Violinist Michael Jinsoo Lim presents an evening of contemporary pieces for solo violin that share a connection to dance. As solo violinist and concertmaster for Pacific Northwest Ballet, Lim has worked at the intersection of music and dance for over a decade. The program includes music by John Corigliano and world premieres of music by Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti, Paola Prestini and Melia Watras.
Program
where we used to be for solo violin (2022)…………………………….….Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti (b. 1983)
A dance of honey and inexorable delight for narrator and violin (2022)…………..Melia Watras (b. 1969)
Herb Martin, recorded voice
Élégie for solo violin (1944)...…………………………………………………...….Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)
Doppelgänger Dances for violin solo (2017)……………………………………………………...Melia Watras
STOMP for scordatura violin (2010)…………………………………………………John Corigliano (b. 1938)
—Intermission—
A Jarful of Bees for violin and electronics (2020)……………………………………...Paola Prestini (b.1975)
Homage to Swan Lake for violin solo (2018)………………………………………………………Melia Watras
The Red Violin Caprices for solo violin (2001)…………………………………………………John Corigliano
Biographies
Michael Jinsoo Lim
Violinist Michael Jinsoo Lim has been praised by Gramophone for playing with “delicious abandon,” and hailed by the Los Angeles Times as a “conspicuously accomplished champion of contemporary music.” Concertmaster and solo violinist for the internationally acclaimed Pacific Northwest Ballet, Lim is featured as soloist with the company in concertos by Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Bach and others, and has toured with PNB to Paris and New York City. Lim is violinist and co-founder of the Seattle-based ensemble Frequency and was co-founder of the award-winning Corigliano Quartet, with whom he appeared on over a dozen albums. The quartet’s Naxos label CD was honored as one of The New Yorker’s Ten Best Classical Recordings of the Year. His discography can be found on Naxos, Planet M, Sono Luminus, DreamWorks, Albany, Bridge, CRI, Bayer Records, RIAX and New Focus. Lim has served on the faculty of the Banff Centre, taught at Indiana University as a guest professor, and currently serves on the faculty of Cornish College of the Arts.
John Corigliano
The American John Corigliano continues to add to one of the richest, most unusual, and most widely celebrated bodies of work any composer has created over the last forty years. Corigliano's numerous scores—including three symphonies and eight concerti among over one hundred chamber, vocal, choral, and orchestral works—have been performed and recorded by many of the most prominent orchestras, soloists, and chamber musicians in the world. Recent scores include Conjurer (2008), for percussion and string orchestra, commissioned for and introduced by Dame Evelyn Glennie; Concerto for Violin and Orchestra: The Red Violin (2005), developed from the themes of the score to the François Girard’s film of the same name, which won Corigliano the Oscar in 1999; Mr. Tambourine Man: Seven Poems of Bob Dylan (2000) for orchestra and amplified soprano, the recording which won the Grammy for Best Contemporary Composition in 2008; Symphony No. 3: Circus Maximus (2004), scored simultaneously for wind orchestra and a multitude of wind ensembles; and Symphony No. 2 (2001: Pulitzer Prize in Music.) One of the few living composers to have a string quartet named for him, Corigliano serves on the composition faculty at the Juilliard School of Music and holds the position of Distinguished Professor of Music at Lehman College, City University of New York, which has established a scholarship in his name.
Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti
Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti is a Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) composer/sound artist dedicated to the arts of our time. A "leading composer-performer" (The New York Times), Lanzilotti’s musical voice is grounded in experimental practices, both through influences as part of the network of musicians/artists in the Wandelweiser collective, and her own explorations into radical indigenous contemporaneity. Lanzilotti was honored to be a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Music for her string orchestra piece, with eyes the color of time, which the Pulitzer committee called, “a vibrant composition . . . that distinctly combines experimental string textures and episodes of melting lyricism.”
Herbert Woodward Martin
Herbert Woodward Martin is a prize-winning poet and performer, an actor and playwright, a singer and opera librettist, a professor, and a scholar. Born in Alabama in 1933, Martin and his family moved to Toledo, Ohio, when Herbert was twelve years old. Martin served as professor of English and poet-in-residence at the University of Dayton for more than three decades where he taught creative writing and African-American literature. He has devoted decades to editing and giving performances of the works of the poet and novelist Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906). He is also the editor of four books as well as the author of nine volumes of poetry.
