CHLOE AND ISAAC GO BAROQUE 5 & 6 Jan 2024 Victoria Concert Hall
5 & 6 JANUARY 2024 CHLOE AND ISAAC GO BAROQUE PROGRAMME Chloe Chua violin/Artist-In-Residence Isaac Lee organ
VITALI Chaconne in G minor
10 mins
VERACINI Largo
4 mins
TARTINI (arr. Kreisler) Variations on a Theme by Corelli
5 mins
TARTINI Devil’s Trill Sonata
15 mins
Intermission
20 mins
LOCATELLI Concerto No. 1 in D major from L’arte del violino, Op. 3
15 mins
MILSTEIN Paganiniana
8 mins
CONCERT DURATION: approximately 1 hour and 20 mins (with 20 mins intermission)
© Joel Low
CHLOE CHUA
violin/SSO Artist-In-Residence Chloe Chua (b. 2007) shot to international stardom after winning the joint 1st Prize at the 2018 Yehudi Menuhin International Competition for Young Violinists. The young star from Singapore has also garnered the top prize at the 24th Andrea Postacchini Violin Competition, 3rd prize at the 2017 Zhuhai International Mozart Competition, as well as accolades at the Thailand International Strings Competition (Junior Category Grand Prize) and the Singapore National Piano & Violin Competition (1st Prize, Junior 2017, 3rd Prize, Junior 2015). Her stunning musicality despite her young age has captured the hearts of audiences around the world, and her performances have taken her to concert halls and orchestras across the U.S.A., U.K., Italy, Germany, Saudi Arabia, China, Thailand and Singapore, in festivals such as the Copenhagen Summer Festival, New
Virtuosi Queenswood Mastercourse, Atlanta Festival Academy and the Singapore Violin Festival. For the 2023/24 season, Chloe extends her Artist-In-Residency at the Singapore Symphony Orchestra for a second season, performing several concerts and recording projects across 2023 and 2024. Her debut album of The Four Seasons and Locatelli’s Harmonic Labyrinth will be followed by a set of complete Mozart Violin Concertos with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra and Hans Graf. Chloe has been with Singapore’s Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA) School of Young Talents since age 4, and is currently under the tutelage of Yin Ke, leader of their strings programme. Chloe performs on a Giovanni Battista Guadagnini, Milan, 1753, on generous loan from the Rin Collection.
© Michelle Tng Ying
ISAAC LEE organ
Isaac Lee is a first year C.V. Starr Doctoral Fellow at The Juilliard School. He recently graduated from Yale University with a Master of Musical Arts degree. While at Yale, he received the 2002 Robert Baker Prize for performance excellence and the 2023 Director’s Prize for research excellence. He is one of the 2024 winners of the American Guild of Organists Commissioning project where he will work with Singaporean composer Cheng Jin Koh to premiere a new piece. He served as the Wilson Family Sacred Music Intern at The Brick Presbyterian Church in New York City for two years and was organist for Marquand Chapel at Yale University. He earned his Bachelor of Music degree with high distinction from the Eastman School of Music studying with Hans Davidsson. Thereafter, he obtained multiple graduate degrees from the Royal Danish Academy of
Music under the tutelage of Bine Bryndorf and Hans Davidsson. Whilst in Denmark, he completed a successful fellowship at Roskilde Cathedral, a UNESCO heritage site that boasts the 1555 Raphaelis organ. Past collaborations in Singapore include Pipe Up!, an organ chamber music series at Victoria Concert Hall, freelance work for the Singapore Symphony Group, and a stint as assistant director to Organ Academy Singapore. He was also awarded a National Arts Council grant to produce a digital project titled Organ in the Time of Cholera.
PROGRAMME NOTES TOMASO ANTONIO VITALI (1663 – 1745)
FRANCESCO MARIA VERACINI (1690 – 1768)
Chaconne in G minor
Largo
The chaconne is a dance or set of variations based on a fixed harmonic progression. Originally the xacona, a sexually suggestive and fast swirling dance-song of the African slaves in Latin America, it became tamer and slower as it reached Europe, first becoming the Italian ciacona, condemned as vulgar, indecent and inappropriate by moral authorities such as “proper society” and the church, which instantly guaranteed its popularity with the younger crowd – much like the waltz circa 1800. Eventually it reached France and became the respectable chaconne, a lyrical slow dance which was a favourite of high society and court, the standard dance ending to every French Baroque opera.
Italian composer Francesco Maria Veracini was born in Florence to a family of violinists (interestingly, his father, the only one who did not play the violin, was a pharmacist and undertaker), and his career took him all over Italy, Germany, and England. In addition to being a superb violinist (his playing allegedly stunned Giuseppe Tartini into a silent reflective retreat for days), he had a reputation for being something of what we would now call a “drama queen”. In 1722, during his time as kapellmeister (court composer) at the Dresden court of Duke Augustus II of Saxony (who was also King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania), a quarrel between highly gifted (and highly paid) musicians led to Veracini leaping out of an upperstorey window to make a point. Veracini survived but fracturing his hip, as well as his foot in two places, resulted in a lifelong limp.
This Chaconne in G minor, attributed to Italian Baroque composer Tomaso Antonio Vitali, is likely not by him, as its style (with far too many key changes for the period) is radically different from his other surviving works, and is probably a musical hoax by Ferdinand David, the German musician who first published it in 1867 as part of a collection of 18th-century compositions for violin. Nevertheless, the piece has become a popular concert showpiece for virtuosi ever since Jascha Heifetz played it as part of his 1917 Carnegie Hall debut.
