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Alexi Kenney PLAYS Sibelius
LEOŠ JANÁČEK
Mládí (“Youth”)
I. Allegro
II. Andante sostenuto
III. Vivace
IV. Allegro animato
Anne Chao, flute • Will Stevens, oboe • Abraham Schenck, clarinet • Jingrui Liu, bass clarinet
Monica Ellis, bassoon • Sophie Steger, horn
OLLI MUSTONEN
Nonetto II
I. Inquieto
II. Allegro impetuoso
III. Adagio
IV. Vivacissimo
Daniel Dastoor, Ugnė Liepa Žuklytė, Rachel Yi, Yip-Wai Chow, violin • Rebecca Albers,
Sebastian Gonzalez Mora, viola • David Ying, Kyle Victor, cello • Anthony Manzo, bass
JEAN SIBELIUS
Violin Concerto in D Minor, Op. 47
I. Allegro moderato
II. Adagio di molto
III. Allegro, ma non tanto
Alexi Kenney, violin • Jayce Ogren, conductor • Festival Orchestra
About Alexi Kenney
Violinist Alexi Kenney is forging a career that defies categorization, following his interests, intuition, and heart. He is equally at home creating experimental programs and commissioning new works, soloing with major orchestras around the world, and collaborating with some of the most celebrated musicians of our time. Alexi is the recipient of an Avery Fisher Career Grant and a Borletti-Buitoni Trust Award.
Highlights of Alexi’s 2023/24 season include appearances as soloist with the Dallas, Pittsburgh, and Milwaukee Symphonies, leading a program of his own creation with the New Century Chamber Orchestra, and debuting a new iteration of his project Shifting Ground at the Baryshnikov Arts Center and the Ojai Festival, in collaboration with the new media and video artist Xuan. Shifting Ground intersperses seminal works for solo violin by J.S. Bach with pieces by Matthew Burtner, Mario Davidovsky, Nicola Matteis, Kaija Saariaho, Paul Wiancko, and Du Yun, as well as new commissions by composers Salina Fisher and Angélica Negrón.
In recent seasons, Alexi has soloed with the Cleveland Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, l’Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Detroit Symphony, Rochester Philharmonic, Indianapolis Symphony, Gulbenkian Orchestra, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Oregon Symphony, Louisville Orchestra, and l’Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne, as well as in a play-conduct role as guest leader of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. He has played recitals at Wigmore Hall, on Carnegie Hall’s ‘Distinctive Debuts’ series, Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival, Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, 92nd Street Y, Mecklenberg-Vorpommern Festival, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Winner of the 2013 Concert Artists Guild Competition and laureate of the 2012 Menuhin Competition, Alexi has been profiled by Musical America, Strings Magazine, and The New York Times, and has written for The Strad.
Chamber music continues to be a major part of Alexi’s life, regularly performing at festivals including Caramoor, ChamberFest Cleveland, Chamber Music Northwest, Kronberg, La Jolla, Ojai, Marlboro, Music@Menlo, Ravinia, Seattle, and Spoleto, and as a founding member of Owls—an inverted quartet hailed as a “dream group” by The New York Times—alongside violist Ayane Kozasa, cellist Gabe Cabezas, and cellist-composer Paul Wiancko. He is an alum of the Bowers Program (formerly CMS 2) at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.
Born in Palo Alto, California in 1994, Alexi is a graduate of the New England Conservatory in Boston, where he received an Artist Diploma as a student of Miriam Fried and Donald Weilerstein. Previous mentors in the Bay Area include Wei He, Jenny Rudin, and Natasha Fong. He plays a violin made in London by Stefan-Peter Greiner in 2009 and a bow by François-Nicolas Voirin.
Outside of music, Alexi enjoys hojicha, modernist design and architecture, baking for friends (especially this lumberjack cake), and walking for miles on end in whichever city he finds himself, listening to podcasts and Bach on repeat.
PROGRAM NOTES
LEOŠ JANÁČEK
Mládí (“Youth”) (1924)
The final decade of Janáček’s life was his most fruitful compositionally. Janáček had sustained a distinguished career as director of the Brno Conservatory since 1881; however, despite his prominence there, success in the Czech capital of Prague long eluded him, and Janáček lamented what he considered his merely provincial rank. In 1916, after years of refusal, the National Theater finally accepted his opera, Jenůfa. The performance received great acclaim, and at last, at age 62, Janáček was propelled to national renown.
