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Daniel Hope and Sebastian Knauer

Violin and Piano

SUNDAY CONCERTS

Music Room

Tickets are $45, $25 for members, $20 for students with ID, and $5 for youth (ages 8-18); museum admission for that day is included. Advance reservations are strongly recommended.

Members: please sign in to receive member discount, which will be applied at checkout.

Concert sold out? You’ve got options:

Any available Rush tickets will be released via the “buy ticket” link on Fridays at 5 pm preceding each Sunday Concert.

Standby tickets may become available (credit card only) near the entrance to the Music Room starting at 3:30 pm.

image for 2019-04-14-sunday-concerts-hope

Program

After formative years at the Menuhin School and the Royal Academy of Music in London, Daniel Hope became the youngest ever member of the Beaux Arts Trio, playing in its last six seasons. He has commissioned works and collaborated with composers including Schnittke, Maxwell Davies, and Turnage. His recordings include celebrated versions of the violin concertos of Mendelssohn, Berg, and Britten, as well as music by composers imprisoned by the Nazis in Terezin. Hope’s Phillips Music recital ends with the Sonata for Violin and Piano by William Walton, originally composed for Menuhin. Vanessa Perez began her studies in Caracas, Venezuela, before continuing her musical education in London, Italy, and the US, working with the likes of Lazar Berman, Peter Frankl, and Daniel Epstein. She has appeared as a soloist throughout North and South America as well as in Europe. Her chamber music partners have included violinist Joshua Bell and cellist Jan Vogler.

Program:

GEORGE ENESCU (1881-1955)
Impromptu concertant for violin and piano (1903)

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH (1685-1750)
Sonata for violin and keyboard No. 4 in C minor, BWV 1017 (1718-1722)

FELIX MENDELSSOHN (1809-1847)
Violin Sonata in F Major (1838)

INTERMISSION

BÉLA BARTÓK (1881-1945)
Romanian Folk Dances, Sz. 56 (1915)

MAURICE RAVEL (1875-1937)
Kaddish, for violin and piano (from Two Hebrew Melodies) (1914)

WILLIAM WALTON (1902-1983)
Sonata for Violin and Piano (1947)

About the Artists

The violinist Daniel Hope has toured the world as a virtuoso soloist for 25 years and is celebrated for his musical versatility as well as his dedication to humanitarian causes. Winner of the 2015 European Cultural Prize for Music, whose previous recipients include Daniel Barenboim, Plácido Domingo, and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Daniel Hope appears as soloist with the world’s major orchestras and conductors, also directing many ensembles from the violin. Since the start of the 2016/2017 season, Daniel Hope has been Music Director of the Zurich Chamber Orchestra—an orchestra with whom he is closely associated since his early childhood.

In March 2017, he released his latest album For Seasons. It is Hope’s very personal homage to the seasons featuring 12 single works—exclusively dedicated to each month of the year—and the Four Seasons by Antonio Vivaldi, accompanied by the Zurich Chamber Orchestra. This album was awarded the 2017 ECHO Klassik prize. Hope has been an exclusive Deutsche Grammophon artist since 2007. In 2017, the documentary film Daniel Hope—The Sound of Life was screened in European Movie Theatres.

Hope was raised in London and studied the violin with Zakhar Bron. The youngest ever member of the Beaux Arts Trio during its final six seasons, today Daniel Hope performs at all the world’s greatest halls and festivals: from Carnegie Hall to the Concertgebouw Amsterdam, from Salzburg to Schleswig-Holstein and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (where he was Artistic Director from 2009-2013), and from Aspen to the BBC Proms and Tanglewood. He has worked with conductors including Kurt Masur, Kent Nagano, and Christian Thielemann, as well as with the world’s greatest symphony orchestras including Boston, Chicago, Berlin, Paris, London, Los Angeles, and Tokyo. Devoted to contemporary music, Hope has commissioned over 30 works, enjoying close contact with composers such as Alfred Schnittke, Toru Takemitsu, Harrison Birtwistle, Sofia Gubaidulina, György Kurtág, Peter Maxwell-Davies, and Mark-Anthony Turnage.

