When Frank Peter Zimmermann performs a violin concerto, virtuosity is never the sole focus. What matters above all is the intensity of musical expression. In William Walton’s Violin Concerto, the exceptional violinist turns to a work that moves between lyrical intimacy, dance-like lightness and rich orchestral colour.
The programme opens with Missy Mazzoli’s »Orpheus Undone«, in which the NDR Artist-in-Residence takes the ancient myth of Orpheus as the starting point for a musical reflection on loss, shock and the futile desire to turn back a decisive moment.
After the interval, Alan Gilbert leads the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra in Mozart’s »Jupiter« Symphony. Its intricately interwoven voices, dance-like energy and almost weightless clarity in the finale create a fascinating contrast with Mazzoli’s contemporary musical language and the vivid colours of Walton’s Violin Concerto.
Performers
NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester
Frank Peter Zimmermann violin
conductor Alan Gilbert
Programme
Missy Mazzoli
Orpheus Undone
William Walton
Concerto for Violin and Orchestra
– Interval –
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Symphony in C major, KV 551 »Jupiter«
About the Programme
Fate in myth is irreversible: Orpheus was given one last chance to free his beloved Eurydice from the underworld, but failed when he looked back at her. All the harder, then, to come to terms with a missed opportunity. In her 2022 work »Orpheus Undone«, the NDR Artist-in-Residence Missy Mazzoli explores precisely this psychological dilemma. She wrote the music out of the experience that, in moments of shock or trauma, different speeds of time seem to overlap – and that we would most of all like to undo such moments…
British composer William Walton took a rather more light-hearted view of his own moment of shock during a stay in Ravello, Italy, in 1938. When the poor man was bitten by a tarantula there, the unpleasant experience provided welcome inspiration for his Violin Concerto. He promptly inserted a »downright crazy« tarantella passage into the work’s highly virtuosic Scherzo… Otherwise, however, this rarely performed work in Germany is entirely serious – indeed, »one of the finest violin concertos ever written«, as the conductor of its premiere, led by the dedicatee Jascha Heifetz, enthused. Now the »Heifetz of our time«, exceptional violinist Frank Peter Zimmermann, takes up this remarkable work.
To conclude the programme, chief conductor Alan Gilbert turns to a familiar work: the three final symphonies of Mozart were written, the Mozart scholar Alfred Einstein once suggested, as an »appeal to eternity«. Why the composer embarked on these demanding works three years before his death remains unclear. In any case, he was not responding to a specific commission. Presumably, then, he simply wanted to leave posterity a monument to his own abilities – and what a monument it was. Not long after Mozart’s death, the finale of Symphony No. 41 in C major was hailed as the »triumph of the new art of music«. Here, Mozart seems almost effortlessly to have created a kind of »Art of Fugue« that makes the complex seem light in a way that is uniquely his own.
