Soovin Kim, Anna Lee & Amadeus Chamber Orchestra
Fresh on the heels of her electrifying CMNW debut performances at our Summer Festival, Protégé Violinist Anna Lee returns to Portland to thrill us again! Anna and CMNW Artistic Director Soovin Kim team up to play the beloved Bach Double Violin Concerto. They are joined by Portland’s own conductorless Amadeus Chamber Orchestra which is comprised of some of the Northwest’s finest professional musicians, along with Artistic Director Adam LaMotte. This sensational evening of virtuosity includes Protégé Composer Alistair Coleman’s visionary Moonshot, and Tchaikovsky’s delightful Serenade for Strings.
Co-Presented in partnership with Amadeus Chamber Orchestra.
“Lee was a mythical creature, drawing the audience under a spell with virtuosity and crystal-clear clouds of sound.”
— Neue Musikzeitung
This concert is co-sponsored by: Ronnie-Gail Emden & Andrew Wilson + Heidi Yorkshire & Joseph Anthony
AT-HOME CONCERT | This concert will be professionally recorded to stream beginning on 10/13.
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WEARING MASKS + UP-TO-DATE VACCINATION STATUS ARE STRONGLY ENCOURAGED at this time for attending CMNW concerts.
AMADEUS CHAMBER ORCHESTRA musicians for this concert
VIOLIN 1
Adam LaMotte
Greg Ewer
Shin-Young Kwon
Vijeta Sathyaraj
VIOLIN 2
Shanshan Zeng
Hae-Jin Kim
Jenny Estrin
*Claire Youn
VIOLAS
Hillary Oseas
Casey Bozell
*Elijah Zacharia
CELLOS
Katherine Schultz
Adaiha MacAdam-Somer
*Sarah Lee
BASSES
Andrew Harmon
*Maggie Carter
*Portland Youth Philharmonic Apprentice
Patricia Reser Center for the Arts
Thursday, 9/29 • 7:30 pm PT
Program
Click on any piece of music below to learn more about it.
- J. S. BACH Concerto in D Minor for Two Violins, BWV 1043
J. S. Bach (1685-1750)
Concerto in D Minor for Two Violins, BWV 1043Vivace
Largo ma non tanto
AllegroSadly, only seventeen Bach concertos survive today, and only nine survive in their original instrumentation – six Brandenburg Concertos and three violin concertos, one of which is on this program. The other eight exist only as Bach transcribed them for different instruments later on, although many scholars have attempted recreate his originals.
Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins, Strings and Continuo in D Minor, BWV 1043, is one of his most popular works. The first movement, Vivace, shows him at his most densely contrapuntal, unfolding in a constant swirl of contrary lines. The Largo ma non tanto is the extended centerpiece, an exquisitely lyrical duet between the two violins filled with longing suspensions. The final Allegro provides a brusque conclusion, with the soloists at times playing together in flowing parallel harmonies and at others closely pursuing one another in furious imitation.
— Ethan Allred
- ALISTAIR COLEMAN ‘Moonshot’ for Violin & String Orchestra (2019)
Three years ago, I was fortunate to tour the Glenstone Art Museum in Potomac, Maryland. It was a magical experience, and it was here that I encountered On Kawara’s Moon Landing triptych. The juxtaposing colors, precise gestures, powerful historical context, and placement of the pieces encapsulated me in the space. I have only seen photos and historical artifacts from the mission, but experiencing Kawara’s pieces, each completed on the day of each event, made me feel frozen in a moment in time — almost as if the works themselves were artifacts from the mission, or more broadly, living relics from a watershed moment in American history.
Experiencing Kawara’s Moon Landing triptych led me to envision a new work for solo violin and string orchestra. Now titled Moonshot, the piece is composed of two distinct sections to capture two moments in the Apollo 11 mission. The first is the feeling of launch on July 16, 1969 with the Saturn 5 rocket launching from Cape Canaveral, ascending above the clouds and breaking the earth’s atmosphere. The second section is more reflective: I imagine the command module quietly orbiting around the moon and revealing the solitude of spaceflight. Overall, I wanted to illustrate the feeling of each moment in time, using the paintings as a direct connection to those events, and capturing the wonder of art and space exploration that Kawara’s work evoked in me.
