By Signe Hammer
Pro Musica is delighted to introduce internationally acclaimed violinist Jessica Tong who, with Michael Sheppard, piano, will open Pro Musica’s main season at St. Paul’s Church on Sunday, October 16, at 5pm.
A Canadian, Jessica Tong is an «outstanding talent» (Performing Arts in Canada) with «keen sensitivity and receptivity» (Bloomington Herald Times), who «allow[s] us to savor her sense of ardor and intensity, but never [to] the detriment of her tonal beauty.» (ClassiqueInfo France). She won top prizes at the Toronto Symphony, Canadian Music, and Yellow Springs International Chamber Music Competitions, and the David Ouchterlony Award for Outstanding Artist. She has served as first violinist of the Vinca and Larchmere String Quartets, and both Artist-in-Residence at the University of Evansville, Indiana, and concertmaster of the Evansville Philharmonic Orchestra. She has performed at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall, the Kennedy Center, Paris’s les Invalides and Leipzig’s Gewandhaus, among other venues.
Dedicated to finding innovative ways to make classical music relevant and comprehensible, Tong is a passionate advocate for music education and humanizing the concert experience. She is cofounder of the music residency organization Music Beyond the Chamber and currently serves as the Chamber Music Director for the Composers Conference at Brandeis University, as well as Assistant Professor of Violin at the State University of New York Fredonia. A certified yoga teacher, she often leads workshops and masterclasses that explore the art of mindful movement and body awareness in instrumental playing.
Her program will start with a work by Franz Schubert, who played both violin and viola from an early age and had already written several string quartets when he composed his Violin Sonata No. 1 in D major. It’s modeled after Mozart’s sonatas, with three movements rather than four. Next up is Poulenc’s Violin Sonata, composed in memory of the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca and dedicated to the composer’s niece. Poulenc played the piano accompaniment at his Sonata’s Paris premier during World War II, and he was a member of Les Six, a group of French avant-garde composers that also included Darius Milhaud, Arthur Honegger, Louis Durey, Georges Auric, and one woman, Germaine Tailleferre.
Gershwin’s Three Preludes, written for solo piano and arranged by Heifetz for violin and piano, ends the first half. Gershwin established an iconic American style that fused classical, blues, jazz, and ragtime and his Preludes include a jazzy section, a blues lullaby, and a lively finale.
Occupying the entire second part of the program, Richard Strauss’s early Violin Sonata in E-flat major has an expressive beauty presaging the lush music that follows. The Sonata was composed the year that Strauss met the soprano Pauline de Ahna, who he would marry, and one might well hear more than a suggestion of romance in the work’s lyricism.
Tickets for the concerts at St. Paul’s are 400 and 600 pesos donation each and are on sale through our website, and at the concert 45 minutes before performance time. Details of all Pro Musica concerts and Patron Membership are on our website, www.promusicasma.org, or contact us at promusicasma@aol.com.
*NGO submitted article
