The Prokofiev Concerto is an audience favorite, and one of the most recorded concertos from the 20th century; its virtuosic demands on the soloist make it a favorite of performers, too.  The melodic lines of the Franck Symphony are a lovely auditory complement to both the violin concerto and the light and delightful Mozart overture also on the program.

Tickets are $18 and available online at www.midcoastsymphony.org. Tickets can also be purchased at Gulf of Maine Books in Brunswick; Now You’re Cooking in Bath; or at the concert hall prior to the performance.  For additional information or to purchase tickets by phone, call 207-846-5378.  Ages 18 and younger admitted free.

More about the soloist

Eva Gruesser, Concertmaster of American Composers’s Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, has performed as soloist, chamber musician and concertmaster throughout North America, Europe and Australia. Recent concert appearances have included a performance as soloist in Evan Chamber’s Concerto for Violin and Irish Fiddle with the American Composers Orchestra at Zankel Hall and a benefit performance at Carnegie Hall of Mahler’s 3rd Symphony with members of leading American orchestras, Mahler for Children with AIDS. In the 2006 – 2007 concert season she performed with Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra in collaboration with American Composers Orchestra. In 2012 she performed at Bowdoin College in concert with pianist George Lopez. She performed as soloist in the Barber Violin Concerto with the New Hampshire Symphony Orchestra.

Ms. Gruesser has performed as guest concertmaster with many orchestras including the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Australian Opera and Ballet Orchestra, Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra, Stamford Symphony Orchestra and Long Island Philharmonic. Ms. Gruesser was concertmaster of the New Hampshire Symphony Orchestra from 2002 – 2007.

As first violinist of the Lark Quartet from 1988 to 1996, Eva Gruesser won the Naumburg Chamber Music Award in 1991 and the Gold Medal at the 1991 Shostakovich International String Quartet Competition in St. Petersburg. She performed with the Lark Quartet on many occasions at Lincoln Center and Weil Hall in New York and the Kennedy Center and Corcoran Gallery in Washington DC. Following the Shostakovich Competition, Ms. Gruesser was invited with the quartet to play at the Lockenhaus Festival in Austria. With the Lark Quartet she also performed at the Sviatoslav Richter Festival at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, Schleswig-Holstein Festival and San Miguel de Allende Festival in Mexico. Eva Gruesser has collaborated on commissions with composers Aaron Jay Kernis, Libby Larsen, Penka Kouneva, and Jon Deak. Ms. Gruesser was a member of the Da Capo Chamber Players from 1997 until 2001 and served in 2007 on the panel of judges at the Fischoff Chamber Music Competition in South Bend, Indiana. She performed with the late Lukas Foss in his Three American pieces for violin and piano at Weil Hall, has recorded works by Martin Bresnick and participated in a Kennedy Center tribute to composer Joan Tower. This concert will be her second appearance with Midcoast Symphony Orchestra.

More about the music

Prokofiev, Violin Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Opus 63 Serge Prokofiev

(1891-1953)

This concerto, written in 1935 and premiered in Madrid at the end of Prokofiev’s self-imposed exile from Soviet Russia, is said to exemplify the “new simplicity” towards which he was striving at the time. This “simplicity” refers not to any lack of difficulty in the solo part, but rather to the tunefulness of the main themes, and the clarity of formal structures. Prokofiev was thinking seriously about returning to the Soviet Union at this time, and was experimenting with a proto-Socialist-Realist idiom less dissonant and thorny than was the fashion in much Western European modernism at the time. It may be politically ironic given the history of U.S.-Soviet relations in the 1940s through the 1990s, but the requirement that Socialist Realist music have popular appeal and be rooted in its own national tradition was shared—also during the 1930s and 1940s—by the group of mid-twentieth-century composers that included Aaron Copland. These composers, like Prokofiev, also worked in more European-Modernist idioms, but the works for which they are best-known are their less abstract and acerbic ones.

This concerto begins with a theme in the solo violin calculated to remind us of a Russian folksong. This theme provides the basic material for almost the whole movement, either in whole or in bits, in its original form, upside down, or even just in its rhythm. The violin is often decorating that theme by playing faster figurations over some version of it in the orchestra. The second movement begins sweetly, but turns into an unabashedly Romantic cantilena. The last movement is a sort of grotesque waltz, whose main tune is often played in chords by the violin, and is often accompanied by castanets, perhaps as a nod to Madrid, the city of the work’s premiere. Both movements deploy all the capacities of the violin and then some.

Symphony in D minor César Franck

(1822-1890)

César Franck is better known for his organ than for his orchestral music. This late Symphony in D minor, written the year before his death, is Franck’s last work for orchestra, and, apart from a youthful effort, his only symphony “proper.” His other orchestral works are symphonic poems—works that explicitly tell a story or paint a picture. This symphony is, as Franck himself noted, a “classical” work. It has no explicit story, and uses compositional strategies found in Brahms and Beethoven, despite a harmonic language that seems more like Wagner than like his symphonic forefathers.

There are three things especially worth listening for in this grand work. The first is the rich use of orchestral resources. Franck uses a large complement of wind and brass, including four horns and a bass clarinet. The second thing to listen for is the ever-changing harmony that is audible as a perpetually restless quality. The final thing to listen for is the way Franck holds this large work together by repeating both short ideas and longer tunes.

Overture to Cosí fan tutte, K. 588 Wolfgang Amadeu Mozart

(1756-1791)

Cosí fan tutte is the last of the three great comic operas that Mozart wrote with the librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte (who later emigrated to the United States and became the first professor of Italian language and literature at Columbia University). The story is superficially implausible: two sisters swear fidelity to their lovers; an old philosopher tricks said lovers into pretending to go to war; they return home dressed as Albanians, each to seduce the “wrong” girl. The deceit is discovered, the “right” lovers reunite, and the philosopher intones that “women all do that” (cosí fan tutte).

In the course of the opera, however, both Mozart and Da Ponte raise questions of true love and betrayal, the nature of beauty, and the relation of modern art to the classical tradition. The overture perfectly reflects this mix of seriousness and buffoonery. It opens ceremonially and with a brief imitation of learned counterpoint. This segues into the much longer, fast section, which directly anticipates no music in the opera, but perfectly captures the mixture of scurrying and pomposity that characterizes the work as a whole. The “cosí fan tutte” motif recurs towards the end of the whole overture, as if to remind us of the maxim’s constant presence in the work.

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