’s “Carmen Fantasy” (I accompany myself on the piano for Rachmaninoff and Sarasate - another perk of playing concerts virtually!)

We are seeing different models of how to do virtual concerts, some paid, some free. I don't know which models will turn out to be more successful, since this is new territory for us all, but I am inspired by the initiative and creativity I see in the music world, trying to make the best of a bad situation, and I am grateful for these festivals!

This is the moment when I’d like to ask all music lovers to not hesitate to pay for virtual concerts if you like the festivals and/or artists featured - despite all the free and excellent videos on youtube. I’d also like to encourage all of you, if you are able to, to give money to your local concert presenter and orchestra to support them through this crisis. Although this is a temporary situation, it is the biggest crisis the classical music world has ever faced. Festivals/orchestras/presenters in the United States survive mostly without any government support, and face an existential threat to their continuing existence. They will only be able to put on virtual events, and eventually concerts with reduced audience attendance, if they can somehow make ends meet and survive until we emerge from this crisis.
It takes years to build a festival or an orchestra, and only a moment for such an organization to disappear. When large organisations go bankrupt, they often cannot be brought back as easily as it would be, for example, to restart a business. It is in many cases not possible to simply hit a “pause” button and resume 1-2 years later. And while we try to adapt as best as we can to the situation, every virtual concert, and every concert with socially-distanced seating will run a deficit.

Of course orchestras, presenters, festivals provide employment for so many musicians. If they go bankrupt, not only will countless musicians be unemployed, but many for-profit businesses (such as talent agencies and managements) will quickly follow, and then as the next logical step universities will cut their music programs, since there will no longer be much employment for musicians. It would be a vicious circle from which the classical music world in the United States might never recover. So I urge you to support your local classical music organizations in whatever way you can.

What we really need in the United States is comprehensive government support for the whole performing arts sector. I just read that the arts as a whole contribute more money to the US economy than agriculture, transportation, or warehousing. I would encourage you to read and possibly (if you support its goals) to sign the petition at www.change.org/artsrelief and read more at www.artsrelief.org. Arts Relief is an advocacy group intended to lobby congress to pass comprehensive relief measures to enable the arts world to survive this moment - including extending unemployment benefits for musicians, emergency loans and grants for arts businesses.

To end this post on a positive note, here is a video I recently filmed at home, of Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson's "Louisiana Blues Strut: a Cakewalk". I recently set out to learn repertoire by neglected black composers, and had a lot of fun with this piece!

A lot has happened since the last post, and we are all living in a very different world during the coronavirus crisis! Like all other musicians, I am at home during this time, and have spent my time making a lot of music videos at home, exploring both new repertoire and pieces I hadn’t played in years, and also producing a series of miniature masterclass videos. I had been meaning to do this for some time, and finally found the time for it (and am already on episode 23!).
To keep up to date with my videos and everything else I am doing in this time, please go to my Facebook page and YouTube channel, which will be more current than the video page of the website. When the concerts stopped, it was a chance to embark on other projects that I normally would not have time for this year, and it has been wonderful to feel more connected than ever to listeners and fans through social media.
The term “social distancing” is kind of a misnomer - what we need is “physical distancing”, but we should, if anything, actually draw even closer socially.
What I am missing immensely, is playing with other musicians, and for other people. I always say that the best thing about playing the violin is that we usually play with other people, and this is what I find most energizing and rewarding. It’s fun to make videos, but even with the best recording technology online videos can never be a substitute for playing and hearing live music, and for me, an online concert is simply not a concert.

I am by nature an optimist and am hopeful that the worst will be averted, but the music world is certainly facing a terribly difficult time - particularly in the United States, where the arts receive almost no funding from the government. With so many performances canceled this spring and summer we are already, like the entire rest of the world, in crisis. However, if musicians and presenters do not find a way to present live music in some format next season, I’m afraid it could mean the end for a large number, perhaps even the majority, of classical music institutions in the United States. Due to the nature of what we do, there are special challenges in this particular crisis that never existed previously. The crowds are not as large as at sports events, but can be several thousand people - and many concertgoers are older.
Art and culture is usually the last priority for politicians, so this is not a problem that will be solved for us. Musicians, orchestra managements, presenters all have to figure out ways together to make live music happen again this summer/fall in a way that is safe for the audience and musicians.
I’ve heard a lot of interesting ideas already - the most obvious is playing for much smaller audiences spaced out far apart in big halls (with video-streaming for those patrons who prefer to stay home for the time being), and playing more chamber music rather than orchestral works to minimize the number of people on stage. Halls could be retrofitted to reduce crowding and increase distance between people even when entering and exiting. Outdoor concerts also have added appeal in this situation. It may not be financially sustainable but might be a way for orchestras to stay in business until the crisis is over and traditional live music events can resume.
Safety is paramount and we have a responsibility towards our audience and each other. I fear however that if musicians don’t press their case to find ways to perform safely, classical music concerts might be the last thing to return, long after sports events and big conventions make a comeback - and in many places will not return at all.

I also have some good news: since December 2019 I am performing on a different violin, the 1744 “Leduc” Guarneri del Gesù. It is said to be the last violin made by Del Gesù before his death, and was for over 30 years Henryk Szeryng’s favorite instrument, from 1957 until his death in 1988. I grew up with recordings that Szeryng played on this violin, and still remember seeing a poster of this violin hanging in a NYC violin shop years ago, so it’s amazing that I now get to play on it every day!
Since Szeryng passed away, the Leduc had rested for over 30 years. Over the first few months of playing it I have experienced it “waking up”, as the wood gradually vibrated more and more freely. It is hard to describe the character of the sound of this instrument, it is rich and warm and full, but the sound is also an enigma, strong and robust yet also vulnerable.

We don’t know very much about Giuseppe Guarneri’s life compared to Antonio Stradivari (who was much more famous and successful in his lifetime - it was only sometime later that these two makers came to be considered history's greatest violin makers). A lot of myths and wild stories have been made up over the centuries. He is called “del Gesù” to distinguish him from his father, who was also called Giuseppe Guarneri (and is referred to as “filius Andreae” - son of Andrea Guarneri). The moniker “del Gesù” alludes to his habit of writing I.H.S. (the latin abbreviation of Jesus’ name) and a roman cross on his labels. It is thought that this might have been a sort of business card: in those days, there were no street numbers and proper addresses, and people oriented themselves using the many churches and other major landmarks in a city. The Guarneri shop was close to a Jesuit church (bearing the initials I.H.S. prominently on the front), so if you heard this violin somewhere and liked it, you could travel to Cremona, somebody would point you to the Jesuit church, and from there you could find the shop and buy a violin there. Now, almost 300 years after he died and the shop closed, his violins are sounding better than ever.

