The pull of the strings
Mozart Festival highlights virtuoso violinists
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Audience members drink in the dramatic views along with the music (and perhaps a glass of wine) during a Vermont Mozart Festival performance at the Trapp Family Lodge in Stowe. File |
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By Jim Lowe
Staff Writer - Published: July 8, 2007
This is the year of the violin at the Vermont Mozart Festival.
Three virtuoso violinists – including one who played the solos in the current hit film "Ratatouille" – will perform some of the greatest concertos of the repertoire, starting July 15. Japan's Hamao Fujiwara, North Carolina's Clayton Haslop and Boston's Harumi Rhodes will be featured in major works by Mozart, Vivaldi, Bach, Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Brahms.
Now in its 34th year, the Vermont Mozart Festival expects to attract nearly 16,000 music lovers to 19 concerts in 11 locations throughout central and northern Vermont. Performances featuring the Vermont Mozart Festival Orchestra are outdoor concerts, where audiences often dine on picnics as refined as the music. Chamber music concerts will be presented in intimate indoor settings.
The festival's artistic director and co-founder, Mel Kaplan, attributes its popularity to a proven recipe. "It's a mixture not of just who is playing and what is being played, but where it's being played," he said. "They all make a difference."
This year's three featured violinists have at least one thing in common: They have all performed with Kaplan, who is also a veteran concert artist manager and oboist.
Hamao Fujiwara
Fujiwara and Kaplan met nearly 40 years ago when the Japanese violinist was a student at New York's Juilliard School of Music and Kaplan taught there. Fujiwara's teacher, Joseph Fuchs, recommended him to Kaplan for the Musica Aeterna Orchestra, which Kaplan managed.
"Hamao came in and played in the back of the second fiddle section and nobody knew him," Kaplan said. "In two years, he was playing concertmaster. In typical Hamao fashion, he never said a word – (his advancement) was always from obvious talent …"
After Juilliard, Fujiwara's career took off. He has won Belgium's Queen Elisabeth Competition and Italy's Paganini Competition, taught at Juilliard, and performed as soloist with the world's major orchestras. Since returning to Japan in 1992, he has been teaching at Tokyo's major conservatories and performs as concertmaster of the Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra.
Fujiwara was a participant in the Vermont Mozart Festival's first year and has returned many times to perform major concertos as well as chamber music with Kaplan's New York Chamber Soloists.
"Interestingly, he's playing something this year we've never done here before, the Brahms Concerto," Kaplan said, adding, "He's an impeccable violinist."
And apparently an unflappable one, if Kaplan's story is to be believed.
"One of the times he was here, we were playing a concert at Basin Harbor (in Vergennes), and a wind had blown up," Kaplan remembered. "I literally saw the wind blow the bow off his strings – and he was (never) nonplussed. He just went on and played."
Clayton Haslop
Kaplan came to know Haslop as first violinist of the New Hollywood String Quartet, made up of top Los Angeles film players, an ensemble that Kaplan managed.
"A lot of people knew him because he was and still is the most sought-after concertmaster in all of the film industry," Kaplan said. "He played concertmaster and a lot of solos with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and he was a wonderful first violinist in this quartet."
Haslop has performed as concertmaster for "Titanic," "A Beautiful Mind" and "The Matrix," among many. But he is foremost a virtuoso classical violinist who had the good fortune of studying with one of the greatest violinists in history.
Haslop had heard Nathan Milstein only on old recordings when he joined the late teacher's master class in Los Angeles. When the old master first illustrated a point with his violin, it was out of tune; the next was better; finally, when he tuned his instrument and illustrated another point, Haslop's jaw dropped.
"I had never in my life heard somebody, live in a small room, play this way," Haslop remembered. "Of course, it was the Russian school, a different kind of bow arm and way of approaching the violin than I had grown up with. That first day, I went up to him at the end of the class and said, 'I have to study with you.'"
Haslop was able to take lessons with Milstein at his home in London.
He will be using what he learned when he performs the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto at the Mozart festival.
"The model I have is Milstein, his approach," Haslop said. "It's a virtuosic approach. The tempos are quick – the first movement and the last movement really move. Mendelssohn himself said he wanted to write a virtuoso concerto that would be a challenge to the virtuosi of his day – and had heard Paganini play."
With the two Mozart concertos that Haslop is playing, No. 4 in D Major and No. 5 in A Major, he has taken into account the beliefs of the "authentic instrument" movement — to imitate the smaller, more intimate sound of the instruments at that time. But he feels this music is more appropriately played with the violin virtuoso's freedom.
He has in the past performed on "period" instruments, violins with shorter fingerboards and gut strings and tuned lower, and the last time he performed Mozart's D Major Concerto, it was with a "transition" bow made in 1780.
"So, I'm sympathetic to it," Haslop said. "On the other hand, I also come from a 19th-century Romantic virtuoso violin tradition. So I look at Mozart concertos and the Mendelssohn Concerto as being virtuoso works intended to be played by virtuosi – especially the Mendelssohn."
Although Haslop recently moved to Asheville, N.C., where he teaches and creates teaching DVDs, he still regularly returns to Los Angeles to record for film. His most recent project was Michael Giacchino's score for "Ratatouille."
"It has a lot of violin solos," Haslop said. "I've done a lot of films, been concertmaster in a number of them and had solos, but this film has been the most the violin has been featured. It's a beautiful score."
Harumi Rhodes
Rhodes came to Kaplan's attention when he was looking to replace a violinist who had retired from his New York Chamber Soloists.
"I inquired from a variety of people in the group and out of the group as to who they had heard that was good, etc., etc." Kaplan said. "Her name kept coming up."
The daughter of Juilliard Quartet violist Samuel Rhodes, Harumi Rhodes graduated with top honors from Juilliard and Boston's New England Conservatory. She toured and recorded with Musicians from Marlboro — the southern Vermont festival's touring ensemble — and the chamber orchestra Orpheus and, still in her 20s, is a member of Lincoln Center's Chamber Music Society II. And now she is a member of the New York Chamber Soloists as well.
"Everybody loved her," Kaplan said. "… When we first saw her play, we thought it was too (physically) effusive, you know, how she moved, but she pulls it off – just another great violinist with a wonderful sound."
Rhodes will be featured in the monumental Beethoven Violin Concerto.
"The orchestra part to that concerto is huge," Rhodes said. "The orchestra is, in a sense, the principal voice, equal to the solo part.
"Much of the time, the solo part is almost just an embellishment or comment on some of the beautiful wind writing and string writing in the orchestra. I feel that is a huge source of inspiration because it shapes the solo part. For me, that's what makes it so monumental."
Rhodes will also play and conduct Vivaldi's "Four Seasons," four violin concertos each describing a season.
"For me, that piece is great because it communicates very directly," Rhodes said. "There's something really refreshing about that. …
"A lot of people see very direct links from passages in the music to the poetry or images of the seasons, or different elements of nature. There's something very nice about that sort of innocent way."