Violinist Daniel Hope Returns to Savannah Music Festival for 12th Season as Associate Artistic Director (March 19-April 4), Tours U.S. with David Finckel and Wu Han (Feb 28-April 15)
“This violinist, now among the best in the world as well as the most
thoughtful, is as brilliant at Bach as Birtwistle.” — The Observer
This spring, violinist Daniel Hope returns to Georgia for his 12th season as Associate Artistic Director of the Savannah Music Festival (March 19–April 4), which commissions and stages original, one-time only productions, collaborations and premieres over a three-week period each year. Under Hope’s co-direction, it has been credited by the Chicago Tribune with “breaking the sound barriers” and is considered “one of the top music festivals in the world” (USA Today). The British violinist has curated a 10-concert chamber series for SMF 2015 that brings friends and colleagues from across North America and Europe to Savannah. As part of the popular “Daniel Hope & Friends” series, his collaborators will include the Emerson String Quartet, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and the Savannah Philharmonic, which the violinist will join for the Mendelssohn concerto (March 21).
A dedicated chamber musician, Hope will also tour across North America with the CMS; from February 28 to April 15, he will be teaming with cellist David Finckel, pianist Wu Han and violist Paul Neubauer to play piano quartets by Schumann, Brahms and Mahler, which the group will also record for Deutsche Grammophon. In another spring highlight, Hope will showcase the central work from Escape to Paradise: The Hollywood Album, his latest hit Deutsche Grammophon release, when he performs Korngold’s Violin Concerto in Wisconsin with the Madison Symphony Orchestra, March 6-8. In an article that Hope wrote in today’s Wall Street Journal, he explores Korngold and the legacy of other composers of the era, who fled from European fascism in the 1930s and ended up in Los Angeles, where they helped define the “Hollywood Sound” (http://on.wsj.com/1BqB5KT). Hope also hosts and presents a new television program on the European network ArteTV starting this month. His activities in the first half of 2015 underscore why the New York Times has said that his “thriving career … has been built on inventive programming and a probing interpretive style.”
Savannah Music Festival, March 19-April 4
Hope recently extended his contract as Associate Artistic Director of the Savannah Music Festival through the 2018 season, having served in the post since 2004. Thanks in no small part to the creative vision he brings to its classical programming, “the festival seems to broaden its musical reach every year,” according to National Public Radio. Hope kicks off his popular “Daniel Hope & Friends” series in this year’s festival with Schubert and Beethoven chamber works on March 19.
There is a string of especially high-profile “Daniel Hope & Friends” events this year. After the opening concert the violinist features as soloist in the Mendelssohn concerto with the Savannah Philharmonic on March 21. He will also team with the Grammy Award-winning Emerson String Quartet on March 30, and his North American tour of Schumann, Brahms and Mahler with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center will include a stop at the festival on April 4. Other concerts with Hope include chamber programs of Dvorák, Webern and Brahms (March 23); Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn and Borodin (March 26); and Ravel, Saint-Saëns, Milhaud and Chausson (March 30).
SMF 2015 runs from March 19 through April 4, with more than 100 performances in intimate venues throughout Savannah’s historic district. For more information, visit www.savannahmusicfestival.org.
CMS of Lincoln Center tour, Feb 28-April 15
For years, Hope has closely collaborated with his friends in the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, performing with the group in its home at Alice Tully Hall in New York City as well as on tour. He joins in an all-star piano quartet from CMS – also including pianist Wu Han and cellist David Finckel (directors of the CMS), as well as violist Paul Neubauer – to tour North America from February 28 to April 15. They will play 13 dates in a dozen cities from Richmond, VA (Feb 28) and New York (March 1, 3) to Vancouver, BC (April 14) and Costa Mesa, CA (April 15), with concerts in between in Chicago; Savannah, GA; Santa Fe, NM; Urbana, IL; Toronto; Washington, DC; Detroit; and Princeton, NJ. The tour program features two 19th-century classics – Schumann’s Piano Quartet and Brahms’s Piano Quartet No. 1 – alongside Mahler’s early Piano Quartet in A minor, a deeply moving if rarely heard slice of late-Romanticism.
Korngold’s Violin Concerto and Escape to Paradise
An exclusive Deutsche Grammophon artist, Hope released his latest DG album – Escape To Paradise: The Hollywood Album – last fall. The Financial Times review sums it up: “Violinist Daniel Hope shows what happened to the mostly Jewish composers exiled from Nazi Germany when they turned up in the ‘paradise’ of Hollywood. The result is not an academic exercise – many of the pieces here are played in new arrangements – but an invitation to soak in the luxuriantly romantic world of Korngold, Rósza and their contemporaries. Sting makes a guest appearance in a song by Eisler, Max Raabe in one by Weill. But mostly this is a showcase for Hope’s violin, basking in the saturated emotion of Korngold’s Violin Concerto.”
