Fort Worth Civic Orchestra
Kurt Sprenger, Music Director
Michael Shih, violin
Saturday, November 2, 2019 at 7:30pm
Truett Auditorium
Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary
FREE Admission
Artist Profile
Violinist Michael Shih, concertmaster of the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra since 2001, has performed throughout the United States and his native Taiwan, as well as on tours of Canada, France, Germany, Costa Rica, Honduras, Peru, China, Japan, and Korea. An United States Presidential Scholar in the Arts, he was a winner in the Naumburg International Violin Competition and Artists International’s Auditions, which led to his New York recital debut at Carnegie’s Weill Recital Hall in 1992. He has appeared as a soloist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl, the Little Orchestra Society at Avery Fisher Hall, the Williamsburg Symphonia, the Abilene Philharmonic, the New York Youth Symphony, the San Pedro Sula Symphony in Honduras, the Taipei Symphony at Taiwan’s National Concert Hall and with the symphony orchestras of Dallas, Fort Worth, Hartford and New Amsterdam. In 2007, he gave the world premiere of Kevin Puts’ Violin Concerto with the FWSO conducted by Miguel Harth-Bedoya, and this critically acclaimed performance was released by FWSO Live in recordings titled The Composer’s Voice and Take Six.
An avid performer of chamber music, he has collaborated with Leon Fleisher, Sharon Isbin, Jaime Laredo, Cho-Liang Lin, Yo-Yo Ma, Michael Tree and Charles Wadsworth. From 1992 to 2002, he was first violinist of the Whitman Quartet, formerly graduate quartet-in-residence at the Juilliard School and winner of the Naumburg Chamber Music and Catherine Filene Shouse Debut Artists awards. Music festival appearances include Aspen, Bard, Chamber Music Northwest, Chautauqua, Kansai Science City (Japan), La Jolla, Lincoln Center, Ravinia, Spoleto USA, Stuttgart (Germany) and Mostly Mozart. He has also appeared at the prestigious Chiehshou Hall Concert at the Office of the President of Taiwan, at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Chamber Music International in Dallas and Cliburn Foundation’s “Cliburn at the Bass” and “Cliburn at the Modern” series with composers John Corigliano, Sebastian Currier, Osvaldo Golijov, Jennifer Higdon, Lowell Liebermann, Kevin Puts, Christopher Theofanidis and Joan Tower.
Media credits include NPR’s Performance Today, NBC’s Today Show, Japan’s NHK Television and Taiwan’s Public Television. He holds Bachelor and Master of Music degrees from the Julliard School, where he studied with Dorothy DeLay and Hyo Kang. Other teachers include Chiu-Sen Chen, Masao Kawasaki, Shue-Tee Lee and Margaret Pardee. He was on the violin faculty at the Lucy Moses School for Music and Dance in New York City from 1995 to 2001. Currently, he is a Distinguished Guest Professor of Violin at the Texas Christian University and a 2013 Visiting Professor of Music at the East China Normal University.
Concert Program
Josef Suk (1874-1935)
Toward a New Life
Three blasts of a trumpet fanfare, each a step higher than the one before, open this jaunty little march from the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles. Suk had dedicated a version of the piece to the Sokol (Falcon) Society, the youth athletic association that was the pride of his native Czechoslovakia, a dozen earlier. After laying it aside, he revised and entered it in the art competition for the Games of the X Olympiad; from 1912 to 1948, medals were awarded for architecture, literature, music, painting or sculpture. The judges awarded him the Silver Medal even though Gold and Bronze weren’t awarded that year!
Notwithstanding the bright, youthful spirit of this march, Josef Suk’s major works of this period in his life were practically Mahler-like in their darkness and brooding character. His musical reputation largely rests on the symphonic tetralogy: Asrael after the Angel of Death (1906), Suk’s cataclysmic reaction to the loss of his father-in-law, Antonín Dvořák, and his wife, Otilie; A Summer’s Tale (1909), a meditation on nature by a man beaten down by fate; Ripening (1917), an autumnal hymn to life; and a valedictory song of earthly liberation, Epilogue (1929). Seen in the light of those works, the name of his Olympic march resonates with the joy of youth’s promise.
