ConcertPulse
Violin Recital
Filharmonia Narodowa, Concert Hall (ground floor) (Warszawa)
Augustin Hadelich, photo: Suxiao_Yang Augustin Hadelich used the time of the Covid-19 pandemic to study solo works by Johann Sebastian Bach. He has the good fortune to play on a unique violin called ‘Leduc’, once owned by the famous virtuoso Henryk Szeryng and considered by some to be the last work of the Cremonese lutenist Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesù. On this instrument, he recorded a two-CD album of Bach sonatas and partitas. Hadelich matched a copy of a Baroque bow to an eighteenth-century violin, but without completely abandoning the ‘modern’ aesthetic in which he grew up. Two Bach partitas will open and close his recital at the Warsaw Philharmonic, consisting of varied examples of solo violin music. In his Blue/s Forms, Coleridge Taylor Perkinson drew on intervals characteristic of blues and jazz that are lowered for expressive purposes (so-called blue notes). David Lang’s Mystery Sonatas, a cycle premiered in 2014 by Augustin Hadelich, is a conscious (albeit distant) reference to the famous work of the brilliant Baroque violinist Heinrich Ignaz Biber. As for Eugène Ysaÿe’s showstopping Sonata No. 3, dedicated to Romanian composer George Enescu, it ranks alongside Bach’s sonatas and partitas among the greatest and most popular challenges of the solo violin repertoire. The concert will take place in the Concert Hall, and not, as previously planned, in the Chamber Music Hall.