For me, the biggest difference between the violins of del Gesù and “Strads’ are the way the violins respond — Strads respond right away to the most subtle touch on the string, and small nuances of the bow arm make a huge difference. Del Gesü violins are slower in response (since the wood is thicker), but once the sound gets started, one is rewarded with a warmer, full sound. I have had to adjust how I use my bow arm in order to get the violin to respond, and it requires a more physically energetic approach. I have had to make many adjustments to my playing as a result.
I have to confess that in the past, I was firmly in the Strad camp, and was fascinated by the colors, response and malleability of his instruments. The vocal, human quality of the sound of the Leduc immediately drew me in however, and every piece I’ve played on this violin over the past 5 months has felt somehow new and fresh.

Paganini concerto no. 1 is a piece I don’t play every season, but this spring I performed it with several different orchestras. The Leduc suits this operatic, lyrical music wonderfully — in fact Paganini himself performed on a famous Del Gesü violin, “il Cannone”. In particular, the melodramatic second movement sounds wonderful on this violin. Here is a video of a performance of the Paganini concerto from Detroit in January.
Playing Sibelius concerto on it was also a revelation — the dark brooding themes on the G string sound particularly rich and warm. There are now videos of me playing the Sibelius concerto on both the "Leduc" del Gesù, and the "Kiesewetter" Stradivari (which I played from 2010 until 2019), and I think it’s interesting how the two violins brought out different aspects of the piece (or rather, made it possible for me to bring out very different aspects of the piece)

On July 3rd, my next album — called “Bohemian Tales” — will be released on Warner Classics. The program consists of the Dvořák Violin Concerto (recorded live in concert in 2018 with the Bavarian Radio Orchestra and Jakub Hrusa) as well as works for violin and piano by Janáček and Josef Suk, with Charles Owen on the piano (we also recorded some short Dvořák pieces). I can’t imagine better collaborators for this program! I’ve played the piece with Jakub Hrusa a number of times before, and love his fluid, natural and unmannered approach. The Bavarian Radio Orchestra played like a dream. The concerto has long been neglected in the repertoire, due to its difficult violin part, tricky orchestrational challenges and unusual form, but I find it immensely exciting and beautiful and play it in concert often.
I immediately thought of pairing this concerto with the Janáček sonata, a piece that Charles Owen and I have performed quite a lot and love deeply. Janáček was in many ways Dvořák’s opposite: he goes for raw intensity where Dvorak would go for elegant refinement, and creates stark and sudden contrasts where Dvorak might write smooth transitions between sections. His sonata is a heart-wrenchiing piece that deals with his complicated and conflicting feelings about World War I and the Russian troops entering Moravia.
Josef Suk’s Four Pieces is a lighter work from less troubled times, and is a new addition to my repertoire. This piece should be much better known, and I wish I’d known it 20 years ago.

What’s next? I will be learning more music, making more tutorials and keeping in touch with musicians around the world in anticipation of the day, hopefully not too long from now, when we can all make and listen to live music again.
You can already two music videos of pieces from the album here: Dvořák's Humoresque and Songs My Mother Taught Me.
 

The past month has been one of the most intense and exciting of the whole year! I wrote a series of blog posts for Strings Magazine about these weeks - basically about my life as a traveling violinist, and thoughts about the different concertos I played and about traveling and adjusting to acoustics of the hall and working with different conductors.

The first post was about playing the Beethoven concerto with the Boston Symphony and Andris Nelsons. Walking onstage in Boston’s beautiful Symphony Hall is quite an experience, especially when the room is packed with people. Its resonant acoustics are ideal for the Beethoven. Sixteen white marble statues in the Roman style watch over the concert hall, while the name “Beethoven” is placed most prominently in gold on top of the proscenium!
You can read the full post on the Strings Magazine site here

After Boston, I traveled to New York City for three performances of the Sibelius concerto with Jaap van Zweden and the New York Philharmonic. New York City has been my home for the past 15 years, and I have played with the New York Philharmonic a number of times over the years, and just played the Britten concerto with them and Jaap in Vail in July, so this past week felt in many ways like I was coming home to friends. The full post is here

In the third blog post, I wrote about traveling to Eindhoven in the Netherlands to perform Prokofiev's second violin concerto with the BBC Philharmonic on tour and John Storgards. Later in the week I continued to London to play the Mendelssohn concerto with the Philharmonia Orchestra and Clemens Schuldt. I write about jet lag, what it's like to perform concerts that are also live radio broadcasts, and how Mendelssohn and Prokofiev, despite the huge stylistic differences between them, arrive at a similar emotional place in their second movements.
The third blog post is here

The fourth and final Strings Magazine blog post is about my concerts with the Cleveland Orchestra, playing once again Prokofiev's second concerto. I go into more depth about my thougths about Prokofiev. His music is always telling stories in very colorful and evocative ways, but his idosyncratic way of writing makes his works quite hard to memorize. The concerts were with Klaus Mäkelä, a young Finnish conductor who stepped in as a replacement, and was totally brilliant!
Here's the link to the full post.

After a little break, my next concerts will be Brahms concerto with the Seattle Symphony and Nathalie Stutzmann. I have a long friendship with this orchestra and am always happy to return to Seattle, where I have made so many fond musical memories over the years. After that, I will go to Hamburg to play with Alan Gilbert, in my debut with the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra. I have heard so much about the Elbphilharmonie concert hall, and can't wait to check it out for myself with a conductor I love playing with.
I am happy that so many new halls are being built. I believe that after a "dark age" of acoustics in the post-war period, when halls often turned out quite poorly, the last few decades have actually been a golden age of beautiful- and clear-sounding concert halls being built all over the world!

