Multiple award-winning composer Elena Kats-Chernin has long been a luminous figure in Australia’s musical pantheon. Her uniquely eclectic and original music embodies an acute awareness of musical culture and history. She has written in almost every genre — operas, piano concerti, film scores, choral works, and orchestral, chamber and solo instrumental works of a seemingly endless variety and in highly innovative styles.
But until now she has not written a violin concerto.
Violinist Emily Sun, the ASO’s Artist-in-Association, invited Kats-Chernin to compose a violin concerto and, with the support of an ASO commission and philanthropist Mary Lou Simpson, Sun and Kats-Chernin worked together to develop it.
As Kats-Chernin has explained in Limelight: “the solo violin part is multifaceted — virtuosic, poetic and sometimes surreal… I designed the concerto as if it was a fantasy on those themes from a place called the Wintergarten in Berlin where variety shows were performed.” The story, says the composer, is from a German silent film about love and betrayal.
The result is entitled Fantasie im Wintergarten, Concerto for violin and orchestra. It’s in three movements and,...
Comments
Log in to join the conversation.