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Music

Bow show

Virtuosos virtually blanket the bay area this weekend, both in recitals and in concert with the Florida Orchestra.

By JOHN FLEMING
Published January 18, 2007

Joshua Bell, 39, considered a classical music star, has recorded bestselling albums and made People magazine's list of 50 most beautiful people.
	[Special to the Times: Chris Lee]

ADVERTISEMENT [Special to the Times: Grant Leighton] Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, 46, has numerous recordings, and her TV appearances range from The Tonight Show to Sesame Street.

it's a violin weekend in the Tampa Bay area, and lovers of the instrument can take their pick from among a pair of recital programs and one of the most popular concertos. Or splurge and take them all in.

Joshua Bell plays recitals at Ruth Eckerd Hall in Clearwater and Van Wezel Hall in Sarasota. Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg is the soloist for three performances with the Florida Orchestra in the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto. And Jeffrey Multer, concertmaster of the orchestra, has a recital at Palma Ceia Presbyterian Church in Tampa.

Bell is playing Schumann and Beethoven sonatas as well as a new work by Edgar Meyer, an American composer and bass player whose music ranges from bluegrass to classical.

"Meyer's music is so original. There's nothing like it anywhere," Bell says. "My bluegrass friends when they hear it think it sounds like a classical piece, and my classical friends think it sounds like a bluegrass piece."

Salerno-Sonnenberg says that Tchaikovsky's evergreen concerto has been in her concert repertoire for more than 25 years. "It's been a very good piece for me. I play the piece differently every time I play it."

Multer, 41, in his first full season as concertmaster, joins up with pianist Christina Dahl to play sonatas of Mozart and Brahms and a Chopin prelude.

Bell has a new CD out, Voice of the Violin, his collection of arrangements with help from composer J.A.C. Redford of arias and art songs for violin and orchestra. With lush, unspeakably beautiful performances of popular tunes such as Rachmaninoff's Vocalise and Schubert's Ave Maria, it's the sequel to his classical chart-topping Romance of the Violin.

Occasionally the violinist is asked whether he feels limited by such unadventurous fare as the transcriptions and encore pieces on these albums. The question doesn't faze him.

"It's not like they're all I do," he says. "Ninety percent of what I play are the classical warhorses. Besides, Voice of the Violin has its own challenges. Playing those pieces is not so simple. Playing something simply and beautifully is probably the hardest thing you can do in music."

Bell, 39, is one of the more tech-savvy classical musicians around. This month, he jumped at the offer by his record label, Sony Classical, to fly out on a day between concerts with the Boston Symphony Orchestra (he was soloist in the Bruch Violin Concerto) to play a little recital at the company's booth at the mammoth Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

"I love electronics and gadgets," says Bell, a devoted video game player, who adds, only half-jokingly, "I've probably played more hours of video games in my life than violin. I have kind of an addictive personality, so I could go 10 hours straight if I'm trying to perfect a new video game."

His latest faves are computer games he plays with friends. "I love to play games online. One is called Quake, another one is called Unreal. They're shoot-'em-up 3D games that are pretty immersive and probably a little bit violent. It's a nice way to get your mind off of everything and act out some of your aggressions."

As for his answer to the inevitable question nowadays - "What's on your iPod?" - he mainly downloads chamber music and jazz. "There's not a lot of violin music on my iPod," Bell says. "Not a lot of pop or hip-hop. I get enough of that when I go out to bars and clubs with my friends."

Salerno-Sonnenberg, 46, recently released her performance of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto - "the Tchaik," as she calls it - on her own NSS Music label, pairing it with a new concerto by Claire Assad. The recording was made in a concert with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra under Marin Alsop.

Tchaikovsky wrote his concerto in 1878 for Leopold Auer, concertmaster of the Imperial Orchestra of St. Petersburg, Russia. But Auer rejected it, calling it unplayable, and early critics panned the work.

Of course Tchaikovsky was ultimately vindicated when the concerto went on to become a staple for the violin and a big audience favorite. Still, Auer's reservations were understandable, according to Salerno-Sonnenberg.

"It has an outrageous number of notes," she says. "Basically, it's not violinistic. A lot of it is simply written poorly for the instrument. It's a rough, violent kind of approach to the violin. In order to really capture the quality of this concerto, the greatness, the grandeur and the excitement, you've got to go for it."

- Violinist Joshua Bell and pianist Jeremy Denk play a recital at 8 p.m. Saturday at Ruth Eckerd Hall, Clearwater. 35-$70. (727) 791-7400; www.rutheckerdhall.com. Bell and Denk also play at 8 p.m. Sunday at Van Wezel Hall, Sarasota. $45, $55. (941) 953-3368 or toll-free 1-800-826-9303; www.vanwezel.org.

- Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg is the soloist in Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto with the Florida Orchestra at 8 p.m. Friday at Morsani Hall of the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, Tampa; 8 p.m. Saturday at Mahaffey Theater, St. Petersburg; and 7:30 p.m. Sunday at Ruth Eckerd Hall, Clearwater. $17-$52. (813) 286-2403 or toll-free 1-800-662-7286; www.florida orchestra.org.

- Jeffrey Multer, concertmaster of the Florida Orchestra, and pianist Christina Dahl give a recital at 3 p.m. Sunday at Palma Ceia Presbyterian Church, Tampa. Free. (813) 253-6047; www.palmaceiapres.org.

Critic's calls

In Sunday's Latitudes section, Times performing arts critic John Fleming gave Joshua Bell's new Voice of the Violin CD a B grade, praising the sumptuous sound Bell summons from his 1713 Stradivarius, but called it "basically background music, an easy-listening footnote to the violinist's main work of performing concertos with orchestras and recital programs."

He gave Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg's Tchaikovsky & Assad: Concertos in D major an A, commending her choice to pair "the Tchaikovsky warhorse with a new concerto by Claire Assad, a young Brazilian composer with roots in the jazz world."

For the full reviews, go to links.tampabay.com.

[Last modified January 17, 2007, 06:56:45]