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
Violin Concerto in D
Brahms was the composer with the severest case of self-critical paralysis by analysis. By his own reckoning, he labored 21 years over his First Symphony, knowing full well that the concert-going public expected “Beethoven’s Tenth.” When he finally delivered a symphony at age 43, the floodgates finally opened, a second one soon poured out and, two years later, a violin concerto in the same key as Beethoven’s. (Key signatures and notes that spell out names have enormous significance of homage for composers.)
The D Major concerto is closely associated with Brahms’ violinist friend and collaborator, Joseph Joachim, who advised the pianist-composer on technique and playability – and his prints (and bow markings) are all over it. But the unseen hands behind the work belonged to another Hungarian violinist, Ede Reményi, who instilled in a 15-year-old Brahms a lifelong love of Gypsy music. The concerto’s melodies aren’t overtly alla Zingarese, but it has moments that flirt with Roma style (if filtered through a crusty classical sensibility).
Like the Beethoven concerto, the Brahms’ first movement has a double exposition – the first, a long orchestral introduction of principal themes and the second, the main event for violin. The opening theme is a rolling melody of falling and rising triplets; the contrasting one is an angry explosion of dotted rhythms. A passage with turbulent strings builds the tension and sets up the violin’s dramatic entrance, a virtual cadenza inspired by virtuoso Gypsy fiddling. The actual cadenza comes near the movement’s end and is soloist’s choice, the last major violin concerto without a cadenza written down by the composer.
Brahms originally envisioned a four-movement symphonic structure (as in his second piano concerto), but the interior movements didn’t come together. The scherzo may have made its way into the piano concerto, but the adagio was replaced entirely. The Spanish violinist Pablo de Sarasate famously refused to take up the concerto, not wanting to stand idle while the oboe played the only tune in the second movement. The finale again has a Gypsy feel, though the melody could have been lifted from (or, rather, inspired by) the Violin Concerto No. 1 by Max Bruch that Joachim introduced a decade earlier. The concerto wasn’t well received at its first performance in Leipzig, and legend has it that Brahms reacted to the critical commentary by burning the sketches of a planned second violin concerto.
Richard Wagner (1813-1883)
Prelude to Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg
In the spring of 1845, Wagner completed Tannhäuser, his opera about 14th century German Minnesingers and a song contest. A few weeks later, he began sketching the libretto for an opera about 15th century German Mastersingers and a song contest.
But Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg was on hold for 16 years while Wagner attended to other distractions: Lohengrin (1848), Das Rheingold(1853), Die Walküre (1856) and Tristan und Isolde (1859). It wasn’t until late 1861 – when a Titian painting in Venice reminded him of the subject – did he return to his Mastersingers. He composed the Prelude to Act I on a train in March, 1862, and premiered it that fall. Another six years went by before the full opera was completed and staged, but the opening prelude introduced many of the principal musical themes associated with its characters.
Wagner cast his opera as a battle of wits between musical progressives and conservatives. His hero Hans Sachs, the historical leader of the Mastersingers guild (and a stand-in for Wagner himself), mentors the young Franconian knight Walther von Stolzing in a song contest to win the hand of the beautiful Eva. Sachs’ nemesis is the musically giftless Sixtus Beckmesser (a stand-in for Wagner’s chief antagonist in real life, the music critic Eduard Hanslick). The prelude opens with two majestic themes representing the Mastersingers and their apprentices. Wagner introduces a contrasting lyrical theme in the violins, Walther’s famous Prize Song. The middle section is a fugue based on the apprentice music, and the work concludes with a return to the majestic theme of the opening bars.