Happy New Year! 2018 was filled with exciting milestones and was one of my busiest ever - I played 14 different concertos throughout the year as well as recital and chamber programs, in a total of 113 performances! Since my last update, I flew around the world a few times - in addition to visits to Minneapolis, Kansas City, Seattle, San Antonio and Miami and a return to the Hollywood Bowl, I also made my debut at the Salzburg Festival and went on a wonderful tour to New Zealand and Singapore in August. In the fall I made a lot of trips to Europe to play performances in Oslo, Brussels, Lyon, Frankfurt, Helsinki and Vienna. One of the biggest highlights of the year was my debut with the Bavarian Radio Symphony in October 2018 playing Dvorak concerto with Jakub Hrusa!

In November I made a very special return to Indianapolis playing Bartók’s second concerto with Krzysztof Urbański. This was the concerto I played at the Indianapolis Violin Competition in 2006, and as I stood on that same stage again playing that same piece with the same orchestra, I had many flashbacks to my time at the competition! I used to be so nervous performing, and have over the years felt more and more at home on stage. My visit to Indianapolis made me reflect on how much has happened and how much experience I have gained since then.

In other news: my recording of David Lang’s mystery sonatas, a work commissioned by Carnegie Hall that he wrote for me in 2014, is finally out and can be ordered here!
There are also some new Youtube videos of performances of the Britten concerto in Detroit in March and of the Mendelssohn concerto in Valladolid, Spain in May.

My recording of the Brahms and Ligeti violin concertos with the Norwegian Radio Orchestra and Miguel Harth-Bedoya will be released on Warner Classics in April. I’ve dreamt for a long time of recording these two masterpieces of the 19th and 20th century together on album. They are of course very different in style and temperament, but also similar in surprising ways — for example there is a strong influence of both renaissance counterpoint and of Hungarian folk music in movements of both concertos.

This recording will feature two new cadenzas: the amazing cadenza for the Ligeti by Thomas Adès that I already wrote about in my previous news entry, and my own cadenza for the Brahms concerto, which I have added to the cadenzas section on this site.

Until the early 20th century, it was customary and even a point of pride, for violinists (from Joachim to Kreisler to Heifetz) to write their own cadenzas to the Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms concertos (those major concertos without a cadenza by the composer). Unfortunately, this tradition did not continue into our time. Writing a cadenza is a very rewarding process for the performer and provides variety and a personal viewpoint to the listener. It’s important to stay close to the composer's style, since it can be jarring otherwise, and in order to achieve this it's essential to study and analyze the composer’s use of form, rhythm and their harmonic language. For me, it was a humbling experience to compose using Brahms’ motives and materials and gave me an even greater appreciation of his genius.

2019 is off to a fast start, with concerts in January in Moscow, Toledo (Ohio), Bournemouth, Lausanne, Raleigh (North Carolina), and Birmingham, UK!

What a whirlwind the past few months have been! On Wednesday I played my debut with the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal - Tchaikovsky concerto with John Storgards conducting. I love his approach to the piece, the spontaneous, warm and flexible way in which he approaches the score - never repetitive, or merely an accompaniment. The Montréal Symphony played with a warm tone and responded to every nuance. Every time I perform the Tchaikovsky, I think to myself, what an exhilarating piece to perform!

I have enjoyed every performance in 2018, despite the weather, and some very difficult travel. It is not unusual that when weather cancellations occur, I have to book several additional “contingency” flights with other airlines, since it can be impossible to know which flight will go ahead and which will be canceled. Because of this kind of planning, I’ve not missed a concert or even a rehearsal since 2012! Other hiccups can occur, however. For my concerts in Lahti in February, my suitcases never arrived, and I had to borrow a tails from the orchestra for the performance. This season has also seen multiple acts of "security theater" at airports with absurd inspections of the violin case, and an occasional airline employee strike. It’s when I finally get to a destination and start rehearsals that I am reminded about why I do what I do!

Earlier this month I performed the Bernstein Serenade at the Kennedy Center with the Fort Worth Symphony and Miguel Harth-Bedoya, as part of the SHIFT festival. It was ten years ago that I made my Carnegie Hall debut with Miguel and the Fort Worth Symphony, and I have been back to Fort Worth many times - it was such a joy to perform with them at Kennedy Center and the concerto’s theme of love felt fitting for the occasion! It’s a piece loosely - very loosely - based on Plato’s Symposium, but is really a violin concerto. Even Bernstein later wished he’d just called it “concerto” as the title is actually more distracting than helpful. I especially love the fourth movement, “Agathon”, and also the jazzy dances of the last movement.

Other recent highlights: in March I returned to Detroit to perform the Britten concerto with Jukka-Pekka Saraste and the Detroit Symphony. (The New Yorker Magazine music writer Alex Ross came to Detroit that week and wrote an article about our performances). Earlier in the season, I also performed the Britten with the St. Louis Symphony and David Robertson on a tour in California. I had a blast performing the Ligeti concerto again, with the Seattle, Milwaukee and Boston Symphony orchestras. In Boston I played the premiere of Thomas Adès’ new cadenza for the Ligeti, a kind of frenzied recapitulation of all five movements of the concerto. It’s a brilliant conclusion to the piece, and I think it’s amazing how true it is to Ligeti’s compositional style. The Boston Symphony released a short video clip of the ending of the last movement and the cadenza.

My Paganini album was released in January and is available for order! It is an amazing feeling to finally hold the CD in my hand. It feels like it was something I worked towards my whole life! Several music videos were released alongside the album, and are now on YouTube: Fantasia dei Gatti, an animated short based on Caprice no. 17, and music videos of Caprices nos. 1, 3, 4, 11, 16 and 21.

I’m in the middle of a busy and exciting summer season. There have already been many fun visits to festivals (Chautauqua, Vail and Aspen, a week playing at the Seattle Chamber Music Society, and now Bowdoin in Maine).The highlight for me was last week’s Sibelius performance at Tanglewood with Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony! The Sibelius violin concerto has long been one of my favorite concertos; there is no other work quite like it in the violin repertoire. Half concerto and half tone-poem, the Sibelius is filled with startlingly original and memorable ideas. The energy and effortless musicality of Andris was enormously inspiring - it was as though the music flowed from the score through him to the orchestra and to the audience. It was exhilarating to perform this incredible work for over 4000 people!

Next week I will travel to the Sun Valley Music Festival in Idaho for the first time (Dvorak concerto), and then go to London for my first performance at the BBC Proms! At the Proms, I will perform “Four Iberian Miniatures” by Francisco Coll, with the Britten Sinfonia and Thomas Adès conducting. It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of Adès and his music and music-making (and that I play his concerto as often as I can) and this will be my first time playing with him as a conductor.