Paola Prestini
Composer Paola Prestini has collaborated with poets, filmmakers, and scientists in large-scale multimedia works that chart her interest in extra-musical themes ranging from the cosmos to the environment. She has created, written and produced large scale projects such as the world's largest and first communal VR opera, The Hubble Cantata, and the eco-documentary currently on PBS, The Colorado. Her current work Sensorium Ex dives deeply into community impact, opera, and AI-bridging her love of collaboration with system building. Her work has been performed by the New York Philharmonic, Minnesota Opera, Los Angeles Opera, San Diego Opera, The Barbican Centre, Bellas Artes, and at the Festival Dei Due Mondi in Spoleto, Italy. She has been a resident at MASS MoCA, the Park Avenue Armory, the American Academy in Rome, and at Sundance. Prestini is a Co-Founder of VisionIntoArt, a non-profit new music and interdisciplinary arts production company in New York City and is the Co-Founder/Artistic Director of the non-profit music organization National Sawdust.
Melia Watras
Melia Watras has been hailed by Gramophone as “an artist of commanding and poetic personality” and by The Strad as “staggeringly virtuosic.” As a violist, composer and collaborative artist, she has sustained a distinguished career as a creator and facilitator of new music and art. Watras has released 8 albums, while performing on 13 others as violist of the Corigliano Quartet. Her compositions have been performed throughout the US and in Europe, broadcast on National Public Radio’s Performance Today, and can be found on the albums String Masks; 3 Songs for Bellows, Buttons and Keys; Firefly Songs; Schumann Resonances and 26. Watras’s adaptation of John Corigliano’s Fancy on a Bach Air for viola is published by G. Schirmer, Inc. and can be heard on her Viola Solo album. Watras is the violist of Frequency, and for twenty years, she concertized worldwide and recorded extensively as violist of the renowned Corigliano Quartet, which she co-founded. She is currently Professor of Viola and Chair of Strings at the University of Washington School of Music, where she was awarded the Adelaide D. Currie Cole Endowed Professorship, the Donald E. Petersen Endowed Fellowship and the Royalty Research Fund.
Program Notes
As concertmaster and solo violinist for Pacific Northwest Ballet, I have found myself at the intersection of music and dance for over a decade. Dance has shaped my career in unexpected and delightful ways, and this project, which will include an upcoming album to be recorded in May 2023, is a reflection of this. Each piece has a connection to dance, and I have a connection to each composer. For nearly 20 years, I was a member of the Corigliano Quartet, named after composer John Corigliano (in honor of our passion for contemporary American music). Corigliano’s music from the film The Red Violin has been used by choreographers including Peter Martins (The Red Violin Concerto, for New York City Ballet) and Nicolas Blanc (Red Violin Caprices for violinist Philippe Quint and dancers of the Joffrey Ballet). Corigliano’s STOMP has bluegrass roots and even calls for the violinist to stomp while playing. Igor Stravinsky’s works with legendary choreographer George Balanchine are staples of the ballet repertoire and I have had the privilege of playing his Violin Concerto and wonderful violin solos from Agon and Apollo at PNB. His Élégie (originally for solo viola) was choreographed by Balanchine for NYCB. I have known Paola Prestini since we both were studying at Juilliard. I have gotten to know Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti in recent years, after she and my wife Melia started to collaborate as fellow violist/composers. And of course, I have shared life and career connections with Melia since we met at the age of 18. I asked all three of these important composers to write for my project and they all agreed (lucky violinist!).
—Michael Jinsoo Lim
John Corigliano:
STOMP for scordatura violin (2010)
When considering the type of piece to be written for a competition in 2011, I felt an impulse to wander from the expected. Rather than compose a virtuoso étude or a lyrical essay (as the judges would have dozens of pieces demonstrating these virtues), I envisioned a more interesting piece that would test a performer’s imagination, intelligence and musicality by offering non-traditional problems to solve. Hence, this unaccompanied six-minute study I call STOMP written for the 2011 Tchaikovsky Competition in Russia.
STOMP provides aural, artistic and physical challenges to the player. First, the violin’s outer two strings are tuned to non-standard pitches. This mis-tuning (scordatura) deepens the instrument’s range, and replaces the usual perfect fifths between strings with grating dissonances. The player’s ear is forced to hear pitches not usually heard on their instrument, as well as play pitches on a different string and position altogether. Second, the piece is modeled not on classical precedents, but on American fiddle music—bluegrass and jazz. And third, as in fiddle playing, the violinist must periodically stomp with his or her foot along with the music, testing their coordination and extending the physicality of “normal” violin playing. STOMP demands a theatrical mind, an unerring ear, and a delight in making music with the entire body. It is supposed to be fun for the audience and a workout for the violinists.
