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Jörg Widmann Conducts the US Premiere of his Violin Concerto No. 2 at Juilliard

Sep. 22, 2023

On September 26, Jörg Widmann will conduct the Juilliard Orchestra in the US premiere of his Violin Concerto No. 2, featuring Stella Chen as soloist. The program also includes Widmann's Con brio and works by Mozart and Mendelssohn.

Violin Concerto No. 2 was premiered in August 2018 by the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra, led by the composer and featuring  his sister Carolin Widmann as soloist. The composer notes:

The violin concerto is a “sacred” genre. It is also a genre to which one entrusts the most personal things. This is especially true since this violin concerto is dedicated to my sister. The violin, as a voice-like instrument, is a carrier of a wide variety of human emotions.

The first movement "Una ricerca" is the violin's search for itself, for its own voice. A search for sounds, gestures, shapes, connections. The orchestra only responds sporadically, but with the sounds and figures that follow, the phrases will then be decisive. This first movement is about 5 minutes long, similar in lengtht to the final movement, “Mobile” where patterns from the previous movements are catapulted into a constant high-speed and taken to the extreme. However, the gesture remains light almost throughout.

I titled the central and by far most extensive movement, “Romance”. In this movement, a widely ramified spiritual cosmos is spanned; it is a journey into the interior. A wide variety of emotional zones are traversed, and song-like, tender things stand next to noisy and brutal outbursts. But the violin always remains the narrator.

Compositionally, there is a constant playful variation across all three movements of what is essentially a strictly limited tonal material and gesture vocabulary, despite the variety of sounds and colors. The invention itself, the timbres, the harmony: this has always been important to me since I could think musically. But the focus on reduction and form is new. Without my second exposure to the violin concerto genre, it would probably not have been created in this way."


Violin Concerto No. 2/Jörg Widmann/hr-Sinfonieorchester/Carolin Widmann, violin/Andrés Orozco-Estrada, conductor

To learn more about Jörg Widmann, please visit schott-music.com.

Jörg Widmann
Violinkonzert Nr. 2 (2018)
for violin and orchestra
2 (2.pic).2(2.eh).2(2.bcl).2(2.cbn)-4.0.0.0-timp-2perc-hp-cel-str(14.12.10.8.6) 
35'

Con brio (2008)
2(2.pic.)2.2-.2.2.0.0-p-str.(14.12.10.8.6)
12’

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