Right after, I will travel to Amsterdam for a performance of the Beethoven concerto with the Rotterdam Philharmonic in the beautiful Concertgebouw hall. I know the hall from my performances as artist-in-residence with the Netherlands Philharmonic in 2015. It has a famous staircase behind the orchestra from which the soloist and conductor descend - probably one of the most difficult paths to a stage I’ve seen. I’d never been so self-conscious when going down stairs! When you play there, you cannot help but think of all the amazing artists who have filled the hall with their sound in the past.

After Amsterdam, I have a few weeks off which I shall use to prepare for the start of an ambitious project for next season: the recording of the complete caprices of Paganini for Warner Classics. I’ve often played caprices as encores in the last years (especially nos. 5, 24, 9, 17 and 19, and occasionally no. 1). The Paganini Caprices were a major part of my musical upbringing in Italy. Paganini’s works are often regarded to be Etudes or chores used to improve technique, which is understandable, considering how much hardship they cause violinists! However,  they are also beautiful, witty and original compositions. In Paganini’s works, the technical fireworks always serve the music, not the other way around. As he explores different extended techniques and virtuosic acrobatics, each caprice also shows off his compositional skills, which are on a higher level than many other 19th-century violinist composers. Many of the caprices are charming, funny, entertaining and thrilling, some are dramatic and passionate, and yet others serene and lyrical. Each caprice has its own quirky personality; some are my friends, but others are ferocious beasts to be tamed! A few of them are not so terribly difficult, while others provide technical challenges so absurdly extreme as to border on the impossible. I’ll be recording groups of caprices over the course of the season, in order to give each of them the attention they deserve.

I won my first Grammy! It was in the category of “Best Classical Instrumental Solo” for my recording of the Dutilleux violin concerto (“l’arbre des songes”) with the Seattle Symphony and Ludovic Morlot. (link)
This incredibly exciting news reached me on February 15, when I was mid-journey on my way to England where I have spent the past two weeks performing first with the Bournemouth Symphony (where I am Artist-in-Residence this season), then with the London Philharmonic, and now with the BBC Philharmonic in Manchester. It has been wonderful to read all your words of congratulations and support in the many emails, texts and Facebook messages I received. I cannot imagine better collaborators than Ludovic Morlot and the Seattle Symphony, and with the help of the engineer, Dmitriy Lipay, the recording turned out so beautifully. I am also personally thrilled because I love Dutilleux and our winning this award might lead to more people discovering his beautiful and somewhat neglected concerto.

On Wednesday, I performed the Tchaikovsky concerto with the London Philharmonic and Vasily Petrenko, and the recording of this performance will eventually be released on the same disc as Lalo’s Symphonie Espagnole (which I played with the LPO last year), sometime in early 2017. It may seem like an unusual pairing, but it was actually upon hearing the Lalo that Tchaikovsky decided to write his own concerto!

I have played the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto since I was 12 years old. Over the years, through playing it again and again, I have found it occasionally necessary to take a step back and approach the piece as if I had never played nor heard it before. Out of the entire violin repertoire, this is the concerto where the violinistic "tradition" (all the old recordings and conventions passed down through the generations of violinists) is least helpful to me, as the concerto had historically been performed with cuts, many parts altered, and so many of Tchaikovsky's instructions (about tempo, dynamics, articulation) ignored. I find these changes extraneous, because the concerto, as it was originally written by Tchaikovsky, is so brilliantly conceived and thoughtful!

Tchaikovsky's favorite composer was Mozart, and his violin concerto (just like the “Rococo Variations”), shows Mozart’s influence in many places. The main theme of the first movement is classical and elegant, in contrast with the lushly romantic and passionate second theme. It has often been speculated that Tchaikovsky had a romantic affair with Josef Kotek, for whom he wrote this concerto (although Kotek did not premiere the piece), and the music seems to reflect this sunny period in his life – to me, this piece was written by a man who is happily and passionately in love. Therefore, to me, this concerto is a joyful work, and though there are some bittersweet, aching moments (for example in the slow movement, Canzonetta), it never takes a dark or tragic turn. An exhilarating concerto both to think about and to play!

I will always remember the day in early 2007 when I performed the Tchaikovsky with the Fort Worth Symphony and Miguel Harth-Bedoya in front of large groups of high school students in South Lake, TX. (We repeated the performance three times in one day, for three groups of students!) These were not regular concertgoers and I found it wonderful how uninhibited they were, without much awareness nor concern about how to behave "appropriately" at a classical concert. At the end of the exposition of the first movement, where the first long violin solo ends and the orchestra plays the first theme, the students started clapping! When this music was written, it was customary for audiences to cheer whenever they liked something they were hearing (or to boo if they didn’t). And doesn’t it feel so artificial when people don't clap after the first movement of the Tchaikovsky? I found theunrestrained enthusiasm of the students very refreshing. To this day I still think back fondly to those performances whenever I play the Tchaikovsky.

Aspen, July 30 2015 -- I can’t believe how long it has been since my last news update! Over the past few years, it has become harder and harder to find the time to write these notes. 2015 has been a whirlwind! It would be impossible to pick a favorite moment - I played debuts with the London Philharmonic, NHK Symphony (Tokyo), Danish National Orchestra and Minnesota Orchestra, return engagements with the New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, and the orchestras in Baltimore, Houston, Karlsruhe, Saint Louis, Stuttgart, Toronto… every week has been incredibly exciting, and I was never bored for a moment. Violinists are lucky that there is so much great repertoire written for our instrument!

My newest CD, of the Mendelssohn concerto and the second Bartók concerto is finally out! I recorded it in June 2014 with my friend Miguel Harth-Bedoya and the Norwegian Radio Orchestra (There is a promo film for the recording here). It is now added in the "about/discography" section, and I added some selections from it to the sound player of the website.
There are also some new videos from my time in Vail, Colorado last week: my performance of the Sibelius concerto with the Philadelphia Orchestra (link); first movement of Janacek sonata with Joyce Yang (link).

