PROGRAM NOTES 

by Dr. Lorne Tepperman

Violin Concerto ‘Jacob’s Dream’ by Baruch Berliner  (1942 -       )

Premiere Canadian performance

This violin concerto was composed over three years from 2015 to 2018 and premiered in 2018 at the White Nights of Karelia Music Festival in Russia. Performed in 40 different countries already, it has also been adapted for performances with the solo part on cello or clarinet in addition to the original version presented this evening.

The melodic first movement Prologue draws on Eastern European and Middle Eastern traditions and is followed by a second which gives the concerto its title, Jacob’s Dream, reflecting Jacob’s awe, fear and then joy as a stairway to heaven came to him in a dream. The final movement, Gate to Heaven, begins with a pensive Lento, gathers energy through a Moderato section and concludes in an ecstatic Allegro molto, exulting in a vision of heavenly peace.

String Quartet No. 14 in D minor, “Death and the Maiden” by Franz Schubert (1797-1828)

Orchestral version by Nurhan Arman          

The Death and the Maiden Quartet gives us Schubert’s dark side, a place quite different from the atmosphere often shown in prints with a sociable young man at the keyboard among his circle of intimate friends in a cozy Viennese interior. It is in minor keys throughout, something Schubert never did in any other quartet. And its primary key, D minor, was deemed in the second half of the 19th Century to be the best key for depicting tragedy and turmoil. This is the only composition of any kind Schubert ever wrote in D minor.

The first movement Allegro explodes into motion with a unison outburst reminiscent of the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, and drives forward with a similar strength and powerful rhythm. Tender melodic episodes of Schubert’s typically elegant writing for strings appear, but are abruptly overtaken by renewed storms and musician violence. Three themes are grounded in three different tonal areas; the movement’s continuous harmonic movement adds to the emotional tension. A final tempest of feelings comes in the coda, when Schubert whirls on of the major themes through a torrent of key changes on top of the powerful rhythm of the opening.

The Andante con moto is a set of variations based on the piano introduction to the famous song Der Tod und das Mädchen, “Death and the Maiden,” composed when Schubert was just twenty. The song’s text was a poem by Matthias Claudius, and 18th-century clergyman fascinated by the Tontentanz, the “dance of death,” a late-Medieval theatrical form that showed Death dancing and talking with victims from all levels of society - king, beggar, youth, knight and maiden - before taking them away with him.

The third movement Scherzo: Allegro molto is concise. It begins angrily in D minor, but moves into a brighter, lyrical second section; the change may perhaps represent the contrast between grim Death and the gentle maiden.

The furious Presto that ends the quartet is a tarantella, an ancient Italian dance associated in legends with madness and sometimes with death from a tarantula bite. Turbulence alternates with passages of lovely delicacy, carrying the essential dark-light dichotomy of the entire quartet through to its conclusion. The prestissimo ending is traditional in tarantellas, and becomes painfully graphic in this depiction of the maiden’s final struggle with inexorable death.

BIOGRAPHIES

Violinist Haik Kazazyan was born in Yerevan in 1982. In 1989 he entered the Yerevan Sayat-Nova School of Music (class of Levon Zoryan). He completed his studies in Moscow under Eduard Grach at the Gnessin School of Music and the Tchaikovsky Moscow State Conservatory, as well as under Ilya Rashkovsky at the Royal College of Music in London.

First prize-winner at the 2024 Rome Classic Violin Competition, the Henryk Wieniawski International Violin Competition (Poznań, 2001; 3rd prize and special prize), the International Tchaikovsky Competition (Moscow, 2002; 4th prize and three special prizes) and the International Long–Thibaud Competition (Paris, 2005; 3rd prize and Audience Award). In 2004 he received the Gold Medal and the Audience Award at the International Tibor Varga Violin Competition in Sion (Switzerland), while in 2007 he took the Gold Medal and the Audience Award at the International Yun Isang Violin Competition in Tongyeong (South Korea). In 2011 the musician won the George Enescu International Violin Competition in Bucharest, while in 2015 he received 3rd prize and the Bronze Medal at the International Tchaikovsky Competition (Moscow – St Petersburg).

Haik Kazazyan has performed at such acclaimed venues as Carnegie Hall in New York, the Berliner Philharmonie, the Victoria Hall in Geneva, the Barbican Hall and Wigmore Hall in London, the Théâtre du Châtelet and the Salle Gaveau in Paris, the Usher Hall in Edinburgh, the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, the Small and Rachmaninoff Halls of the Moscow Conservatory, the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall, the Moscow International Performing Arts Centre, the State Kremlin Palace and the Grand Hall of the St Petersburg Philharmonia. Took part in the Sion Festival and the Verbier Festival as well as the festivals Stars on Baikal, Crescendo, Arts Square and Musical Kremlin.

Haik Kazazyan has appeared with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, the Mariinsky Orchestra, the Russian National Orchestra, the Prague Philharmonic, the Irish National Orchestra, the State Academic Symphony of Russia, the Orchestre National de France, the Münchener Kammerorchester and Sinfonia Toronto.

He has collaborated with such musicians as Valery Gergiev, Teodor Currentzis, Yuri Simonov, Vladimir Fedoseyev, Alexander Lazarev, Andrew Litton, Konstantin Orbelian, Pavel Kogan, Denis Matsuev, Eliso Virsaladze, Frederick Kempf, Alexei Lubimov, Natalia Gutman, Alexander Rudin and Alexander Buzlov.

He has recorded for the Chandos label an album of Opera Fantasies and the complete sonatas of Grieg. Since 2002 Haik Kazazyan is a permanent soloist with the Moscow Philharmonic, and has been on the faculty of the Moscow Conservatory.

Baruch Berliner is an Israeli composer, economist and lyric poet. He received his doctorate in mathematics from the University of Zurich. From 1990 until his retirement in 2007, he was a Senior Researcher in the Faculty of Management Science at Tel Aviv University and Chairman of the Erhard Institute of Insurance. Berliner also writes poems in Hebrew, German and English. In addition to the literary works, he composed The Creation of the World and Abraham, poetic symphonies for orchestra, narrator and a male choir as well as South American dances to the rhythm of the waltz. Various of his works have also been performed at the Huberman Festival in Poland, Bulgaria, Moldova and Russia.

Sinfonia Toronto now in its 26th season, has toured twice in Europe, in the US, South America and China, receiving glowing reviews. It has released six CD’s, including a JUNO Award winner, and performs in many Ontario cities. Its extensive repertoire includes all the major string orchestra works of the 18th through 21st centuries, and it has premiered many new works. Under the baton of Nurhan Arman the orchestra’s performances present outstanding international guest artists and prominent Canadian musicians.

Maestro Nurhan Arman has conducted throughout Europe, Asia, South America, Canada and the US, returning regularly to many orchestras in Europe. Among the orchestras Maestro Arman has conducted are the Moscow Philharmonic, Deutsches Kammerorchester Frankfurt, Filarmonica Italiana, St. Petersburg State Hermitage Orchestra, Orchestre Regional d’Ile de France, Hungarian Symphony, Arpeggione Kammerorchester, Orchestra Sinfonica di Roma, Milano Classica and Belgrade Philharmonic.

Sinfonia Toronto respectfully acknowledges that we work in the Treaty Lands and Territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation and the traditional territory of the Huron-Wendat and Haudenosaunee peoples

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