From the Podium (26th Sept 2004)
What a great concert we had last June.
I was very pleased with the performance of the orchestra and the soloist. I thought that the Franck symphony came off with a good deal of “Frenchness”.Our performance was recorded on video by Kostas Metaxas who is a television film producer from Melbourne. He was making a series of documentaries on Creative Greeks and I will be included in one of them. Our episode was shown on the Ovation Channel (Foxtel) during the week starting August 22nd.
A great boost to the visual appearance of the orchestra at the last concert was the use of stage risers to accommodate all of the strings and our piano soloist. I’m told that even the sound of the orchestra was improved by this lift of strings. We need to thank Staging Rentals for their generosity in supplying these risers. Fortunately they have agreed to repeat their gesture for our September concert.
Speaking of our September concert, we are very pleased to welcome back Gu Chen as soloist. Chen won our Concerto Competition a few years ago and consequently performed with us the Brahms Violin Concerto. He has since become a permanent member of Sydney Symphony Orchestra, playing in the first violins. In September he will be playing the gorgeous Mozart Violin Concerto No. 5 and also the virtuosic Saint-Saens Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso.
We’ll also be playing Dvorak’s Symphonic Variations. I don’t know why these are not heard more frequently. They are not dissimilar in style to his famous Slavonic Dances, but more subdued and without the battery of percussion instruments. I highly recommend them to you.
Gary Stavrou
The Artists (26th Sept 2004)
Chen Gu, violin
Chen Gu began playing the violin at the age of four after being captivated watching a violinist play with an orchestra on TV and thinking, “He looks good!” His passion for the violin helped him gain a place at the Shanghai Conservatorium of Music where he began his musical studies while still a primary school student. For Chen Gu, the violin remains a challenge to play, particularly in terms of intonation, tuning and timbre. Daily practice is a routine task which he continues to do with pleasure.
Chen Gu moved to Sydney in 1996 after winning a scholarship to begin his tertiary studies with Shixiang (Peter) Zhang at the Australian Institute of Music, from which he graduated with a Bachelor of Music. For a young Chinese musician, pursuing studies in Australia offered him the opportunity to experience the culture associated with Western music, something that he believes now provides him with quite a different perspective from that he had in China. In addition, his tertiary studies were flexible enough to allow him sufficient time to focus on his practical studies and English language acquisition. For Chen Gu, master classes, violin lessons, concert practice and chamber music were the highlights of his days as an undergraduate. His teachers have included Charmian Gadd, Lois Simpson, John Painter and John Harding.
Since 1996, Chen Gu has won many prizes in international violin competitions. These include the National Chopin and Wieniawski Competition in Townsville, Queensland, the 7th International Wieniawski and Lipinski Violin Competition in Lubin, Poland in 1997 and the 2nd Novosibirsk International Violin Competition in Russia. In 1999 he won the Richard Goldner Scholarship awarded by Balmain Sinfonia, the Kendall Violin Competition and the Dorcas McLean Scholarship from the University of Melbourne. He was a finalist in the ABC Young Performers’ Award in Australia and in 2000 at the International Yehudi Menuhin Violin Competition in Folkestone, England.
Chen Gu’s professional life now centres on his position as permanent violinist with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra (SSO) and his ongoing links as visiting teacher at the Shanghai Conservatorium of Music. He describes his first year with the SSO as a steep learning curve, not only having to maintain his concert practice, rehearsal schedules and concerts but also to craft his violin playing in such as way as to blend with the violin section whilst still maintaining his individual musical style. His yearly commitments at the Shanghai Conservatorium of Music allow him to maintain contact with musical colleagues, to conduct master classes and play solo recitals and concertos. In fact, the Shanghai Conservatorium encourages past students with careers in Australia, for example, to maintain contact: in May 2004 Chen Gu went with Charmian Gadd and others to Shanghai to give concerts and master classes. In 2002, he appeared as guest concertmaster with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. In the SSO’s 2003-2004 season with its chief conductor and artistic director Gianluigi Gelmetti, Chen Gu will be acting associate concertmaster.
Chen Gu continues to expand his musical repertoire and is now working on the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto after a very successful concert with the Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra in 2003 playing the Beethoven Violin Concerto in D Major. This year sees him playing Mozart’s Violin Concerto No 5 in A Major and the Saint-Saens Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso with Balmain Sinfonia.
Despite his busy professional schedule with more than 150 concerts this year with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and overseas travel, Chen Gu still finds time to pursue his love of snooker and to maintain his edge as a snooker champion. For him, snooker playing provides a balance in his life, allows him to meet with non-musicians, to meet with friends and to engage in some healthy competition.
The Music (26th Sept 2004)
- Mendelssohn : ‘Ruy Blas' Overture
- Mozart : Violin Concerto no. 5 in A major. K. 219
- Dvorak : Symphonic Variations, Op. 78
- Saint-Saens : Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso
Mendelssohn : ‘Ruy Blas' Overture
The overture in Mendelssohn's hands was essentially what later composers were to call a symphonic, or tone, poem. It was an impressionistic painting in music, usually portraying a natural scene or catching the mood of a literary work. Although Mendelssohn was not the first composer to establish the overture as a self-contained work of this kind, he still lived early enough in musical history to be a pioneer in this direction, providing an obvious guide to later composers such as Brahms, Richard Strauss and Dvorak, as well as considerable impetus to the Romantic movement in general.