Praise for Hope’s rendering of the sumptuous, cinematic Korngold concerto has come from far and wide, with the UK’s Guardian declaring Hope’s playing “as virtuosic as that of Jascha Heifetz, who premiered the work,” while “the depth [Hope] invested in the music … puts him in a league of his own.” You can hear a sample of Hope’s Korngold in a trailer for Escape to Paradise here. Among his performances this season, the violinist joins Wisconsin’s Madison Symphony Orchestra under John DeMain to play the Korngold alongside works by Franz Waxman and Miklós Rósza – other examples of “the Hollywood Sound” on the DG album – in three concerts, March 6-8.
Hope Hosts New ArteTV Program
Starting this month, Hope hosts “Arte Lounge,” a new program on the European network ArteTV. The violinist interacts with artists across the musical spectrum, including such peers as pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet. Other guests of the program include mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter, baritone Thomas Hampson, pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, cellist Jans Vogler and mandolinist Avi Avital. As an extra feature of “Arte Lounge,” Hope has initiated a series of short documentary webcasts that deal with various socio-political aspects of music in society today, including an interview with Markus Beeko from Amnesty International and Ole Reitov from Freemuse.org, an organization that defends freedom of expression for musicians worldwide. You can see initial videos and a trailer for “Arte Lounge” here.
Daniel Hope: 2014-15 engagements
Feb 24
Zurich, Switzerland
Zurich Chamber Orchestra
Bach: Concerto in D minor, BWV 1043 for two Violins, Strings, and Continuo
Vivaldi: Concerto in A minor, Op. 3 No. 8 for two Violins, Strings, and Continuo
Vivaldi: The Four Seasons, Op. 8
with Willi Zimmermann, violin
Feb 25
Chur, Switzerland
Zurich Chamber Orchestra
Bach: Concerto in D minor, BWV 1043 for two Violins, Strings, and Continuo
Vivaldi: The Four Seasons, Op. 8
With Willi Zimmermann, violin
Feb 28–April 15
U.S. tour with Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center
Mahler: Piano Quartet in A minor
Schumann: Piano Quartet in E-flat major, Op. 47
Brahms: Piano Quartet No. 1 in G minor, Op. 25
With Paul Neubauer, viola; David Finckel, cello; Wu Han, piano
Feb 28: Richmond, VA
March 1: New York, NY (Alice Tully Hall)
March 2: Chicago, IL
March 3: New York, NY (Alice Tully Hall)
April 4: Savannah, GA
April 6: Santa Fe, NM
April 7: Urbana, IL
April 8: Toronto, ON
April 10: Washington, DC
April 11: Detroit, MI
April 13: Princeton, NJ
April 14: Vancouver, BC
April 15: Costa Mesa, CA
March 6, 7, 8
Madison, WI
Madison Symphony Orchestra / John DeMain
Korngold: Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 35
March 19–April 4
Savannah, GA
Savannah Music Festival
With Lorenza Borrani, violin; Eugene Drucker, violin; Benny Kim, violin; Philip Setzer, violin; Lawrence Dutton, viola; Carla Maria Rodrigues, viola; Philip Dukes, viola; Eric Kim, cello; Keith Robinson, cello; Paul Watkins, cello; Joseph Conyers, double-bass; Simon Crawford-Phillips, piano; Sebastian Knauer, piano; and the Savannah Philharmonic
March 19: “Around Beethoven”
March 21: “Orchestral Masterworks by Mozart & Mendelssohn”
March 23: “Brahms & His Influences”
March 26: “Early Masters”
March 30: “Emerson String Quartet with Daniel Hope & Friends”
March 31: “Vive la France”
April 4: “Passionate Piano Quartets”
May 8-10
Tour with Netherlands Chamber Orchestra
Max Richter: Vivaldi Recomposed
May 8: Amsterdam, Netherlands
May 9: Alkmaar, Netherlands
May 10: Haarlem, Netherlands
May 21
Berlin, Germany
Berlin Philharmonie
Deutsches Kammerorchester Berlin / Gabriel Adorján
Weinberg: Concertino for violin and string orchestra
Klein: Partita for string orchestra
Korngold: Symphonic Serenade for string orchestra in B flat major
Eisler: “An den kleinen Radioapparat” from The Hollywood Songbook
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