The piece was commissioned by the Lake Champlain Chamber Music Festival, and premiered by Soovin Kim and the Burlington Chamber Orchestra.
—© Alistair Coleman
- TCHAIKOVSKY Serenade for String Orchestra in C Major, Op. 48
TCHAIKOVSKY Serenade for String Orchestra in C Major, Op. 48
(1840-1893)
I. Pezzo in forma di sonatina
II. Valse
III. Élégie
IV. Finale: Tema russoPeter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, who once dubbed Mozart “the Christ of music,” wrote the Serenade for Strings in C Major as a tribute to his favorite composer. “It is intended to be an imitation of his style,” Tchaikovsky wrote, “and I should be delighted if I thought I had in any way approached my model. Tchaikovsky composed his Serenade in 1880, at the same time as the 1812 Overture, but his feelings about the two works could not have differed more strongly. “You can imagine, beloved friend, that my muse has been benevolent of late when I tell you that I have written two long works very rapidly,” Tchaikovsky wrote to his patron Nadezhda von Meck, “the festival Overture [the 1812] and a Serenade in four movements for string orchestra. The Overture will be very noisy; I wrote it without much warmth or enthusiasm and therefore it has no great artistic value. The Serenade, on the contrary, I wrote from inner conviction. It is a heartfelt piece and so, I dare to think, is not without artistic ‘qualities’. Tchaikovsky was so pleased with his Serenade that upon its completion he wrote to his publisher, “I am violently in love with this work and cannot wait for it to be played.” At its premiere on October 30, 1881, in St. Petersburg, the audience responded in a similar fashion, calling for an encore of the second movement. The Pezzo in forma di Sonatina (Piece in the form of a Sonatina) begins with a slow introduction, in the manner of an 18th century string serenade. This rich, hymn-like melody gives way to an energetic tune that suggests the buoyant joy of Mozart’s music. The lilting Walzer (Waltz) has delighted audiences since its first performance; here Tchaikovsky captured its essential Viennese flavor,
and the music sparkles throughout. In the Élégie we hear hints of the brooding murmurous quality most suggestive of Tchaikovsky’s style, but the overall mood of this movement is meditative rather than melancholy. In the final movement, Tchaikovsky uses contrasting Russian folksongs, one for the slow introduction and the other full of hustle and bustle. The first movement hymn concludes the Serenade.—© Elizabeth Schwartz
Artists
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Anna Lee
Violin
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Delighting her listeners with “her warm, humane musicianship” and “sweet spot of grace,” Anna Lee is an active concert violinist, chamber musician, and teacher. She began violin studies at the age of four with Alexander Souptel and debuted as soloist performing the Paganini Violin Concerto No. 1 a year and a half later with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Lan Shui. She spent a large part of her childhood in Japan and Singapore even though she was born in South Korea, and at the age of six moved to New York after being accepted to the Juilliard School Pre-College Division under the tutelage of Masao Kawasaki.
Concert venues that Anna Lee has appeared in are the Carnegie-Weill, Carnegie-Zankel, Wigmore, Beethoven-Haus, Avery Fisher, Victoria, Lotte, and Esplanade Concert Halls, as well as Merkin Hall and Peter Jay Sharp Theater. She has claimed top prizes in the 2019 Montréal Competition, 2018 Indianapolis Competition, 2011 Sion-Valais Competition, 2011 Kronberg Violin Masterclasses, 2010 and 2012 Menuhin Competition (Junior and Senior Divisions, respectively), and Aspen Music Festival AACA Competition. Anna Lee has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Louis Sudler Prize in the Arts, awarded by Office for the Arts at Harvard, the Bernhard and Mania Hahnloser Violin Prize at the Verbier Festival Academy, and the Jack Kent Cooke Young Artist Award.
Anna Lee was a Chamber Music Northwest Protégé Artist in 2022, and she has also been featured in music festivals around the world, such as the Gstaad Menuhin Festival and the Marlboro Music Festival, and on radio shows such as “From the Top” with host Christopher O’Riley and APM’s Performance Today with host Fred Child. She has also been the cover page feature of the Wall Street Journal Magazine.
