Rock Star-Like Performance to Highlight ASO’s Trailblazer Concert

Exploring the legacy of orchestral pioneers is the program slated for Saturday night’s Anchorage Symphony Orchestra presentation of “Trailblazers” at 8 p.m. at the Atwood Concert Hall at the Alaska Center for the Performing Arts located at the downtown Anchorage Town Square.

The careers of three performers – two deceased and one still very much alive – and their impacts on modern and past orchestral performance are set to be showcased musically through performance of their best-known compositions that when originally released rocked the classical concert world.

“I hope that our audience will take away the fact that certain standard works which we now consider part of the normal classical repertoire were once scandalous and risky,” Randall Craig Fleischer, ASO maestro, via email correspondence last week with the Anchorage Press. “The opening phrase that the soloist plays in Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5 is so beautiful yet we take for granted just how different that section is in terms of the traditions of the day.”

That is because the audience of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s day – between the 1770s and the 1790s – would have been shocked the first time they heard the violin entered the musical performance in a completely different tempo from the introduction, Fleischer said. And even more controversial for Mozart’s day was when the solo violin suddenly yet joyfully reverted to the same line that the rest of the instruments in the violin section were playing as if nothing was amiss.

In today’s orchestral world, a violin solo departing from the written line guiding the rest of the section is nothing unusual. In musical terms, it is called a “cadenza” - a virtuoso solo passage inserted into a movement most often in a concerto yet also found in other works.

It will occur during Saturday night’s performance as world class violinist carefully drags her bow across a nearly 300-year old instrument in the Violin Concerto No. 5 slated to be the second piece performed for “Trailblazers.”

And Saturday night’s violin soloist – Rachel Barton Pine – is well-known within the world of classical music for her interpretation of concerto cadenzas. In fact, she writes her own.

It is a highly unusual aspect of her career that sets her apart as a trailblazer in today’s orchestra and symphony world.

She began composing her own cadenzas at age 17, she told the Anchorage Press via a phone interview last weekend while she was on tour in Vancouver, British Columbia.

She didn’t have a choice at that point.

She was to play a rediscovered concerto piece written by Meude-Monpas, a French composer who doubled as a musketeer in military service to French king Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Due to the composer’s relative obscurity during the same time period that Mozart was the celebrated super star of the classical world, the cadenzas played for the Meude-Monpas piece during that time frame were not written down.

The piece itself had been lost for a couple of centuries until it was found while research in to the work of black composers was conducted.

“Here was this really charming concerto by a contemporary of Mozart but even its score was lost until just recently,” Pine said. “You cannot have a concerto without a cadenza, so I had no choice but to write my own.”

Talk about pressure.

Well, not really, according to Pine.

“Since none of the original cadenzas were written down, there was nothing to compare mine to,” she said. “I did not have to worry about whether mine would be better or worse than anybody else. I was able to let it truly be a true reflection of my interpretation. So, I took the plunge.”

And thus began a standard operating procedure for Pine who today in her early 40s reflects on that teenage experience as the gateway to do something she always wanted: compose and perform her own musical reaction to what others have written.

“As a child, I never thought I could write like the other famous composers from the past,” Pine shares. Yet, she is pleased with the numerous cadenzas she has written and the example she has set for her young daughter – a budding violinist herself. “For my daughter, it just flows right out of her. It is inspiring.”

In an interview with Strings Magazine, Pine said she encourages young violinists to give composing – especially writing their own cadenzas – a try. She believes it helps them to be more engaged with the music and to leave their own stamp on their performance.

“If I can do it, anyone can do it,” she said.

For certain, Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5 has become one of Pine’s signature pieces.

She’s performed it across the globe to rave reviews and Saturday night’s presentation on a finely-tuned violin that is nearly 300 years old is expected to live up her previous accolades.

The violin – known in classical musical circles as the “ex-Bazzini, ex-Soldat” was crafted in 1742 by Joseph Guarnerius del Gesu, an Italian luthier from the Guarneri family of Cremona considered to be one of history’s all-time best instrument makers. It is one of approximately only 200 del Gesu instruments still in existence. Its value is difficult to estimate. Many del Gesu instruments have sold for more than $10 million.

Violins produced by del Gesu – which often have a darker, more robust and sonorous tone – are considered equal in quality to those crafted by Stradivari – a more household name.