The literary world was a source of inspiration for Mendelssohn, who like many Romantic composers sought to depict the vivid dramatic stories and the lyrical depths of literature in their music. Victor Hugo's drama, Ruy Blas , was only one year old when the Leipzig Theatrical Pension Fund begged Mendelssohn to write an overture and song for a benefit concert. Mendelssohn was disinclined to accept their invitation and provided only a song. The Pension Fund's representatives thanked him for this but regretted that he had not written an overture, but stated they were perfectly aware that time was indispensable for such a work and that they would give him more notice in the future. Mendelssohn took this as a challenge and with the concert only six days away set to work immediately to prove he was up to the task. In a letter to his mother on March 18, 1839, he wrote: “The Overture was in the hands of the copyist early on Friday, played three times on Monday in the concert room, tried over once in the theatre and given in the evening as an introduction to the odious play. Few of my works have caused me more amusing excitement.” So within a few days he tossed off this work and jokingly said should be called the Overture “not to Ruy Blas , but to the Theatrical Pension Fund”. It was not published until after his death.
Mozart : Violin Concerto no. 5 in A major. K. 219
It was not uncommon in the eighteenth century for composers to write a series of sonatas, quartets, symphonies or concertos in quick succession, whether it were to meet the demands of publishers, or just out of personal whim or circumstance. In 1775, between April and December, Mozart wrote five violin concertos demonstrating this concentration on a single musical form. At the time he was leader of the Archbishop's court orchestra and since there are no cadenzas extant some scholars believe that he composed them to perform himself as he would have improvised the cadenzas. Other musicologists believe that he wrote them for his assistant, Gaetano Brunetti, which may be the case, as Mozart in spite of his talent for the instrument was not a keen violinist. He preferred to appear as piano soloist or as violist in chamber concerts.
Mozart was only nineteen when he composed these works. The Violin Concerto no. 5 in A major is the most original and assured. It expresses a fullness of emotion whilst displaying a remarkable economy of construction.
Dvorak : Symphonic Variations, Op. 78
When Dvorak composed the Symphonic Variations, Op. 38, in 1877 he considered it one of his finest achievements. Although favourably received a few months later at its premiere, it was then put aside and not performed again for another decade. The reason seems to have been that Dvorak had trouble with his publisher, Fritz Simrock, who was interested in songs and small piano pieces rather than large symphonic works. There was a much wider European market open to works such as the Slavonic Dances and Moravian Duets, and Simrock, being a shrewd businessman, pressured Dvorak into more of these small character pieces which were far more profitable for him.
After ten years, Dvorak's fame had spread and he then felt confident enough to promote his Symphonic Variations. He approached Hans Richter, one of the great conductors of the day, who was delighted to receive his suggestion that this work be performed again. Richter wrote to him: “I have just returned entranced from the first rehearsal for the concert at which we are playing your Symphonic Variations. It is a magnificent work! I am happy to be the first to perform it in London, but why did you hold it back for so long? These variations can take their place among the best of your compositions.”
Such a positive reception still did not sway Simrock and relations between publisher and composer remained strained. Finally in 1888 Simrock agreed to publish the work but labelled it Opus 78 as he believed that it would sell better if it appeared as a current work rather than one that was ten years old. Dvorak naturally wanted his opus numbers to reflect the order of his compositions, not their publication date.
Saint-Saens : Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso
Although he was not a violinist himself, Saint-Saens' works for that instrument, which include concertos, and orchestral and chamber works for solo violin, show a depth of understanding for the instrument and display both brilliance and subtlety in their composition. This is largely attributed to the help he received from the virtuoso Spanish violinist, Pablo de Sarasate. A child prodigy, raised in Pamplona, Sarasate started playing the violin at an early age and when only eight years old won a scholarship to study in Madrid. He was accelerated quickly through his studies and by the age of 13 had graduated from the Paris Conservatoire. Within a couple of years he began touring Europe in search of a composer who would write a concerto for him. He approached Saint-Saens, who was only 24 at the time, and the two quickly developed a friendship that was to provide mutual benefits. Sarasate went on to become one of the great violin virtuosos of the nineteenth century, known for his technical brilliance and pure musicality. Saint-Saens became well recognised for his talent as a composer of a great many works in virtually all genres. The Introduction and Rondo and Capriccioso , a virtuosic work conceived in the Spanish style was composed specifically for Sarasate in 1863, four years after they met. It quickly became a standard of the virtuosic repertoire as Sarasate performed it widely in many countries thus spreading Saint-Saens' reputation. As the composer himself acknowledged, “In circulating my composition throughout the world on his magic bow, Pablo de Sarasate rendered me the highest services.”