Ravinia 2022, Issue 5

SANGWOOK LEE (JACKIW); BENJAMIN EALOVEGA (VENTRIS); DARIO ACOSTA (PETERSEN) friends, but they also belonged to the same Masonic lodge. All of Mozart’s late clarinet and basset-clarinet parts—including for con- certos, trios, quintets and solo arias with clar- inet obbligato—were tailor-made for Stadler. The Quintet in A Major, K. 581, scored for clarinet and string quartet, received its pre- miere on a Christmas concert given by the Tonkünstler Society on December 22, 1789, between halves of Vincenzo Righini’s cantata Il natale d’Apollo . Mozart most likely com- posed for Stadler’s basset clarinet, although a definitive answer to this quandary disap- peared long ago with the autograph manu- script. Despite Mozart’s constant financial hardships—compounded by a downslide in the national economy resulting from Austria’s war with the Turks—the quintet conveys a cheerful outlook. “The music smiles through the tears,” as H.C. Robbins Landon put it. The strings assume responsibility for intro- ducing the thematic material in the Allegro . The clarinet more completely blends into the ensemble as the movement progresses. The Larghetto further emancipates the woodwind part, allowing a near-operatic lyrical revelry. The third movement adopts the form of a minuet plus two trios. Melodic phrases ca- sually pass between the clarinet and strings; the omission of the clarinet from the first trio provides some contrast in tone color. In the finale Mozart composed a set of five varia- tions on an original theme, displaying both the clarinet’s agility and his keen sense of string writing. –Program notes © 2022 Todd E. Sullivan Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart by Dora Stock (1789) NEXUS CHAMBER MUSIC NEXUS Chamber Music is a collective of international artists committed to stimulating interest in chamber music through both its annual two-week summer music festival in Chicago and touring programs across the US and abroad. NEXUS was co-founded in 2018 by Alexander Hersh and Brian Hong, longtime friends and musicians who yearned for ways to meet the technological and social demands of the 21st-century listener and foster a new generation of chamber music supporters and advocates by presenting first-rate concerts and utilizing social media to deliver high-produc- tion-value content. The ensemble-in-residence at Guarneri Hall, NEXUS presents concerts at the brand-new acoustically engineered concert hall as well as at unconventional venues, such as the Whiner Beer Taproom and Buzz Coffee Roaster and Baker. A winner of the 2016 Concert Artists Guild Competition—the first clarinetist in nearly 30 years—Korean-Cana- dian Yoonah Kim also became the first wom- an to win first prize in the Vandoren Emerg- ing Artist Competition and George Gershwin Competition that same year, and she is a gold medalist of the 2020 Vienna International Competition. Currently the C.V. Starr Doc- toral Fellow at The Juilliard School, Kim has recently performed Mozart’s Clarinet Con- certo with the Maui Chamber Orchestra, Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue arranged for solo clarinet and string orchestra by Texu Kim, and the world premiere of a double con- certo for violin and clarinet by Eric Nathan, playing alongside Stefan Jackiw with the New York Classical Players. She has also been fea- tured at many acclaimed festivals, including Marlboro, Mainly Mozart, California’s Festi- val Napa Valley, Maine’s Bay Chamber Music Festival, Bravo! Vail, Sarasota, The Banff Cen- tre, and Greece’s Thessaloniki Festival. Korean-American vi- olinist Brian Hong has recently been an Ensemble Connect fellow at Carnegie Hall following his studies at the New England Conservatory (bachelor’s degree) and The Juilliard School (master’s degree), where he held a Kovner Fellowship, as well as top prizes from several competitions in the US. As a soloist, he has performed with such ensembles as the Fairfax Symphony Orchestra, Chesapeake Orchestra, US Army Orchestra, and National Philharmonic, with recent highlights including performances of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto with Kyle Wiley Pickett and the Springfield Symphony Orchestra and Schoenberg’s Violin Concerto with Edward Gardner and the Juilliard Or- chestra. Hong also has extensive experience as a chamber musician, having