Hope is one of the world’s most prolific classical recording artists, with over 25 albums to his name. His recordings have won the Deutsche Schallplattenpreis, the Diapason d’Or of the Year, the Edison Classical Award, the Prix Caecilia, the ECHO-Klassik Award, and numerous Grammy nominations. His album of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto and Octet with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe was named one of the best of the year by The New York Times. His recording of Alban Berg’s Concerto was voted Gramophone Magazine’s “top choice of all available recordings.” His recording of Max Richter’s Vivaldi Recomposed, which reached No. 1 in over 22 countries is, with 160,000 copies sold, one of the most successful classical recordings in recent times.

Hope has penned four bestselling books published in Germany by the Rowohlt publishing company. He contributes regularly to the Wall Street Journal and has written scripts for collaborative performances with the actors Klaus Maria Brandauer, Sebastian Koch, and Mia Farrow. In Germany he also presents a weekly radio show for the WDR3 Channel and curates, since the 2016/2017 season his own series Hope@9pm, a music and discussion event with well-known guests from culture and politics at the Konzerthaus Berlin.

Since 2004 Hope has been Associate Artistic Director of the Savannah Music Festival. From September 2017, he will begin a new role as “Artistic Partner” of the New Century Chamber Orchestra in San Francisco, directing the Ensemble from the violin. Hope plays the 1742 “ex-Lipiński” Guarneri del Gesù, placed generously at his disposal by an anonymous family from Germany.

Venezuelan-American pianist Vanessa Perez, “is not to be taken lightly”—The Washington Post. A product of the energized musical culture of Venezuela, Perez has been praised for a bold, passionate performing style allied to musicianship of keen sensitivity.

Perez’s all-Chopin album on the Telarc/Concord label, soon after its release in 2012, reached No. 5 on the Classical Billboard Charts. Her Latest Album, Spain was released in February 2016 by the Steinway & Sons label. This Spanish themed album features works by Manuel de Falla and Claude Debussy. Fanfare Magazine praised in June 2016, “the piano is stunningly played and extremely well recorded.”

Recent performance highlights include the Gilmore International Keyboard Festival, a collaboration with the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra under John Axelrod in Germany, concerts with the Orquesta de la Juventud Simon Bolivar under Gustavo Dudamel in Caracas, working with Conductor Nikolaj Znaider and the Teresa Carreño Youth orchestra, the Casals Festival, and the Chopin Festival in Mallorca. Perez is a Steinway Artist.

Tribute to Yehudi Menuhin

Yehudi Menuhin was my primary violin teacher, and even after his passing in 1999 has remained an inspiring presence in my life; this program consists of music dear to his heart.  The opening piece, George Enescu’s Impromptu concertant, reflects the fact that Menuhin studied with Enescu from the age of 11, a mentorship that led to the two becoming lifelong friends (“Enescu will always be my guiding light as a man, as a musician”). Menuhin and Glenn Gould famously recorded J.S. Bach’s Violin Sonata No. 4 in C Minor, BWV 1017.  Menuhin also had great affection for the next piece on the program, Mendelssohn’s Sonata in F Major, which he instrumental in publishing for the first time in 1953.

Bartók’s Romanian Folk Dances acknowledge Menuhin’s devotion to the Hungarian composer (Menuhin commissioned the Sonata for Solo Violin from Bartók).  Ravel’s “Kaddisch” was a piece Menuhin recorded at age 20, and is the final work he heard me play just days before his death.  Finally, the Walton Violin Sonata was commissioned by Menuhin in the late 1940s. All in all, this program is intended to evoke Menuhin’s warm, curious, and very generous spirit.

-Daniel Hope

Watch and Listen