{"id":602,"date":"2015-11-13T08:14:07","date_gmt":"2015-11-13T15:14:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/?p=602"},"modified":"2015-11-24T08:26:53","modified_gmt":"2015-11-24T15:26:53","slug":"leila-josefowicz-at-zankel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/leila-josefowicz-at-zankel\/","title":{"rendered":"Leila Josefowicz at Zankel"},"content":{"rendered":"

I first learned\u00a0about Leila Josefowicz\u00a0eight\u00a0years ago, shortly before she won her MacArthur award, and because I was working on Shostakovich at the time, I acquired her recording of his\u00a0notoriously difficult\u00a0Violin Concerto No. 1. \u00a0It was a knockout, and I resolved from then on to keep my eye (and ear) on her. More recently, I saw her do the complicated first-violin role in Schoenberg’s First String Quartet, with Fred Sherry on the cello and two other great players on the viola and second violin. This too was an eye-opener. But not until I heard her in a whole program of her own devising, last Tuesday night at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall<\/a>, did I fully realize what a tremendously\u00a0accomplished musician she is.<\/p>\n

The program, which paired Josefowicz with the pianist John Novacek, began with Manuel de Falla’s showy\u00a0Suite populaire espagnole<\/em>, which let her strut her fast-fingering stuff in a folksy, romantic mode. Well done, but hardly the kind of composition\u00a0that would have drawn the avid music audience who had come to hear her that night. She satisfied the more modernist contingent with the next piece, Olivier Messaien’s Theme and Variations<\/em>, which allowed her to convey\u00a0a more stringent, harsh, rigorous world of sound. But it was only when she and Novacek entered onto the third work\u00a0of the evening, Schumann’s Violin Sonata No. 1, that their partnership became profound. This is to Schumann’s credit, of course, as well as to theirs: he knew how to make the voices of the two instruments meld\u00a0fully together. But he was extraordinarily well-served by this particular violinist and pianist in tandem, because they both understood how his work defined\u00a0that\u00a0strange nineteenth-century moment\u00a0when music\u00a0was\u00a0at once fixed in a tradition\u00a0and potentially open to change.<\/p>\n

The period after the intermission was entirely late-twentieth-century, featuring two composers that are still very much alive. Josefowicz ended with John Adams’s Road Movies<\/em>, a thrilling piece that premiered in 1995 and that I could listen to a thousand times. But in part because I have<\/em> listened to it a thousand times (one San Francisco friend has playing it on his household soundtrack practically every time I come over), I was more moved and impressed by the other work\u00a0on the program, Erkki-Sven T\u00fc\u00fcr’s Conversio<\/em>. This too dates from the 1990s, but no one in the audience, to my knowledge, had ever heard it before (last Tuesday was its Carnegie Hall premiere), and we went wild with enthusiasm for it. The music draws from a range of modernist strategies\u2014harsh shrieking, low thrumming, antic pizzicato, intensely propulsive\u00a0chords, and above all suspenseful pauses\u2014but it sounds like nothing else I have ever encountered, and it made me want to hear more of this Estonian composer’s work. It also displayed to the fullest Josefowicz’s intelligent musicality: she understood exactly the ways in which it was connected to both the Messiaen and the Adams (and even the Schumann, in terms of emotional register), but she also understood that this twelve-minute composition was triumphantly a thing-in-itself,\u00a0a fitting pinnacle to the program she had so beautifully designed and presented.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I first learned\u00a0about Leila Josefowicz\u00a0eight\u00a0years ago, shortly before she won her MacArthur award, and because I was working on Shostakovich at the time, I acquired her recording of his\u00a0notoriously difficult\u00a0Violin Concerto No. 1. \u00a0It was a knockout, and I resolved … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[303,305,301,300,304,291,302,154],"class_list":["post-602","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-lesser-blog","tag-adams","tag-de-falla","tag-john-novacek","tag-leila-josefowicz","tag-messaien","tag-schumann","tag-tuur","tag-zankel-hall"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/602","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=602"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/602\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":612,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/602\/revisions\/612"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=602"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=602"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=602"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}