Leonidas Kavakos (the biography)
PROGRAMME:
Edward Elgar
Military March No 1 in D Major from Pomp and Circumstance Military Marches, Op. 39
Jean Sibelius
Violin Concerto in D Minor, Op. 47
Edward Elgar
Enigma Variations for orchestra, Op. 36
Leonidas Kavakos has the name of a legendary and courageous Spartan with long hair. If he takes his glasses of he could undoubtedly perform as Niccolò Paganini in biographical films. The more so as he is a virtuoso, he doesn’t cede to the renowned man of Genoa. Leonidas is from a “working dynasty” of musicians, studied music with his parents and, like Paganini, suffered from the strict tuition of his father. In one interview he related how, at the age of nine, he created a “small domestic revolution” and he was taken to Stefan Kafantaris at the Athens Conservatoire. “I don’t believe that there are teachers like that anymore in this world... I began to give recitals,” Kavakos continued, “in 1985 I went to the Sibelius Competition and won it. I was eighteen at the time. I was proud and happy to take my own Grand Prix to my teacher. Because after my win everyone discovered my teacher’s name!” And, after winning the Paganini Competition in 1988, he was awarded the right to perform the Il Cannone violin crafted by Guarneri del Gesù which had belonged to Paganini. Today Kavakos performs the Stradivarius Falmouth violin, which he found and bought in an antique shop in New York without any outside assistance from foundations.
Music has been performed on Kavakos’ 18th century instrument for four centuries. At the Concert Hall of the Mariinsky Theatre alone he has performed masterpieces of the Baroque and all of Beethoven’s violin sonatas, the Romantic composers from Schubert to Sibelius, Tchaikovsky, both violin concerti by Prokofiev, Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto and, most recently, a concerto by Henri Dutilleux, performed at a mini-festival in honour of and in the presence of the patriarch of French avant-garde music who died recently at the age of almost one hundred (organised by Valery Gergiev as part of the 2008 Stars of the White Nights festival).
At the current festival Leonidas Kavakos and Valery Gergiev will be performing the Sibelius Concerto with which Kavakos won the Sibelius Competition. Don’t miss the chance to witness the friendship of these two wonderful musicians: Sibelius’ Violin Concerto is one of the great wonders of the music world.
Iosif Raiskin
“Edward Elgar holds the same position in English music that Beethoven holds in German music” and “Elgar is only our Shakespeare of music” were accolades conferred upon the British composer by his contemporaries. Essentially, after Henry Purcell, he became the first national composer to place British music in an international context. The music of Edward Elgar (1857–1934) is a looking glass that reflected Great Britain in the Victorian era. The orchestral march cycle Pomp and Circumstance (1901–1930), consisting of five pieces, received widespread acclaim. Elgar was known to audiences first and foremost for his magnificent March No 1 in D Major Land of Hope and Glory) from that cycle. Today, too, Elgar’s marches are performed on celebratory occasions at Buckingham Palace and at Westminster Abbey. British music lovers did not hurry in their acclamation of Elgar, but he was actively championed by Bernard Shaw (who published articles as a concert and opera critic). The time was soon to come when the situation would change. In 1904 at Covent Garden, the first Elgar festival was held; the composer was also elected a member of the prestigious Athena literary club, and in July that year he was also knighted.
Edward Elgar completed his Variations on an Original Theme for Orchestra (Enigma) in 1899; the work was to become his very own calling card. Legend has it that after an entire day’s teaching Elgar improvised a theme in which one can hear understandable weariness and which, to Russians, recalls the Song of the Volga Boatmen. The theme drew the attention of the composer’s wife Caroline Alice Elgar, and he then improvised the variations. The initials and the invented names conceal the identities of people close to the composer. The romantic and refined first variation, a direct continuation of the theme, is dedicated to his wife. In variation No 6 the theme is given to the violas (Isabel Fitton studied the viola under Elgar). Once the hero of the seventh variation – the architect Arthur Troyte Griffith – and the composer were caught in a thunderstorm and sought shelter at the home of Winifred No rbury (see the eighth variation). Variation No 9, Nimrod (August Johannes Jaeger), stands alone for the amazing beauty and orchestral expression of its Adagio – one of Elgar’s masterpieces. The Old Testament patriarch Nimrod who built the Tower of Babel is represented by one of the composer’s friends who served with the London music publisher No vello & Co.
Of the other pieces, several are sweet nothings. Dorabella is the stuttering Dora Penny, while variation No 11 is a portrait not of George Robertson Sinclair, a Hereford organist, but his beloved bulldog. In the thirteenth bar of variation No 13, to the background of the measured sounds of the violas and the tremolo of the kettledrums depicting the crashing of waves and the noise of a ship’s machinery, the clarinet performs the secondary theme from Mendelssohn’s overture Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, subsequently repeated by the trumpets and trombones: the heroine of the variation has set sail for Australia. The finale, in which the orchestra may be joined by the organ, is Edward Elgar himself. During his lifetime, he revealed all of the mysterious codes in his comments on the work. Yet for the next generation he left an even deeper enigma: the variations would appear to conceal some hidden and resonant theme in the score that even today remains elusive... To this day people are still trying to find it and these searches force us to return to Enigma,looking for some deeper meaning beneath the leaves of this private photo album.
Anna Bulycheva
The violin was Jean Sibelius’ favourite instrument, and in his youth the composer dreamt of a glittering career as a virtuoso violinist. Sadly these dreams were not to be: he had begun to learn the instrument too late, and Sibelius had also suffered an injury to his shoulder which ultimately forced him to abandon his ambitious plans. Nevertheless, the composer never lost interest in the violin and could spend ages improvising on it. Approaching his fortieth birthday, he remarked “there is still a part of me that wishes to be a violinist, and this part of me manifests itself in an unusual way.” Sibelius soon started working on his one and only violin concerto, in which he displays his deep love for and intimate knowledge of the instrument.
The Violin Concerto in D Minor (1905) is remarkable for its extreme complexity: it reflects clearly Sibelius’ desire to showcase the violin’s unparalleled expressive possibilities – the ones that were beyond his own reach as a performer. The premiere of the work in Berlin was an astounding success, and his music led one of the critics to a make a charming comparison with “the picturesque Scandinavian winter landscapes where artists use the refined play of white on white to achieve rare and at times hypnotic and powerful effects.”
Nadezhda Kulygina
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