An even more important spark to Janáček’s creativity came in 1917, when Janáček met the young Kamila Stösslová. He fell deeply in love with her (an affection which she never wholly reciprocated), and began a prolific and intimate correspondence: over 700 letters until his death in 1928. Stösslová became the direct source of inspiration for three operas, a song cycle, and a string quartet (pointedly subtitled, “Intimate Letters”).
In 1924, Janáček wrote to Stösslová from Hukvaldy, a Moravian village which Janáček visited for a few weeks on his 70th birthday: “While here I have composed a sort of memoir of my youth.” He had just completed Mládí. The musical reminiscence includes a direct quotation, in the third movement, of Janáček’s “March of the Blue Boys,” which evokes his boyhood days as a chorister in the Brno Monastery. Janáček also employs a technique he had developed to emulate the tone of the speaking voice: the opening theme of the first movement, introduced by the oboe and featured again in the final movement, sets the phrase, “Mládí, zlaté mládí,” (“Youth, golden youth”).
OLLI MUSTONEN
Nonetto II (2000)
Olli Mustonen has provided the following note to accompany his Nonetto II :
The Nonetto II follows on from its predecessor. The first movement (Inquieto) opens with piercing discords and stunted rhythms, which nevertheless create a Balkanese pulse. The brief and concise movement is anguished.
The second movement (Allegro impetuoso) is Romantically opulent and passionate. These themes are joined by a noble hymn-like theme (in the manner of Schumann or Brahms) which also supposes the Beethovenian galloping rhythms. In the development, the music proceeds in a Sibelian direction, towards the mysterious pastoral movement of the Sixth Symphony. The movement eventually ends on a tranquil note, although the ostinato rhythm never relents.
The slow movement (Adagio) is inscrutably smiling, more sparsely populated than the previous one. The main theme is again brief; in being repeated, it becomes somewhat desperate, taking on board brief virtuoso flutters. Despite occasional moments in a minor key, the movement maintains a radiant aura, perhaps slightly unreal. The finale (Vivacissimo) is full of white light and tremolo, as Karelian kanteles and bells ringing proclaim a Russian feast. Virtuoso passages overtake one another and get snagged by the block-like pounding rhythms, but towards the end they explode in an instrumental ecstasy. Mustonen dedicated his Nonetteo II to his parents.
JEAN SIBELIUS
Violin Concerto in D Minor, Op. 47 (1904)
The Nordic tone of Mustonen’s Nonetto sets the stage for the only concerto ever written by Finland’s most glorified composer. Sibelius’ decision to write a concerto for violin reflects the instrument’s importance in his own musical formation. At the age of ten, Sibelius received the gift of a violin from his uncle; at age 15, his first serious forays into music were the violin lessons he took with the military bandleader in his hometown of Hämeenlinna. The Sibelius children — Jean, together with his siblings Christian and Linda on the cello and piano — grew up playing trios at home. In the long run, Sibelius’ virtuosity as a violinist was limited. He began to focus increasingly on composition from the 1880s, and by the turn of the twentieth century, with works like his tone poem Finlandia, his fame was steadily growing.
Why Sibelius set about composing a violin concerto in mid-1902 is uncertain. Around that time, Sibelius and his wife were undertaking construction on their rustic residence, “Ainola,” overlooking Lake Tuusula south of Helsinki, which would be complete the same year as the concerto, in 1904. One spark of inspiration may have come when the composer met famed German violinist Willy Burmester. Ultimately, however, this meeting led to a battle of egos: Sibelius had at various moments expressed to Burmester that he wished for him to premiere the new concerto, even as he made arrangements for other violinists to perform it in Helsinki and in Germany. Burmester retaliated by declaring to Sibelius, “I will never play the concerto!” He remained true to his word.
Instead, the concerto received an initial premiere in 1904 in an early version, causing a publicity disaster. Critics panned the poor soloist, rather haphazardly chosen by Sibelius, who was hardly up to the challenge. Meanwhile, Sibelius decided to restructure the work, cutting out a number of themes and eliminating one of the cadenzas. These cuts shifted the work’s equilibrium, situating the remaining cadenza right in the middle of the first movement as a sort of “centerpiece” — a significant innovation in form. The revised version was premiered in Berlin under the baton of Richard Strauss, and, according to Martti Haapakoski, it has become the most frequently recorded of all twentieth-century violin concertos.
Program Notes by Peter Asimov