Blue Candlelight Music Series 5/21/2022
—Gregory Sullivan Isaacs
The Blue Candlelight concert series is a visit to the past when solo performances took place in private homes. This allowed for a more personable encounter with the artists. Many presenters still offer an occasional “house concert.” All well and good, but Blue Candlelight’s regular venue is in a beautiful home with a great room specifically designed for chamber-sized concerts.
On Saturday evening, they presented two exceptional artists who are part of the management team for the series. The program focused on classical music that has been used in Hollywood-style films. This concept surprised some of the audience as they discovered how deeply “classical” music has permeated into popular world culture. All the selections were technically difficult, and tossed off by the artists with aplomb and exceptional sensitivity.
The violinist was Gary Levinson, senior principal associate concertmaster of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and artistic director of the Chamber Music Society of Fort Worth. The pianist was the universally renowned Baya Kakouberi. The extraordinary collaboration they achieve is not only due to their exceptional abilities, but they also are married in “real life.” The pair frequently concertize together around the world, and have created a series of highly praised recordings.
The program opened with Fritz Kreisler’s familiar Preludium and Allegro, as used in the 1991 film The Prince of Tides. This is a piece of exceptional beauty that can be played by violinists of almost any level of ability, but hearing it in the hands of an artist such as Levinson reveals its inner nobility. The last selection on the program was a work by John Williams. We heard his aptly named Devil’s Dance, from the 1987 film The Witches of Eastwick. By the way, unlike other composers on the program, Williams is equally at home with film or on the concert stage. With him, the usual process is often reversed: music from his film scores became classical concert selections—instead of the other way around.
In between these bookends, we heard works as diverse as Song without Words by Felix Mendelssohn immediately followed by Claude Debussy’s eternal Clair de Lune. On the fireworks side of the programming, we heard Pablo de Sarasate’s virtuosic extravaganza Zigeunerweisen (gypsy airs) and Giuseppe Tartini’s Devil’s Trill. (Appropriately, both were written by great violin virtuosi for their own appearances at “house concerts.”)
From the more standard repertoire, Beethoven’s “Kreutzer” sonata made an appearance, as did Jules Massenet’s stunningly beautiful Meditation from his opera Thais. Among the movies that “hosted” these classical works were Titanic, Schindler’s List, and Ocean’s 11.
All performances were exceptional in their diverse display of musicianship, technical prowess, and empathy between the artists. Add to that the gourmet dinner buffet offered before the concert and you could almost imagine yourself in 1832, seated in a perfumed Parisian salon, eagerly waiting to swoon over that charming Pole, Frédéric Chopin, as he plays some of his newest Nocturnes.
WEB: For more information, go to: bluecandlelight.org