The year has gotten off to a fast start. I have just returned from my first visit to Hawaii and am performing this week with the Pacific Symphony. After this I'm playing my debut with the Danish National Orchestra, with my friend Miguel Harth-Bedoya; then comes the second performance of my residency with the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra, and a return to the SWR Stuttgart Radio Orchestra. My father is from Stuttgart and going there always feels a bit like going home.

Work is progressing on my next recording, Mendelssohn and Bartók violin concertos, to be released later in the spring. The other recording in the pipeline is the violin concerto by Henri Dutilleux (L’arbre des songes - The Tree of Dreams), which I recorded in November with the Seattle Symphony and Ludovic Morlot (with a release planned for late 2015). I've always liked Dutilleux’s music. He lived through the era of dogmatic avantgardism in new music, between the 1950s and 1990s, but along with Messiaen, Dutilleux stood out by writing music that, although complex, was always expressive, beautiful and colorful. I can hear many echoes of Ravel in Dutilleux's orchestration and every moment is imaginative and interesting. Where Messiaens music is often massive in scale and celebratory, Dutilleux’s is more intimate and searching. His concerto is quite rhapsodic, with many fanciful and virtuosic lines that branch out in all directions (those are the branches of the “tree of dreams”). In the most beautiful part of the piece, the violin plays a duet with the oboe d’amore, their lines weaving in and out of each other, as if in an embrace.

I wish you all a happy and musical year 2015!

Great news! I have been selected as the winner of the new Warner Music Prize! It is a prize which was awarded for the first time this year. The nominees were selected amongst soloists performing at Carnegie Hall in the 14/15 season and I am so happy and honored to be chosen.

This season has already been very exciting! I returned from Hong Kong this week after playing my debut with the Hong Kong Philharmonic and am about to travel to Chicago for my debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra! Mozart concerto no. 5, an old favorite, is the repertoire for both debut performances. It is sometimes called “the Turkish” in English-speaking parts of the world. The last movement, a gallant and civilized minuet, is interrupted by a wild, savage and exotic-sounding section.All “exotic” and Eastern-sounding music was referred to as “Turkish” by Mozart and his countrymen, though it had little to do with traditional Turkish music. A century later, if Brahms had written this he and his contemporaries might have called it a Hungarian interlude (just as inaccurately)! This rogue section sounds more like Gypsy music, and parts of it remind me of Czardas. The celli are instructed to play “al rovescio”, beating the string with the wooden part of the bow to imitate whips!  The piece was written less than a hundred years after the siege of Vienna of 1683, when the Turkish army almost took the city, and were beaten back with the help of Polish troops - this “Turkish" section is supposed to delight the audience by first scaring them, and then provide relief as the music returns to the sweet and ‘familiar’ minuet, a compositional device which is incredibly effective.

This fall has been filled with some wonderful musical experiences. I recently played the Beethoven concerto in Milwaukee with Edo de Waart, which was a particularly beautiful collaboration. Earlier in October, I greatly enjoyed playing the Mendelssohn concerto with the orchestra of the Komische Oper Berlin and Sir Neville Marriner. Another musical highlight was my debut with the Pittsburgh Symphony in September, when I played the Brahms concerto with Manfred Honeck.

Looking ahead, I will be playing more unusual repertoire: first, Adès concerto with the Tonkünstlerorchester in Vienna, then the Shostakovich violin sonata in an arrangement for violin, strings and percussion (link) in Detroit, and finally, in a very exciting project with Orpheus Chamber Orchestra at Carnegie Hall (with additional concerts on the west coast), the Stravinsky Divertimento and Tchaikovsky Valse-Scherzo. Stravinsky’s “Divertimento" is one of Stravinsky’s most brilliant works. The music is from his ballet “the Fairy’s Kiss”, which is based on themes from Tchaikovsky.  The way Tchaikovsky’s themes have been “Stravinski-fied" resembles how one might imagine Tchaikovsky would sound if performed by an inebriated orchestra in which half the players lose their places, or start playing in the wrong key!  While Stravinsky occasionally pokes fun at Tchaikovsky's compositional practices, he never does it without respect. This music is a loving homage to the beauty, passion, lightness and elegance of Tchaikovsky’s ballet scores. He made a violin and piano version (which is my favorite Stravinsky violin piece actually), and also an orchestral suite, and we asked Dmitry Sitkovetsky to make a new arrangement for violin and small chamber orchestra. We chose an instrumentation similar to Tchaikovsky’s Valse-Scherzo, which appears on the second half of the program. In recitals, I have often performed the Divertimento and the Valse-Scherzo together and I hope that the new arrangement and this pairing will more clearly reveal the Tchaikovsky within the Stravinsky.

It has been a really busy and exciting summer! It got off to an unexpected start in early July, when I filled in on less than two days’ notice at the Blossom Festival to play the Sibelius concerto with the Cleveland Orchestra and Hans Graf. Since I spent so much time preparing for my Sibelius recording last year, and afterwards on the long process of listening to the recording session takes and the mixes, it is a piece that I can now play on very short notice. It was a joy to play with the Cleveland Orchestra again and amazing to experience the orchestral tutti passages in the first movement (probably my favorite parts) while standing on stage, enveloped by their glorious sound.
After my first performance of the Dutilleux concerto in Chautauqua, I went to Aspen for 10 days to reprise the “Tango Song and Dance” program (originally premiered at the Kennedy Center in April) with Joyce Yang and Pablo Villegas, as well as for another performance of the Sibelius. Playing the fourth Mozart concerto at Tanglewood on August 3rd was another highlight of the summer. It was originally supposed to have been conducted by Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, who sadly passed away in June. He had been a generous and inspiring mentor to me for the past few years and I had been really looking forward to several performances together in the future. Fortunately Juanjo Mena (himself once a protégé of Maestro Frühbeck) was available to step in.