performed at such festivals as the Bowdoin International Music Festival, Music Academy of the West, Taos School of Music, Perlman Music Pro- gram, Kneisel Hall, and Yellow Barn. Avery Fisher Career Grant recipient Stefan Jackiw is the violinist of the Junction Trio, with pianist Conrad Tao and cellist Jay Campbell. His discog- raphy includes the complete Brahms violin sonatas on Sony and a forthcoming record- ing of the complete Ives sonatas on Nonesuch with frequent collaborator pianist Jeremy Denk. The 2002 Ravinia Steans Music Insti- tute alum also recently recorded Beethoven’s triple concerto with cellist Alisa Weilerstein, pianist Inon Barnatan, and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields. In concert, Jackiw has appeared as soloist with the orchestras of Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Minnesota, New York, Philadelphia, and San Francisco, among others, and internationally with the Philhar- monia Orchestra and London, Seoul, and Tokyo Philharmonics. He has also been fea- tured at such festivals and venues as Aspen, Caramoor, Mostly Mozart, Schleswig-Hol- stein, Tanglewood, the Celebrity Series of Boston, Washington Performing Arts Soci- ety, Paris’s Philharmonie, and Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw. Artistic Director of the Cowbridge Festival in Wales, violist Rosa- lind Ventris regularly works with the Ka- leidoscope Chamber Collective, with whom she performed at Wigmore Hall’s 120th anni- versary celebrations and released a BBC Mu- sic Magazine Chamber Award–nominated album in 2021. Since launching her career at age 17 as a prizewinner of the Tertis Compe- tition, Ventris has also appeared at the Bozar, Royal Festival Hall, and the Concertgebouw as a soloist, as with the Slovak Philharmon- ic, Belgian National Orchestra, and Wallonia Royal Chamber Orchestra. As a chamber musician, she has collaborated with Mitsuko Uchida at the Marlboro Festival, the Arcan- to Quartett at the Beethovenhaus in Bonn, and Gerhard Schultz at the Salzburg Festi- val, among others. Previously a professor at the Royal Irish Academy of Music, she was recently appointed Director of Musical Per- formance at Performance Studies at the Uni- versity of Oxford and to the Guildhall School of Music & Drama faculty. Cellist Alexander Hersh is a winner of the 2020 Salon de Virtuosi Career Grant and 2019 Astral Artists National Auditions as well as several compe- titions, including the New York International Artists Association Competition (2017) and Schadt String Competition (2016). He also received critical acclaim at the inaugural Queen Elisabeth Cello Competition in 2017. A passionate chamber musician, Hersh has performed the complete string quartets of Béla Bartok and Alban Berg among many more masterworks of the canon at such fes- tivals as Marlboro, Caramoor, Music@Menlo, Amsterdam Cello Biennial, and the Ravinia Steans Music Institute, where he was a fellow in 2015 and 2016. A fourth-generation string player, he began playing the cello at age 5 and attended the Academy at the Music Institute of Chicago. After completing bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the New England Conser- vatory, he continued studies in Berlin with Nicolas Altstaedt at the Hanns Eisler Univer- sity of Music. Recently a guest so- loist with orchestras in Buffalo, Cincinna- ti, Columbus, Dela- ware, Indianapolis, and Santa Fe, pianist Drew Petersen has also appeared in recital at the Kennedy Cen- ter, Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco, the Gilmore Keyboard Festival, Dame Myra Hess Concerts in Chicago, the Mostly Mozart Festival, Brevard Music Center, and Ravinia, where he was a Steans Music Institute fellow in 2017. A 2018 Avery Fisher Career Grant and 2017 American Pianists Award winner, he released his debut album on the Steinway & Sons label in 2018 with works by Barber, Carter, and other American composers. A frequent radio contributor, Petersen has per- formed on the McGraw-Hill Young Artists Showcase, From the Top , and Performance To- day , and while a member of a Verbier Festival piano trio appeared on French radio’s France Musique. Among numerous profiles, he is featured in Kim A. Snyder’s documentary just normal and Andrew Solomon’s book Far From the Tree . RAVINIA MAGAZINE • AUGUST 15 – AUGUST 28, 2022 46 I ; I I ; I