Notable chamber music collaborations include Gidon Kremer, Yuri Bashmet and Steven Isserlis in the Kronberg Academy’s “Chamber Music Connects the World” festival. Anna Lee was also presented by Sir András Schiff at the BeethovenFest in Bonn. As a soloist, Anna Lee made her New York Philharmonic debut in April 2011, as well as her Frankfurt debut in 2016 with maestro Christoph Eschenbach and the Hessische Rundfunk Radio Orchestra. She has also appeared with the Singapore, Indianapolis, Park Avenue Chamber, and Montreal Symphony Orchestras.
Anna Lee’s teachers were Masao Kawasaki and Cho-Liang Lin at the Juilliard School Pre-College Division, Ana Chumachenco at the Kronberg Academy, and Miriam Fried and Don Weilerstein in Boston, where she recently completed her Comparative Literature degree at Harvard College. Currently, she is studying with Ani Kavafian at the Yale School of Music. She has also taught as a chamber music teacher, most notably at the Kronberg Academy’s Mit Musik—Miteinander festival and Festival MusicAlp in France.
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Soovin Kim
Violin & Artistic Director
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Soovin Kim enjoys a broad musical career regularly performing Bach sonatas and Paganini caprices for solo violin, sonatas for violin and piano ranging from Beethoven to Ives, Mozart, and Haydn concertos and symphonies as a conductor, and new world-premiere works almost every season.
When he was 20 years old, Kim received first prize at the Paganini International Violin Competition. He immersed himself in the string quartet literature for 20 years as the 1st violinist of the Johannes Quartet. Among his many commercial recordings are his “thrillingly triumphant” (Classic FM Magazine) disc of Paganini’s demanding 24 Caprices and a two-disc set of Bach’s complete solo violin works that were released in 2022.
Kim is the founder and artistic director of the Lake Champlain Chamber Music Festival (LCCMF) in Burlington, Vermont. In addition to its explorative programming and extensive work with living composers, LCCMF created the ONE Strings program through which all 3rd through 5th grade students of the Integrated Arts Academy in Burlington study violin. The University of Vermont recognized Soovin Kim’s work by bestowing an Honorary Doctorate upon him in 2015.
In 2020, he and his wife, pianist Gloria Chien, became artistic directors of Chamber Music Northwest in Portland, Oregon. He, with Chien, were awarded Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s 2021 CMS Award for Extraordinary Service to Chamber Music. Kim devotes much of his time to his passion for teaching at the New England Conservatory in Boston and the Yale School of Music in New Haven.
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Adam LaMotte
Violin
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Adam LaMotte is well known to audiences throughout the country as a leader of both period and modern ensembles. He has appeared as soloist, concertmaster, and conductor of numerous orchestras throughout the country, including the Northwest Sinfonietta, String Orchestra of the Rockies, Astoria Festival Orchestra, Pacific MusicWorks, Portland Baroque Orchestra, Bach Collegium San Diego, Ars Lyrica, and the Amadeus Chamber Orchestra.
Adam was nominated for a 2012 Grammy Award, as part of the El Mundo baroque ensemble, and is now Program Director for the Berwick Academy, which guides young professionals in the art of period instrument playing. As Artistic Director of the Montana Baroque Festival, he brings world-class period instrument performances to the rural Montana community. In 2018, Adam founded the Amadeus Chamber Orchestra in Portland.
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Amadeus Chamber Orchestra
Chamber Orchestra
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The Amadeus Chamber Orchestra was founded in 2018 by violinist Adam LaMotte. It presents intimate yet powerful performances, creating programs that span five centuries of incredible classical music. With each concert performance, the ACO keeps with its mission of giving young musicians the invaluable opportunity of playing alongside seasoned professionals, with no conductor to rely on. As of 2022, over 20 teenaged musicians have performed with the ACO, further inspiring many to go onto careers in classical music.
As a conductorless chamber orchestra, our strength lies in flexibility, and the reliance on the cumulative strength of all our musicians, not just a single one calling the shots. Call it chamber music on steroids.