Next I went to play at the Britt Festival in Oregon, and then to Mexico City. The wonderful thing about summer festivals is that even though it’s in some ways more difficult to play outdoors rather than in a regular concert hall, the large crowds, their good mood and the relaxed setting inevitably transfers back to the performers. In Mexico City I performed Bartók’s Second Concerto with the Orquesta Sinfónica Minería and Carlos Miguel Prieto. Already five years ago, when we first played together, Carlos and I were talking of collaborating on this concerto, a favorite for both of us. This piece, too, was very fresh in my head since I recently recorded it in June. When performing the Bartók in the past, I have often felt that there is not enough rehearsal time: with the difficulty of the orchestral parts, the complexity of the ensemble, and so many tempo changes, it needs substantially more preparation time than other 20th-century works like the Shostakovich or Prokofiev concertos. And if Bartók is not played really well—with great expression, beautiful color, and in tune—it sounds very cacophonic! I think the reason why many concertgoers think they don’t like Bartók is because they have heard his works played badly. Once you know Bartók’s style well, you know his vocabulary of gestures and colors and harmonies, and what they mean emotionally; and with this mental reference you will know whether it is a good piece, regardless of how it is being played, just the way you would when hearing Beethoven or Brahms. But people who are less familiar with Bartók will not ‘get it’ unless they are led and drawn in by the performers, who must bring out all those details. I was really happy that we had a lot of time to get to the bottom of it in rehearsal, with the result that the performance was musically extremely satisfying.

I’ve just returned from Scotland, where I played Thomas Adès’ concerto and Haydn's C Major concerto with Peter Oundjian and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra in Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Glasgow. I had a great time and the pairing of the two pieces worked very well; their combined duration is about 35 minutes, and early music is a major influence for Adès. I think the pairing enhanced the effect of both pieces by revealing Ades’ use of baroque gestures and phrasing, especially in the slow movement, which is a sort of passacaglia. (It was completely different from the pairing of Adès and Sibelius on my CD, which in contrast enhanced the dramatic, heroic, and monumental side of both works.) To close the program I played a slow Bach movement (the unbelievably beautiful Andante movement from the third solo sonata) that brought us back to the key and style of the Haydn.

I am now preparing for my next CD recording in June, with the Norwegian Radio Orchestra and Miguel Harth-Bedoya. I will record two of my all-time favorite pieces: the Mendelssohn concerto and Bartók's second concerto! In this case, I am drawn to the combination just for how totally different the two works are. I also know that Bartók's style is not familiar to many people; hopefully, I can convert new listeners to Bartók who may get the CD because of the Mendelssohn. Once you are hooked on Bartók, you will never tire of his music. The great challenge of his second violin concerto is its form: the first movement is straightforward sonata form, the second movement is a theme with variations, and the finale is a variation of the first. It's astonishing how he manages to make the material of the first movement totally new in the last. But since this is not obvious to the new listener, it's the job of the performer to play the piece in a way that hangs together, with a sustained dramatic arc that doesn't get sidetracked. There is a lot of pain and sadness in this work, which was written during 1937-38 as fascism was spreading. One can sense the premonition and fear of what was to come, but there are also precious moments of beauty(not least the opening of the concerto with its beautiful harp chords). Like much of his writing it is unmistakably Hungarian, coming out of the rich Hungarian folk music tradition.

At the end of April, I premiered a new solo violin work by David Lang, called mystery sonatas. It is a large work in seven movements, inspired by the Rosary Sonatas of the Baroque virtuoso Heinrich Biber. This is the first time I’ve had a piece written for me and it was exciting to work with David—who was very patient and accommodating!--as I was learning it. David's music is "minimalist" in the sense that he works with techniques of repetitive variation over extended periods of time. But what drew me to his music is its emotional depth. David's music often looks inward, and despite the apparent peacefulness, there is a lot of turmoil under the surface. This becomes more and more apparent the longer one listens. The first and the last movements are very slow and almost meditative. One of the inner ones is a crazy fast fiddling pattern that gradually finds a groove, but then becomes stuck on two notes with no way out. One sounds a bit like a Baroque invention, and yet another one is composed of two long, painful and increasingly poignant descending sequences. David left most of the articulations and detailed dynamics up to me, and in some of the more meditative movements, even the pacing - he just described what he wanted to be expressed, likening the music to thoughts that are forming as I play. For the premiere at Carnegie Hall's Zankel Hall, I read the music off an iPad (doing the page-turns with pedals), with the hall entirely dark at the beginning - the only light being the backlighting of the iPad on my face. It was a powerful effect - and I must say that, once I got the hang of the foot pedals for page turning, in many ways I preferred it to using a traditional stand! (You can read the New York TImes review of the premiere here)

My new recording of the violin concertos by Thomas Adès and Jean Sibelius was released a few weeks ago, and has already gotten some great reviews in the New York Times, Gramophone Magazine, BBC Music Magazine and on NPR! (I added it to the site under about>discography)
A few weeks ago I went to play in Sao Paulo and Belo Horizonte. It's refreshing to go to a country like Brazil where classical music is so much on the up-swing, with world-class orchestras that get even better every time I visit, playing for enthusiastic and inquisitive audiences of all ages.
In Sao Paulo I played Mozart concerto no. 4 with Marin Alsop - the rest of the program consisted of works by Prokofiev (including almost never done Scythian Suite) and by the Brazilian composer César Guerra-Peixe. In Belo Horizonte I played Bartók's second concerto with Fabio Mechetti, and the rest of the program were works by Beethoven, Villa-Lobos and Enescu. Perhaps because there is not a pre-conceived notion (built over many decades) of what programs are supposed to be -- the traditional pattern is of course overture-concerto-symphony, and everything except for the overture is very old music -- the programming there is varied and imaginative: new and old music, obscure and well-known all mixed together, and audiences come with an open mind.
Right afterward I flew to Europe to play my first recital in the Kleine Zaal at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam with Charles Owen. What a beautiful hall in a beautiful city! We both enjoyed every second of it.

Last week I played Mendelssohn with Juanjo Mena and the Cincinnati Symphony - leading up to the performances, I did a "residency" with the CSO, going to various schools and performing outreach events. I enjoyed getting to know Cincinnati better this time (being there almost two weeks rather than just flying in for the first rehearsal). I even played one performance at a bar (Northside Tavern) with my friend Pablo Villegas. Tango is meant to be played in this setting! It was the first time that I played Piazzolla's "Histoire du Tango" in a bar rather than in a hall, and the atmosphere was electric.