GIUSEPPE TARTINI (1692 – 1770) arr. Fritz Kreisler (1875 – 1962) Variations on a Theme by Corelli Nihil sub sole novum (“There is nothing new under the sun”), says Ecclesiastes 1:10 in the Latin Vulgate Bible, and the reuse of one composer’s prior material in a new work by another composer is as old a compositional technique as music itself. In 1747, in his collection L’arte
dell’arco (The Art of the Bow), Italian composer Giuseppe Tartini published a set of 17 variations for solo violin on a theme taken from the Gavotte from Sonata No. 10 of Corelli’s 12 Violin Sonatas, Op. 5. (1700). Tartini must have really liked the theme, as he expanded the number of variations to 38 in the 1758 edition, and finally to 50 in 1798 (published posthumously, as he died in 1770). GIUSEPPE TARTINI (1692 – 1770) Devil’s Trill Sonata I. Larghetto ma non troppo II. Allegro moderato III. Andante IV. Allegro assai – Andante – Allegro assai The Violin Sonata in G minor by the Italian violinist and composer Giuseppe Tartini has always had a larger-than-life reputation. Nicknamed The Devil’s Trill, on account of both the diabolical difficulty that requires extreme virtuosity (utilising techniques as double and trilling on one string while playing another line cantabile), and the curious story attached to it. Tartini allegedly had a dream in which he struck a deal with the Devil, who showed him the most amazing solo, which he proceeded to write down upon waking up, but in vain, for yet what he wrote down was still so inferior to what he heard in his dream that he would have smashed his violin and quit music, had he any other means of making a living. The sonata begins with a wistful and dreamy melody, lilting yet with a premonition of darkness, depicting the restless sleep of the composer.
An Allegro follows – the nightmare has begun! The third movement is an Andante-Allegro, with the tempo switching reflecting agitated dreaming. The final movement is the part of the dream where the Devil shows Tartini the violin solo, wild and rough in its intensity. PIETRO LOCATELLI (1695 – 1764) Concerto No. 1 in D major from L’arte del violino, Op. 3 I. Allegro II. Largo III. Allegro Italian violinist-composer Pietro Antonio Locatelli was born in 1695 in Bergamo, Lombardy, in Northern Italy, and became a child prodigy on the violin, eventually being sent to Rome to study under Arcangelo Corelli. His musical travels took him around Italy and Germany, and enjoyed being the centre of attention, always charging shockingly high prices for his services. Once at the Berlin court of the King of Prussia, Locatelli appeared before the monarch in a blue velvet coat embroidered with silver thread, with flashy diamond rings and a sword. He eventually settled in Amsterdam in 1729, where he gave violin lessons to amateurs, performing occasionally, and ran a flourishing business selling violin strings. Amsterdam was the centre of music publishing in Europe, and standards were high – both Handel and Vivaldi published their works with Amsterdam presses – so here it was that he published and republished new editions of his works. According to English aristocrats who encountered him in Amsterdam in 1741, he was a terremoto (earthquake).
On his death in 1764, he left a massive library with over a thousand documents and books on a broad range of topics in literature and the sciences. L’arte del violin, Op. 3 (The Art of the Violin) was published in 1733, and consisted of 12 concerti for solo violin, strings, and basso continuo, as well as 24 capriccios for unaccompanied violin, intended to be inserted into the first and last movements of the concerti as a sort of cadenza. You may recognise this as the same collection from where No. 12 – The Harmonic Labyrinth – comes from, which Chloe performed and recorded with the SSO in 2022. The collection broke new ground as it extended the limits of existing technique, sometimes requiring high positions (up to the 16th position), causing a revolution in violin playing. While the sprezzatura of a skilled performer should make this all imperceptible to the listener, the challenge remains for the player, whose left hand is often overstretched, making precise intonation highly difficult—in those high positions, a slight difference in the placement of the fingers makes out-of-tune playing extremely obvious. According to contemporary reports, he once played a Corelli Adagio so beautifully that a canary was dazed and fell from its perch.
NATHAN MILSTEIN (1904 – 1992) Paganiniana The name of Italian violinist-composer Niccolò Paganini is known to even the most superficial lover of classical music, and his Caprice No. 24 (from 24 Caprices for Solo Violin, published 1820) is perhaps one of the best known of his showpieces. In 1954, Russian-born American virtuoso violinist Nathan Mironovich Milstein published a set of variations which he called Paganiniana (as a tribute) on the original Paganini work. Videos of Milstein performing the work show that he changed bowings, fingerings, and even notes between performances, which may be frustrating for those who believe the written music is sacrosanct, but reflects the fact that at the heart of music, as well as at the core of every successful performer, there should be a spirit of improvisation and spontaneity which differentiates a magical performance from a merely competent one. Programme notes by Edward C. Yong
UPCOMING CONCERTS CHAMBER
FIGARO IN A POCKET 3 Feb, 7.30pm | 4 Feb, 4pm Benjamin Molonfalean Figaro Damian Whiteley Bartolo Sun Ting Susanna Justyna Bluj Countess
CHAMBER
Xiaoming Wang violin/leader Musicians of the SSO Singers from the Singapore Symphony Choruses
SUNDAY AFTERNOON FANCIES 25 Feb, 4pm Singapore Symphony Youth Choir Wong Lai Foon Choirmaster Musicians of the SSO
CHAMBER
SMETANA, MOZART AND BARBER 14 Mar, 7.30pm Musicians of the SSO
ORGAN
CREATION DANCE – RICHARD BRASIER 23 Mar, 7.30pm Richard Brasier organ
SUPPORTED BY
PATRON SPONSOR