Close Encounters with Music Presents “The Miraculous Violin: an Evening with Vadim Gluzman and Angela Yoffe”

GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass. — In technique and sensibility, violinist Vadim Gluzman harkens back to the Golden Age of violinists of the 19th and 20th centuries, while demonstrating the passion and energy of the 21st century. Lauded by both critics and audiences as a performer of depth, virtuosity and technical brilliance, he has appeared throughout the world as a soloist and in a duo setting with his wife, pianist Angela Yoffe. Gluzman’s warm tone, developed out of his miraculous “ex-Leopold Auer” Strad (on which the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto was premiered!) takes its inspiration from the timeless examples of Mischa Elman, Nathan Milstein and David Oistrakh. A legendary violin in the hands of a master, and a dazzling holiday program with music of Mozart, Stravinsky, Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev and Castelnuovo-Tedesco will be heard on Saturday, December 21, at 6PM at the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center with Angela Yoffe as his chamber music partner.

Gluzman’s extraordinary artistry both sustains the great violin tradition of the 19th and 20th centuries and enlivens it with the dynamism of today. A recent music critic captured the singular quality of his approach to violin playing: “Most remarkable was his ability to sustain Tchaikovsky’s romantic emotionalism without falling into vibrato-drenched clichés,” wrote Chris Waddington of New Orlean’s Times-Picayune. “Gluzman did it by unleashing an astounding palette of colors from his violin: a golden hive-like droning, finger-snap pizzicatos, and a plunging dive-bomber wail that had me thinking of klezmer—and of Jimi Hendrix calling down fire from heaven in ‘Machine Gun.’” He goes on to say, “For folks who prefer the classics, I’d sum up Gluzman this way: He is better than Itzhak Perlman, better than Midori, better than Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg and all the other big-name string titans who have soloed with the LPO [Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra] in recent years.”

Gluzman maintains a dizzying international schedule: Within a mere six months, he will have performed with the Austin, Buffalo, Atlanta, and Columbus symphonies in the U.S.; the Russian National Philharmonic in Moscow, Orquestra Sinfoica do Parana in Brazil; Orchestra National de Lyon, in Sofia Bulgaria, with the Residendtie Orchestra in The Hague, the Yomiuri Nippon Symphony in Japan, and back to solo with the Louisiana Symphony. On Novmber 18 he performs at a Holocaust Memorial Concert marking the 70th Anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising at Théatre des Champs Elysées.

Ticket Information for “The Miraculous Violin—An evening with Vadim Gluzman and Angela Yoffe”
Tickets, $45 (Orchestra and Mezzanine) and $25 (Balcony), are available at the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center box office, 413.528.0100; through Close Encounters With Music at 800-843-0778; or by emailing [email protected]. Subscriptions are $225 ($195 for seniors) for a series of 6 concerts, and include a free subscribers-only exclusive event. Performances are supported in part by a grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Vadim Gluzman, an Israeli violinist appears regularly around the world: with major orchestras such as the Chicago Symphony, London Philharmonic, Israel Philharmonic, London Symphony, Leipzig Gewandhaus, Munich Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Minnesota Orchestra and NHK Symphony; and with leading conductors including Neeme Järvi, Michael Tilson Thomas, Marek Janowski, and Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos. Among his festival appearances are Verbier, Ravinia, Lockenhaus, Pablo Casals, Colmar, Jerusalem and the North Shore Chamber Music Festival in Northbrook, Illinois, founded by Gluzman with his wife and long-standing recital partner, pianist Angela Yoffe. This season Gluzman begins a collaboration with the ProMusica Chamber Orchestra in Columbus, Ohio, in the position of Creative Partner and Principal Guest Artist. Born in the former Soviet Union, Gluzman began violin studies at the age of seven before moving to Israel, where he was a student of Yair Kless. In the US he studied at the Juilliard School under Dorothy DeLay and Masao Kawasaki. Early in his career, Mr. Gluzman enjoyed the encouragement and support of Isaac Stern, and was awarded the prestigious Henryk Szeryng Foundation Career Award in 1994. He plays the extraordinary 1690 ‘ex-Leopold Auer’ Stradivari, on extended loan to him through the generosity of the Stradivari Society of Chicago.

Admired for her outstanding musicianship, extraordinary sensitivity and virtuosity, pianist Angela Yoffe has performed in the concert halls of United States, Europe, Japan and Canada. Ms. Yoffe was born in Riga, Latvia where she began her musical training, later immigrating to Israel, where she studied with Victor Derevianko in Tel-Aviv. She continued her studies in the U.S. at Southern Methodist University. She has been a piano assistant in the violin studio of Ms. Dorothy DeLay at the Juilliard School, where she studied chamber music with Jonathan Feldman. As a chamber musician and recitalist, Angela Yoffe has performed in New York, Washington, Chicago, San Francisco, Berlin, Paris, Geneva, Rome and Tokyo. She has also appeared with the Seattle Symphony, the Omaha Symphony, SWR Stuttgart Radio Orchestra, Hamburg Symphony and with New York’s Jupiter Symphony under the batons of Andrey Boreyko, Gerard Schwarz, Victor Yampolsky, Sebastian Lang-Lessing and the legendary Jens Nygaard. Angela Yoffe has received top prizes in many competitions, including the Dvarionas International Piano Competition in Lithuania.

Close Encounters With Music (CEWM) stands at the intersection of music, art and the vast richness of Western culture. Entertaining, erudite and lively commentary from founder and Artistic Director Yehuda Hanani puts the composers and their times in perspective to enrich the concert experience. Since the inception of its Commissioning Project in 2001, CEWM has worked with the most distinguished composers of our time—Paul Schoenfield, Osvaldo Golijov, Lera Auerbach, Kenji Bunch, and John Musto, among others—to create important new works that have already taken their place in the chamber music canon and on CD. A core of brilliant performers includes pianists James Tocco, Adam Neiman, Walter Ponce and Jeffrey Swann; violinists Shmuel Ashkenasi, Yehonatan Berick, Vadim Gluzman and Toby Appel; harpsichordist Lionel Party; clarinetists Alexander Fiterstein, Charles Neidich; vocalists Dawn Upshaw, Amy Burton, Jennifer Aylmer, Robert White, Lucille Beer and William Sharp; the Vermeer, Amernet, Muir, Manhattan, Avalon, Hugo Wolf quartets, and Cuarteto Latinoamericano; and guitarist Eliot Fisk. Choreographer David Parsons and actors Richard Chamberlain, Jane Alexander and Sigourney Weaver have also appeared as guests, weaving narration and dance into the fabric of the programs.

Close Encounters With Music concerts are broadcast on WMHT-FM, and weekly broadcasts of “Classical Music According to Yehuda” are broadcast on WAMC Northeast Radio and at www.wamc.org.

For more information about Close Encounters with Music and its 2013–2014 concert schedule, visit www.cewm.org.