Pine said the “Soldat” produces exactly the sounds and tones she seeks.

“It is everything I am looking for. I can produce the deep, gritty sounds and it can be sweet when it needs to be,” she said.

Yet, the question remains: Will Pine and the “Soldat” take a cue from Mozart’s day when lead violinists often lead the orchestra?

We asked Maestro Fleischer. After all, he is well-known for showcasing appropriate antics – ones that might depart from today’s modern script in favor of providing the audience with insight of past protocol.

He said, “Funny you should ask. I was actually thinking about it.”

He and Pine have performed together numerous times.

“She is always a truly compelling and dynamic artist with tons of wonderful musical ideas, incredible technique, a huge stage presence and lots of positive interaction with the musicians during rehearsals,” Fleischer said.

In fact, she’s a bit of a rock star.

Seriously, Fleischer describes her playing as having a “rock star” quality with a “visceral impact.”

True to her reputation as a “rocker,” Pine described those cadenzas she writes as something similar to a guitar bridge in rock tune.

She’s a huge heavy metal fan. Her favorites include AC/DC, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Metallica and Van Halen. She recorded the ground-breaking, “Shredding with the Symphony,” which put the music of these rock superstars alongside that of classical legends such as Bruch, Shostakovich, Sibelius and Vivaldi.

Anchorage listeners not able to attend Saturday night’s symphony performance have a rock solid opportunity to hear Pine play her own cross between classical and heavy metal at 9 p.m. tonight at The Writer’s Block Bookstore and Café in Spenard.

While her own career with its far-reaching focus on top notch traditional classical performance plus the idea of blending classical and rock as well as her focus on rediscovering forgotten artists and her foundation’s support of the next generation of violinists certainly fits Saturday night’s “Trailblazers” theme, Pine said she is most thrilled to be honoring the career of Amy Beach – A Boston-based composer whose career soared in the 1880s and 1890s was the first American female composer to have her works added to a compilation of “masterworks.”

Beach also stood up for female composers when it was reported in the local newspapers that Antonin Dvorak,a world-renown Czech composer visiting Boston in 1892 while creating a “New World” symphony remarked that “ladies play and it is nice. But I am afraid the ladies cannot help us much. They have not the creative power.”

It rankled Beach who wrote to the newspaper that, “From the year 1675 to the year 1885, women have composed 153 works,” Amy Beach wrote. “Including 55 serious operas, 6 cantatas, 53 comic operas, 17 operettas, 6 sing-spiele, 4 ballets, 4 vaudevilles, 2 oratorios, one each of fares, pastorales, masques, ballads and buffas.”

The full ASO along with Pine are scheduled to conclude Saturday night’s performance with Beach’s ground-breaking, “Symphony in E Minor, Op. 32 ‘Gaelic.’” The “Gaelic” was performed by the Boston Symphony in 1896.

Despite her leadership in the musical field, much of Beach’s adult life was spent as a homemaker dutifully married to her doctor husband. Her piano performances were limited until after the death of her husband, yet she was a prolific composer and her “Grand Mass in E Flat Major” was heralded by critics as having “deeper resources of the science of music” even though it was also noted that it was difficult to associate its sound with the hand of a woman. Her piano piece, “Ecstasy,” was performed more than 1,000 times.

Noting that Beach’s work is not often headlined on today’s modern orchestral world – the Boston Symphony took more than 100 years to perform her “Gaelic” again – Maestro Fleischer admits Saturday night’s performance is a rarity.

“The field of classical music tends to stay within a certain comfort zone in order to not frighten off our audience. Much of the time, we tend to program works by the same composers. Fortunately, Susan Wingrove (the ASO keyboardist) recommended Amy Beach’s symphony and I’m thrilled we’re doing it. It’s really a masterpiece,” Fleischer said of the symphony with strong Irish leanings. “I appreciate the energy and drama of it. Ms. Beach so skillfully and expressively structures the musical events in this symphony to truly grab the listener (and the musicians and the conductor) and takes us on a compelling musical journey.”

Saturday night’s performance is slated to begin with, “The Moldau,” by Bedřich Smetana, a Czech composer who was one of the first European composers to use local folk and pop music in creating classical music. Tickets available at CenterTix Box Office at the Alaska Center for the Performing Arts or online at www.centertix.com or call 263-ARTS (2787), toll free at 1-877-ARTS- TIX.