Levin-McKnight Concert Big Success

I just returned from an amazing concert at Chalice by Mari Levin, violin, and Tim McKnight, piano. Tim, of course, is our Director of Music at Chalice. Mari is a laureate of the California International Young Artists Competition. The theme of the concert was “Variations on a Theme.” There were about 100 people in attendance and the audience was anticipating an excellent concert as they were familiar with Tim’s talent and with high expectations of Mari.

The evening started out with Sonata op. 5, no. 12, Variations on ‘La Folia di Spagna’ (Arcangelo Corelli). There is a nice dialog between the violin and the piano throughout the piece as the theme moves from instrument to instrument.

The second piece was performed by Mari, “Chaconne” from the Partita No. 2 in D minor, MWV 1004 (Johann Sebastian Bach). The song had its origins as a bawdy peasant dance. A Chaconne has a four measure subject that get repeated and varied. This chaconne has some sixty variations in the piece. The piece represents a special challenge to violinists because it is long with no breaks for fifteen minutes. The piece is also somewhat of a “DaVinci Code” among violinist because there are musical quotations from Bach’s other works and scholars have been cataloging how these overlay with his other pieces.

Variations on “Ah! Vous dirais-je, maman!” (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart) was performed Tim McKnight on piano. More familiar to us as “Twinkle, twinkle little star” (not written by Morzart as we find out). Each variation grows in complexity. This was probably the most accessible of all the pieces as even the novice can easily follow the theme through all its extravagant variations.

The fourth piece brings Tim and Mari back together again to play Csardas. A csardas is a folk dance originating in Hungary. Roma music bands popularized the dance form throughout Eastern Europe. The dance form starts out very slowly and ends very quickly with many tempo variations in between. This particular piece by Vittorio Monte requires the violinist to use harmonics to play the melody in some of the variations and ends with a rousing finish to get us to the intermission.

The second half started off with a classic rag, Graceful Ghost Rag, written by William Bolcom, a living American composer. Originally written as part of a collection of rags for piano, he reworked it into an arrangement for violin and piano as a wedding gift for a close friend.

In his youth, Beethoven wrote many variations for solo piano. Beethoven composed Six Variations on an Original Theme Op. 34 in 1802, when he was 32 years old. The variations in Op. 34 are based on an original theme (i.e. not using an existing theme either from his own work or from some other source—folk melody, popular song, etc). The piece opens with a lyrical theme in F major. Each of the variations is written in a different key and has a different character (trilling, dark march, lyrical, etc). The work concludes with a coda, recalling the opening theme. You can see how much more experimental and innovative Beethoven was compare to the variations by Mozart.

Tim and Mari play together again in A Fantasia on Greensleeves by Ralph Vaughn Williams. There is an unproven, but widely believed, legend that the tune Greensleeves was composed by King Henry VIII of England (1491-1547) for his lover and future queen, Anne Boleyn. In 1584, a sonnet set to the tune of “Greensleeves” appears in A Handful of Pleasant Delights. Many believe that the “Lady Greensleeves” of the sonnet was a very promiscuous young lady and likely a prostitute. At the time in England removable green sleeves were required to be worn by prostitutes as an outward label of their profession.

The last piece in the concert was by Maurice Ravel, “Tzigane” Rhapsodie de Concert. Ravel is well-known for writing music in an “impressionistic” style. The “Tzigane” for violin and piano is a significant departure from this style. “Tzigane” is a French word for gypsy and Ravel wrote the piece for the Hungarian virtuouso Jelly d’Aranyi in 1922. The piece opens with a lengthy violin solo exploring the Hungarian harmonic minor scale. As the melodic line gradually moves upwards, Ravel commands the soloist to remain on the lowest string (the G string) until the notes become so high that this is no longer possible. The theme that follows the opening cadenza is a Hungarian dance–a csardas in fact. After the statement of the theme, the piece erupts into a show of spectacular variations where the soloist gets to employ all sorts of violin tricks– perpetual motion, rapid harmonics, left-hand pizzicati (plucking of the strings) in the midst of bowed arpeggios, quadruple stops, and extremely high notes with trills.

For their encore, they performed “Ashokan Farewell” by Jay Ungar which most people may be familiar with from the Civil War documentary by Ken Burns. “This is a piece we discovered recently and just fell in love with.” said Mari.

Tim and Mari gave a great performance of the piece and the audience rewarded a fantastic concert with a standing ovation.