JAVS Summer 2014

Jessica Meyer led a community engagement panel at 1:00 p.m., which covered ground about festival planning, fundraising, career development, and more. The panelists articulated useful skills for musicians, including writing, speaking, and planning and remarked that instilling these skills in students is important (examples included requiring students to talk about their pieces in class and teaching an etiquette class in a summer music camp). Marcus Pyle mentioned that in planning his summer music camp talking to area teachers about needs and areas to cover was helpful. Thursday evening ended with a recital showcasing Primrose Competition laureates playing transcriptions. Christian Colberg and Karin Brown (a Primrose Laureate from 1997) displayed lovely, evenly matched tones in Colberg’s own arrangement of Prokofiev’s Sonata for Two Violins, op. 56. Unfortunately, the work did not translate well, lacking the brilliance and sprightliness of the original, becoming lugubrious played on violas. Nokuthula Ngwenyama (a Primrose Laureate from 1993) next gave a sunny performance of Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1, adding some attractive (and tasteful) embellishments. The concert closed out with Elias Goldstein (a Primrose Laureate from 2011) and Chris Lowry performing Goldstein’s arrangements of caprices by Paganini for two violas. Goldstein has performed these on several occasions recently, including at the 2013 International Viola Congress. These came across as more than “transcriptions” and might instead be called “reimaginings” of the originals. Caprice No. 6 (practically a duo for one violin) was particularly effective, while Caprice No. 24 immediately brought to mind Halvorsen’s own reworking of music by Handel for violin and viola (the Passacaglia and Sarabande con Variazoni ). I was then a bit astonished that the pair played the Handel-Halvorsen Passacaglia as an encore, reinforcing the “reimagining” impression of Goldstein’s own transcriptions. Neither Goldstein nor Lowry were fazed by any of the technical demands of the music (Goldstein played most of the Handel-Halvorsen at the violin’s original pitch), and they also sounded well-matched in tone and spirit.

From left to right: Elias Goldstein and Chris Lowry (photo courtesy of Dwight Pounds)

V OLUME 30 S UMMER 2014 O NLINE I SSUE

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