Overture Magazine 2019-20 BSO_Overture_Jan Feb | Page 27

CHARLIE CHAPLIN’S LEGACY: CLASSICAL MUSIC IN FILM
adding that “Quint’s tonal opulence,
generously inflected with subtle
portamentos, sound like a throwback
to the glory days of Fritz Kreisler.”
An American violinist of Russian
heritage, Philippe Quint is constantly
in demand and regularly appears
with major orchestras and conductors
worldwide at venues ranging from the
Gewandhaus in Leipzig to Carnegie Hall
in New York.
Quint’s award-winning discography
comprises 17 commercial releases
including his recent debut on the Warner
Classics label, Chaplin’s Smile, which
features original arrangements of music
by Charlie Chaplin. The album inspired
Philippe to create and produce Charlie
Chaplin’s Smile, a multimedia show that
will have debuts worldwide throughout
the 2019–20 season. Chaplin’s
granddaughter, Kiera Chaplin, said in
Forbes magazine, “I think it’s amazing
that in 2019, one hundred and thirty
years after his birth, my grandfather
Charlie Chaplin is still around and loved
by so many, that even a hundred and five
years after his first movie was made, he
still surprises people. Philippe Quint’s
new album Chaplin’s Smile is allowing
him to be discovered by a whole new
audience as a talented composer, a side
of him many people did not know.”
The Chicago Tribune proclaimed, “Here
is a fiddle virtuoso whose many awards
are fully justified by the brilliance of his
playing.” In 2018–19, Quint was named
Artist-in-Association by Utah Symphony,
and in 2015, he hosted the Second Annual
Benefit “Philippe Quint & Friends” at
Carnegie’s Zankel Hall.
Making his home in New York since
1991, Quint was born in Leningrad,
Soviet Union; studied with Andrei
Korsakov; and made his orchestra debut at
the age of nine. After moving to the U.S.,
he earned both his bachelor and master
degrees from The Juilliard School. His
distinguished mentors included Dorothy
DeLay, Cho-liang Lin, Masao Kawasaki,
Isaac Stern, Itzhak Perlman, Arnold
Steinhardt and Felix Galimir.
Philippe Quint makes his BSO debut.
About the Concert
mourning the young lives snuffed out by
the Vietnam War.
ADAGIO FOR STRINGS
Samuel Barber
Instrumentation: String orchestra.
Born in West Chester, PA, March 9, 1910;
died in New York City, NY, January 23, 1981
CHACONNE FOR VIOLIN AND ORCHESTRA
Like most American music lovers in the
1930s, Samuel Barber was mesmerized
by Arturo Toscanini and his fiery
interpretations of the great symphonic
and operatic literature. In 1933, the
23-year-old composer used his status
as nephew of the celebrated operatic
contralto Louise Homer to pay a visit
to the maestro at his summer retreat
on Italy’s Lake Maggiore. They struck
up an immediate friendship, and
the old conductor expressed interest
in performing a work by Barber,
despite the fact that he generally avoided
contemporary music. But Barber was by
no means a typical contemporary
composer. Although only recently
graduated from Philadelphia’s Curtis
Institute, he was a precocious artist who
had already found his own creative voice:
lyrical, deeply expressive and rooted in the
harmonic language of the late 19 th century.
It took Barber several years to
produce two works he thought worthy
of Toscanini’s attention. Finally, early
in 1938 he sent the maestro his newly
completed First Essay for Orchestra and
the Adagio for string orchestra he had
fashioned from the slow movement of his
String Quartet of 1936.
Toscanini’s selection of both pieces for
his evening radio broadcast with the NBC
Symphony on November 5, 1938 was the
ultimate promotional coup for Barber’s
career. The Toscanini radio concerts had
a passionate nationwide following, and by
the next morning, Samuel Barber was a
household name for American music lovers.
The Adagio for Strings remains his
most beloved and frequently performed
composition. Called our “national
funeral music,” it has eloquently
expressed Americans’ grief at the
ceremonies for Franklin D. Roosevelt
in 1945 and John F. Kennedy in 1963.
In 1986, it moved a new generation in
the Academy Award-winning Platoon,

John Corigliano
Born in New York City, NY, February 16, 1938
In March 2000, the Academy Award for
best film score of 1999 went to one of
America’s finest composers of concert and
operatic works, John Corigliano, for his
music for the Canadian film The Red Violin.
Although this extraordinarily evocative
film, conceived and directed by François
Girard, never reached a mass audience, it
became a cult favorite among classical music
lovers, who were swept away by Corigliano’s
glorious score, featuring immensely
challenging music for solo violin.
Before the film was released, Corigliano
created a one-movement concert work
from its score, The Red Violin Chaconne,
which was premiered by Joshua Bell and
the San Francisco Symphony in November
1997. And then the BSO commissioned
him to write a full-length Violin Concerto
expanding the Chaconne, which was
premiered in Baltimore in 2003 and
subsequently recorded by the BSO. At this
concert, however, we will hear the original
work: the 17-minute Chaconne.
The Red Violin tells a fantastic tale of the
worldwide journeys and near-miraculous
survival of the eponymous violin after its
creation in Italy during the 17 th century. As
Corigliano explains: “A story this episodic
needed to be tied together with a single
musical idea. For this purpose, I used the
Baroque device of a chaconne: a repeated
pattern of [seven rising] chords upon which
the music is built. Against the chaconne
chords, I juxtaposed Anna’s theme, a
lyrical yet intense melody representing the
violin builder’s doomed wife [whose soul
seemingly enters the Red Violin]. Then,
from those elements, I wove a series of
virtuosic etudes for the solo violin that
followed the instrument from country to
country, century to century.”
After an ethereal opening, bassoons
present the dark and foreboding chaconne
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