Next Monday (April 21) I have a project at the Kennedy Center that also features Pablo, as well as Joyce Yang. It's called "Tango, Song and Dance" - named after a work for violin and piano by André Previn. The three movements of the Previn work form the separated pillars of a recital program, with various duos and solo works in-between. It is a "multimedia recital": we're working with a director, Edward Berkeley, and developed a narrative with him, a kind of story told subliminally through the way the different pieces follow each other. In Ed's words, "The first step is to study the emotional connections between and among the instrumental lines in each work. Where do the instruments argue? Where do they agree? Where do they flirt? Where seduce? Where do they celebrate, where despair?" It all starts with Previn's Tango. Ed elaborates: "The violin and piano in Previn's Tango seem to be having an emotional problem connecting with each other. There is a struggle. This is the core of the evening, the starting point that cries for resolution." It is then that Pablo appears playing Rodrigo’s Invocation and Dance for solo guitar, drawing me into his own mysterious world. I join him in five Falla songs, after which the piano explodes jealously in Ginastera’s Danzas Argentinas. Ed feels that "private thoughts are explored in the solo works until a synthesis is found among the violin, piano and guitar". After Piazzolla's Histoire du Tango and Ysaÿe's sonata no. 6, we finally all play together in Villa-Lobos's gorgeous Bachianas brasileiras No. 5.

To reinforce the non-verbal narrative, Ed asked lighting designer Kate Ashton to create lighting that would further communicate the story. Ed asked that "spaces become smaller and larger to connect and separate the musicians, and that color and image change to imply the passage of time and further explore the emotional voice of each instrument." The lighting is atmospheric, reinforcing the character and emotional message of each work. We want the audience to reflect upon where the pieces take them, and to make their own connections. Hopefully this program will be as much fun for them as it is for us!
 

It has been a long time since my last update! The fall of 2013 was packed with wonderful experiences, so packed that I could not even find the time to write about them. Unforgettable highlights were the Brahms double with Alban Gerhardt, Christoph von Dohnányi and the Boston Symphony; and a Lalo with Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos and the Philadelphia Orchestra. I went on an extremely fun China tour with the San Diego Symphony, made new friends in Porto, Bournemouth and Portland, OR and reunited with old friends in Milwaukee, Vancouver and Madison.

2014 has already gotten off to a fast-paced start. Three weeks ago I was in Dallas packing my bag after a recital when the phone rang: the Los Angeles Philharmonic needed a violinist to fill a cancellation by Christian Tetzlaff! Edo de Waart was to be the conductor; rehearsals would start in three days.
When getting a call like this, I feel a rush of excitement quickly followed by many questions: will the travel be a problem? What about the repertoire - is there enough time for me to prepare? I quickly sent a list of works I could get ready in this short amount of time. We settled on the Beethoven Concerto. (Other possibilities that were discussed were Sibelius, Dvorak, Bartók no. 2 and Stravinsky). I had already played several times with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in the summer at the Hollywood Bowl, but never in on a subscription series, and I couldn't think of any piece I'd rather make my Disney Hall debut with!

Most orchestras and presenters plan their concert schedules years in advance. After the initial excitement of getting an invitation there’s a very long wait until the concert finally happens. I've always hated this waiting for things and in contrast, cancellations are refreshingly fast. The call comes; I accept; and a few days later it's already over and I wonder whether it was all just a dream!

I enjoyed the concerts immensely and got a great review! Disney Hall has the perfect acoustic for the Beethoven concerto - even though it's a large hall, the softest sounds float all the way to the back. Every time I play the slow movement of the Beethoven, I marvel at how perfect, how simple, intimate and human it is. Perhaps it gives us--just for a moment--an insight into some deep fundamental truth of our existence, a glimpse of what lies beyond. My feeling about Beethoven's greatest works is that the better you know and understand them, the harder it is to imagine a person being able to write something so extraordinary.

Anyway, after the last performance, I flew to Hong Kong for a chamber festival. There were wonderful musicians there, some of which I already know well (Joyce Yang, Cho-Liang Lin); others whom I played with for the first time (Vadim Repin, Gary Hoffman). While we did rehearse a lot, we must have spent half the time eating! And as usual at these kinds of festivals, there was much laughter and jokes to counter all the serious music-making.

The pre-order page for my new CD (of the Sibelius and Thomas Adès concertos with Hannu Lintu and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic) is available for pre-ordering now on iTunes and Amazon!
 

This summer has been an unusually busy one, but I am just about to start a 2-week break! Last week I played a performance of Stravinsky's violin concerto, the first time I've played it since 8 years ago, when I was still a student at Juilliard and performed it with the Juilliard Orchestra. It is interesting to return to a piece after putting it down for such a long time - as I started playing it again, I was at first mostly shaking my head at all the things I didn't know in 2005! I also rediscovered why I love this piece. It is so fresh, beautiful, and very funny - the first movement makes me think of a circus! The third movement (Aria II) is my favorite one - it has the violin playing a strange, exotic, chant-like melody over a baroque bass-line. Many parts of this piece sound like a concerto grosso, in the sense that the solo violin is often playing duos and trios: with the Bassoon, the concertmaster, the two flutes. The violin part is very hard and quite virtuosic in parts, although to the listener it does not sound quite as hard as it actually is (infuriatingly, Stravinsky wrote that "the technical demands are relatively tame", which ranks among the composer's more ridiculous statements).
In his neo-classical works, Stravinsky writes music that is almost baroque sounding, except that it is full of "mistakes": notes that are obnoxiously off-key, rythms that don't add up; there is a general state of chaos and mischief! At times sounds as though different sections of the orchestra instruments are lost and are desperately trying to find each other, only making matters worse. I think it's quite important to bring this comedic aspect of the music across.

In June, I recorded a new CD, to be released in the spring of 2014: Sibelius and Thomas Adès violin concertos, with Hannu Lintu conducting the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. It'll be only the second recording to be released of the Adès, which has quickly become one of my favorite pieces. I think Hannu was just the perfect conductor to record these two works with: his approach to Sibelius was fresh and free of "baggage": it is a piece that can sometimes sound plodding and heavy, as though it was bearing the weight of the thousands of recordings that have been made of it before - instead he brought a wonderful spontaneity to it. It was Hannu who first introduced me to the Ades concerto when we first collaborated in 2009 - how fitting to recording it with him.

My performances in Vail (Lalo Symphonie Espagnole with the New York Philharmonic and Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos) and at the Hollywood Bowl (Tchaikovsky concerto with the LA Philharmonic and also with Frühbeck de Burgos) were big highlights for me this summer. What an experience to play the Tchaikovsky at the Hollywood Bowl, in front of over 9000 people! The big tutti in the first movement after the exposition (after I've just played about 10 minutes and the orchestra plays the theme triumphantly) is one of the most exhilarating experiences I've ever had on stage. Usually, I sing along with the orchestra there (since nobody can possibly hear me over the sound of the full orchestra tutti, not even the conductor!), but I had to restrain myself at the Bowl, since the amplification system there might have broadcasted my humming to the whole crowd. As I found out later, a man in the audience proposed to his girlfriend during my performance!

