A Concerto Comes Home

The Violin Concerto of composer John Adams—premiered in 1994 by the late Minnesota Orchestra concertmaster Jorja Fleezanis—is finally coming home to Orchestra Hall. Leila Josefowicz is the soloist in these upcoming performances on April 9-10, and she is the only violinist besides Fleezanis to perform the concerto with the ensemble.

During her lifetime, Fleezanis was a champion of new music and eagerly worked with composers in settings both grand and intimate. This also rings true for Leila Josefowicz, who, after training at the prestigious Curis Institute, has come to build a career based on collaborations with living artists. She has been a champion of John Adams’ music in particular for decades and recorded the concerto in 2018 with David Robertson and the St. Louis Symphony.

As her husband, the late musicologist Michael Steinberg related, Fleezanis was swept away by Adams’ music after listening to the San Francisco Symphony’s 1985 recording of his Harmonielehre, a sprawling orchestral work, on the radio for the first time. At the time, Fleezanis was Edo de Waart’s associate concertmaster in San Francisco, and as Steinberg recalls, she was “too busy counting to get a coherent impression of the work” as the orchestra performed and subsequently recorded it.

It took eight more years (January, 1993) before Adams would begin working on the concerto, once de Waart had become the Minnesota Orchestra's eighth music director and appointed Fleezanis as the Orchestra’s first female concertmaster. Adams approached the work with much reverence for the genre’s deep history. Originally planned as a small-scale work in line with Stravinsky’s violin concerto, the work’s scope encompasses a grander scale than Adams first anticipated: “I was trying to at first avoid a collision with destiny; nevertheless it came out big,” he says.

He and Fleezanis worked collaboratively throughout the compositional process over fax and phone: Adams would send along passages and Fleezanis would play suggestions back into his answering machine. The world premiere was given on January 19, 1994, by Fleezanis, de Waart and the Minnesota Orchestra at Orchestra Hall. Fleezanis reprised her solo role in November 2003 under the baton of then-Music Director Osmo Vänskä.

A Creative Awakening

For Leila Josefowicz, adding the concerto to her repertoire marked the beginning of a new creative chapter in her career, and allowed her to forge a close relationship with Adams that has lasted for decades. In an interview with Strings magazine, she recalls that “I learned his first violin concerto almost on a private whim—it was my first major new work written by a living composer. Before that, I had not been happy with my state of being—I was playing a lot of concerts and pretty standard rep, but I didn’t feel like I owned any of the pieces the way I wanted to. I felt that my level of creativity was hitting a glass ceiling.  I longed for a more human connection—a living person whom I could connect with. John came to my first performance and then it was like wildfire. Now we’ve been all around the world together.” Josefowicz has performed the concerto with Adams on the podium hundreds of times.

A concerto that sings

Spanning three movements, the concerto is a reawakening to the possibilities of the “singing line,” as Adams calls it in his program note on the work. Stylistically, this approach to traditional melody was a departure from Adams’ earlier self-described style of “massed sonorities riding on great rippling waves of energy,” where “harmony and rhythm were the driving forces in my music; melody was almost non-existent.”

Adams elaborates that the Violin Concerto "emerged as an almost implacably melodic piece—an example of ‘hypermelody.’ The violin spins one long phrase after another without stop for nearly the full thirty-five minutes. The concerto opens with a long extended rhapsody for the violin…The second movement takes the chaconne, and gently stretches, compresses, and transfigures its contours and modalities while the violin floats like a disembodied spirit around and about the orchestral tissue. The ‘Toccare’ utilizes the surging, motoric power of Shaker Loops to create a virtuoso vehicle for the solo violin.”

In 1995, the Violin Concerto won the Grawemeyer Award in Music Composition, and the premiere recording was released in April 1996, with violinist Gidon Kremer and the London Symphony Orchestra. Adams gratefully acknowledges both Jorja and Leila for their contributions to the work: