Elena Urioste delivered a remarkable performance of Bruch’s Concerto No. 1 in G minor, Op. 26, as part of the student recital at The Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia last night. Elena, a 20 year-old Mexican-Basque violininst, began her violin studies in Philadelphia and made her debut as soloist with the Philadelphia Orchestra at age thirteen as winner of the Albert M. Greenfield Competition. Since then, she has appeared as soloist with major orchestras throughout the United States. Urioste made her Carnegie Hall debut as a featured soloist in the December 2004 Sphinx Gala Concert, and has returned as a soloist in the 2006 and 2007 Galas. She has performed in recital at Carnegie’s Weill Recital Hall as the youngest musician ever selected for the Young Performers Career Advancement Showcase.
Urioste has collaborated with David Kim, Philadelphia Orchestra concertmaster; pianist Christopher O’Riley; and conductors Keith Lockhart and Shlomo Mintz, among others. She has been a featured artist in the International Young Artists Music Festival, the Kingston Chamber Music Festival, the Sarasota and Aspen Music Festivals, as well as the Festival International de Musique in Sion, Switzerland. In 2007 she was first prize winner of the Sion International Violin Competition. Also this year she won both the senior (2007) and junior (2003) divisions of the national Sphinx Competition, as well as the Kennett Symphony Concerto Competition. Urioste has appeared on NPR radio programs From the Top and Performance Today, and the Spanish language television network, Telemundo. Miss Urioste is a student at The Curtis Institute of Music where she has studied for the past four years with Joseph Silverstein and Ida Kavafian. On 25-SEP-2007 she performed at Carnegie Hall.
Bruch’s idiomatic German romanticism resembles that of Brahms rather than Liszt. The strength of this single work, Bruch’s Violin Concerto in G minor, is, perhaps more than any other part of his oeuvre, the thing that insures Bruch’s continuing relevance today. This Concerto is scored for solo violin and a standard classical orchestra consisting of two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings. The performance at The Curtis Institute was one with piano transcription/reduction of orchestral parts performed by pianist Hugh Sung. Hugh performed with a device that resembles a MuseBook® digital sheetmusic device. Hugh created his digital score-rendering set-up using his own custom page-advancing pedal and off-the-shelf products, including Grahl’s PDF Annotator® software and a Fujitsu Stylistic® Tablet PC. The incisiveness and grace of Hugh’s accompaniment were admirable. My impression is that the use of the digital display with pianist-controlled advancing of pages reduces the burden of rehearsing and performing such complex works somewhat. More information about this is made available by Hugh on his website. In 1993, Sung joined the faculty of The Curtis Institute of Music, where he currently serves as Director of Instrumental Accompaniment and its world-renown Student Recitals Series.
The Concerto’s structure is unusual for a Romantic piece. The first movement (Allegro moderato) is a Prelude, and is improvisatory rather than introductory. The slow second movement—admired for its melody—is lyrical and impassioned: Elena’s technical ability and interpretive insights are well-illustrated here. The Adagio builds upon and develops the theme, and the finale (Allegro energico) opens with a restatement of the theme—in double stops—followed by the second subject, lyrical and immanent and full of conviction. This Concerto is the epitome of German Romanticism.
More than this, the entire piece is ‘essayistic’ in its intent and form, and this aspect provides a wonderful vehicle for the sensibilities that are part of Elena’s Basque heritage. The Concerto is narrative: non-fictional but subjective. It has reportorial qualities, but the first-person story does not merely narrate: it implores us to follow and empathize.
Bruch is a predominantly personal essayist, and this Concerto is surely a fragment of reflective autobiography—Bruch, 30 years old at the time he composed this piece, looking at the world through the prism of music. In this highly personal idiom, Elena is in her ‘element’. Such an essay doen’t allow its scope to be limited or prescribed. It claims for itself a right—a latitude, a freedom. It takes an idea and runs with it. It is oblivious to what others have said and done. It catches fire. It starts more fires in combustible material along its way. Elena’s playing in this recital was positively incendiary.
Her account of the Bruch Concerto did not begin with a reasoned argument or didactic exposition. She began with what she wished to assert, said what’s on her mind, and stopped where it felt complete—which is not necessarily where there’s nothing left to say. In fact, Elena Urioste’s performance of Bruch’s Concerto No. 1 Op. 26 leaves us knowing that there is much more that could be said.
Elena's assertions are not deductive logic nor do they converge on a reductionist conclusion. In her hands, the essay has an emphaticness that is convincing, but it is a persuasion that engages us—that enlists us in continued vigilance and action.
Musical understanding then amounts to more than merely unwrapping what Bruch meant to say. It amounts to taking up the cause that this Concerto propounds, as Urioste recounts its tenets to us.
Elena enables us to grasp what Bruch thought and felt, yes. But, more than this, she persuades us to care about it. Her performance is in fact an essay about the necessity of essays, an essay against the commodification of culture, against objectification and disenfranchisement, against disparities. It is not a dissertation ‘about’ people and their plight. It is instead a forceful, lyrical polemic that asserts what it means to be fully human.
Bravo!
L uck and play are essential to the essay.”
— Theodor Adorno.
- Elena Urioste page at Sciolino Artist Management
- Sphinx competition
- Hugh Sung website
- Fifield C. Max Bruch: His Life and Works. Braziller, 1988.
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- Adorno T. Essays on Music. Univ California, 2002.
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- Hamilton C. Women and ETA: The Gender Politics of Radical Basque Nationalism. Manchester Univ, 2007.
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- O'Connor B, ed. The Adorno Reader. Blackwell, 2000. ('The essay as form', pp.91-111.)
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- MuseBook Score electronic score device
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