—John Corigliano
The Red Violin Caprices for solo violin (2001)
These Caprices, composed in conjunction with the score for François Girard's film The Red Violin, take a spacious, troubadour-inspired theme and vary it both linearly and stylistically. These variations intentionally evoke Baroque, Gypsy, and arch-Romantic idioms as they examine the same materials (a dark, seven-chord chaconne as well as that principal theme) from differing aural viewpoints. The Caprices were created and ordered to reflect the structure of the film, in which Bussotti, a fictional 18th-century violin maker, crafts his greatest violin for his soon-to-be-born son. When tragedy claims wife and child, the grief-stricken Bussotti, in a gesture both ardent and macabre, infuses the blood of his beloved into the varnish of the instrument. Their fates thus joined, the violin travels across three centuries through Vienna, London, Shanghai and Montreal, passing through the hands of a doomed child prodigy, a flamboyant virtuoso, a haunted Maoist commissar, and at last a willful Canadian expert, whose own plans for the violin finally complete the circle of parent and child united in art.
—John Corigliano
Paola Prestini: A Jarful of Bees for violin and electronics (2020)
A Jarful of Bees is inspired by the particular eight dance pattern of the honey bee which is ultimately about communication — by performing this dance, successful bee foragers can share information about the direction and distance to patches of flowers yielding nectar and pollen, to water sources, or to new nest-site locations with other members of the colony. Natural elements such as wind, chimes, and storms create sound beds that in addition to percussive elements (recorded by Ian Rosenbaum) form the backing track for the work. The writing is rhapsodic and rhythmically complex while being melodically direct; ultimately this natural world combats and coalesces with the violin and human voice, symbolizing the threats we pose to our natural world.
—Paola Prestini
Anne Leihlehua Lanzilotti: where we used to be for solo violin (2022)
Approaching the concept of mapping through an indigenous cartographic lens (see Louis, Kanaka Hawai‘i Cartography), I wrote this piece thinking about spatial/temporal knowledge acquisition, representation, and transmission as encoded in dance and music. One endearing thing about giving / getting directions in Hawai‘i is that people will often use important local landmarks that are no longer there, or where something used to be. The memory of these places, either passed through oral tradition, or through personal recollection, becomes a mental map of the landscape, maintained simultaneously with the rapidly changing modern world. This piece is the dance between what is and what used to be.
—Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti
Igor Stravinsky: Élégie for solo violin
Stravinsky’s Élégie was composed in 1944 at the request of by Germain Prévost, violist of the Pro Arte Quartet, in memory of the quartet’s founder and first violinist, Alphonse Onnou. The premiere took place at the Library of Congress, in a concert given by the Pro Arte in memory of Onnou. This short, somber work was originally conceived as a piece for solo viola, but Stravinsky also prepared a version a fifth higher, for solo violin.
—Michael Jinsoo Lim
Melia Watras:
A dance of honey and inexorable delight for narrator and violin (2022)
Doppelgänger Dances for violin solo (2017)
Homage to Swan Lake for violin solo (2018)
These three pieces were written for my dancing partner in life, violinist Michael Jinsoo Lim, specifically for this project.
A dance of honey and inexorable delight takes its title from lines from two poems by the illustrious Herbert Woodward Martin, to whom I am grateful for his artistry and friendship. Herb’s words from A Time for Bees and Virus illuminate my composition, with his text flowing and intertwining with the sounds of a lone violin. How thankful I am to have Herbert himself reading in the premiere performance and upcoming recording.
Doppelgänger Dances explores aspects of doubles. I’ve long had a fascination with doppelgänger stories (those written by Dostoevsky, Gogol, and Poe in particular): the conflicted soul, the intertwined dance of good and evil, questioned reality; and the musical use of the double: a variation, usually twice as fast as the original movement, with notable practitioners such as Bach, Handel and Biber, among many others. In Doppelgänger Dances, I play with the idea of musical doubles, creating variations on thematic material quoted from my earlier composition, William Wilson, which includes text and takes its title from Edgar Allan Poe’s doppelgänger tale.
Homage to Swan Lake. As I wrote, I considered the role of composer as improviser. In days past, composers would duel and compete with each other in the art of keyboard improvisation—notable “champions” include Bach, Mozart and Beethoven. Franz Liszt was known to go see what was playing at the local opera house when he was in town to give a recital, so that he could perform improvisations on themes of those operas and ballets. String players have gifts from performer/composers such as Paganini, Sarasate and Hummel of improvisational fantasies based on operas and ballets. My homage refers to this style—keeping themes from the Tchaikovsky ballet score in mind, but going in different directions with them.
—Melia Watras