“Inside the Clouds” is the title Charlie Siem chose for the recital we discuss in these notes.
It is a peculiar title for a recital, and we do not know the reason for this choice. But perhaps we can see the concert program as a firmament in which we can glimpse the faces of the authors, all violinists and great violinists.
Including Mozart who was, while still a teenager, conductor and first violinist of the Salzburg orchestra until he was in his twenties, having learned the art from his father Leopold, as was Edward Elgar, a hundred years later, from his father William.
In the program all faculties of the violin are represented: the imitative instrument of women’s singing par excellence, as in Mozart’s sonata written at the age of 22, when, while in Paris he got the news of his mother’s passing, the particular aptitude for chromatic harmonization, which is typical and fundamental in the style of Elgar, then of course the romantic lyricism that we find in Henryk Wienawski, a great Polish composer, and in Ole Bull, Norwegian like Master Siem‘s origins, and also the virtuosity of Antonio Bazzini and Fritz Kreisler, to whom Elgar dedicated not this sonata but his concerto for violin and orchestra.
So we can say that Charlie Siem, who plays a splendid Guarneri del Gesù, in a duo with the distinguished Itamar Golan on piano, offers us a highly committed program in which we can find many insights and insights into the development of the violin in a broad section of the wonderful history of the art of Music.
(Lorenzo Porta del Lungo)
P R O G R A M M E
PART I
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756 – 1791)
Sonata no. 18 in G major K 301
Edward Elgar (1857-1934)
Sonata in E minor Op. 82
PART II
Selection of excerpts from:
Fritz Kreisler (1875-1962), Ole Bull (1810-1880),
Henryk Wieniawski (1835-1880), Antonio Bazzini (1818-1897)