I am about to head to Salt Lake City to perform the Dvorak concerto with the Utah Symphony, and will play the piece again in two weeks with the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington D.C. It's often said that Brahms' violin concerto served as the main inspiration for the Dvorak--yet recently, I was struck by how much the Dvorak is also influenced by Max Bruch's concerto. The Bruch was premiered about 10 years earlier, in 1866, and it quickly became one of the most popular works for violin. It sets a clear precedent for many techniques employed by Dvorak in his own violin concerto, especially in the first movement: for example, shortening of the first movement, cutting out the cadenza and recapitulation and instead transitioning directly into an expansive slow movement; not to mention the opening ad libitum lines for the violin. I love the slow movement, which makes me think of an idyllic Czech countryside, and features some incredibly beautiful writing for the horns. The last movement is a lot of fun: it's a kind of furiant dance, with a dumka in the middle. Although Dvorak wrote his concerto for Joseph Joachim, he never actually played the piece. This might have been the starting point for the shameful neglect that this work has experienced over the past century. With a few notable exceptions like Nathan Milstein, many major violinists in the early 20th century did not have the Dvorak in their repertoire. Luckily it has now found its place in the canon as one of the great romantic violin concertos.

Two weeks ago I played Thomas Adès' amazing violin concerto in Rio de Janeiro. This piece is less than 10 years old--it was premiered in 2005--and the more I play it, the more convinced I am that it is the most important addition to the violin repertoire since the Ligeti concerto in 1992. When I first heard it a few years ago, the Adès concerto left a deep impression on me and I quickly decided that I had to learn and perform it. It's about 20 minutes long and is cast in three contrasting movements. There is not one bar too many in this piece! The first movement, "Rings", is very fast and colorful, full of circular, irregular pulsating patterns. The deeply moving and passionate second movement, "Paths", is driven by passacaglia-like sequences that keep pushing against each other. "Rounds", the final movement, is lighter in spirit, with a dancelike and almost tribal-sounding main theme. It's very difficult, but like the Ligeti, I find that it is worth every minute I put into it.
 

My new CD is now out! It's called Histoire du Tango and you can find it on Amazon and iTunes. 

It's an exploration of music for violin and guitar that starts off with Ástor Piazzolla's Histoire du Tango, a four-movement work that traces the development of the tango from the brothels of Buenos Aires around 1900, to the cafés of the 1930s and nightclubs of the 1960s, to the stylized art form played in concert halls today. Next are transcriptions of the Canciones Populares Españolas by Manuel de Falla and two works by Nicolò Paganini: the Sonata Concertata and the fiendishly difficult Moses Fantasy, a work played entirely on the G string (the violin's lowest string). (Legend has it that Paganini would often play this work at the end of concerts once his other three strings had broken!) Pablo de Sarasate's Zigeunerweisen (Gypsy Airs) finishes the program.



I recorded this album with the brilliant guitarist Pablo Sáinz Villegas, whom I first met in 2009. I immediately loved the sound of our two instruments together, and was struck by how rarely violin and guitar are heard together on stage and recording, even though the combination is found in so many popular music settings (like tango and gypsy bands).
Click here to view a short video clip on YouTube, where we talk about the album and play one of the movements of the Piazzolla.

I just finished a series of performances of the Brahms concerto - in Denver, Memphis, Buffalo and Tampere (Finland). It's amazing how different and new this piece feels every time as I play it with different people. Next up I'm playing Paganini's first violin concerto with Saint Louis Symphony and Yan Pascal Tortelier. Paganini's music is dismissed by many as mainly technical, but the first thing I think when I think of this piece is opera: it's written in the lyrical, highly expressive style of the bel canto tradition…with some virtuosic episodes thrown in. It’s music that should melt your heart before it dazzles you. One of my first teachers, the Italian violinist Uto Ughi (with whom I studied in Siena from age 8 to 11) understood this, and his approach to this concerto has always been a great inspiration to me. I love Paganini's sense of humor too, and it's essential to bring that out, despite how hard the piece is technically. A few years ago, I wrote a cadenza for it (link), in which I try to emphasize the fun side of the piece.

My new, redesigned website is finished! It was designed (like the previous one) by the brilliant Balázs Böröcz from Pilvax Studio!

I just returned from Toronto, where I played Mozart's fourth concerto, coupled with the virtuosic Rondo from the "Haffner"-Serenade, with Peter Oundjian conducting. Every collaboration with him is like chamber music, and I feel like he knows what I'm going to do before even I know it!
This week I'm playing Mozart's 5th concerto in my Dallas Symphony debut with Jaap van Zweden.
Is it possible to have a favorite Mozart violin concerto? Luckily, I don't have to pick a favorite, and get to play both two weeks in a row!

Overall, the 5th concerto is flashier and more extroverted, while the 4th concerto is more intimate and elegant. When it comes to the slow movements, I feel that the concertos 3, 4 and 5 are tied, and one is more beautiful than the other. The beauty of the Andante of the 4th concerto lies in its simplicity - the music is so pure, and communicates something that is impossible to put into words. Already as a child, I loved playing this movement.

The slow movement of the 5th is also very beautiful but it is more the kind of beauty one finds in Beethoven - the beauty of something carefully constructed, refined to perfection. In Beethovenian manner, Mozart had discarded his original slow movement (which is now known as the Adagio in E Major) and replaced it with this new Adagio. I love how the meter of the first theme seems to shift, keeping the listener guessing where the bar lines are, and there is a gently rocking feeling to much of this movement.

Mozart liked to insert folk tunes in the Rondo movements of his concertos. In the case of the 4th, one of the interludes is a rustic Gavotte with a musette (a bagpipe imitation), which remains very funny even today. The last movement of the fifth concerto contains a "Turkish" episode - for a moment, it sounds as if we're in the middle of the abduction from the seraglio! Of course, it's Turkish folk music as heard through the ears of an Austrian 18th century composer, and quite different from how somebody like Bartók would have written it down!