Classical violinist Joshua Bell has performed across the globe in venues such as Carnegie Hall, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and a subway station in Washington D.C. An Avery Fisher Prize recipient, Bell performed incognito in the station in 2007 for a Washington Post story examining art and context, an article that earned its writer a Pulitzer Prize.
Bell will play a concert in Spaulding Auditorium this evening, his third in Hanover, yet local interest in his music has not abated. Tickets for the show sold out before classes began in the fall, Margaret Lawrence, Hopkins Center director for programming, said.
“One of the Hopkins Center’s steadfast goals has been to bring artists at the pinnacle of their career, so that students get a chance to see some of the most important artists of their generation,” she said.
Bell will be accompanied by pianist Sam Haywood, an accomplished performer who has won the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition and received the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Isserlis Award. More recently, he performed on Frederic Chopin’s Pleyel piano to celebrate the artist’s bicentennial year in 2010.
Bell and Haywood will perform three pieces, Giuseppe Tartini’s “Violin Sonata in G Minor,” Ludwig van Beethoven’s “Violin Sonata No. 10” and Igor Stravinsky’s “Divertimento.”
Haywood said his favorite may be Beethoven’s sonata. Dedicated to Beethoven’s patron and student, Archduke Rudolph of Austria, the piece generates a dialogue between the violin and the piano through the various movements, ending on a deeply cheerful note.
“Beethoven’s piece is so unique and intimate,” Haywood said. “That’s what I love about it, that it’s so personal.”
Stravinsky’s “Divertimento” has a “magical” quality, Haywood said. Written for his one-act ballet, “Le baiser de la fee (The Fairy’s Kiss),” Stravinsky’s piece is an homage to Tchaikovsky. The ballet premiered at the Paris Opera in November 1928, the 35th anniversary of Tchaikovsky’s death.
Haywood and Bell have performed together on and off for four years, and Haywood is looking forward to collaborating at the Hop.
“What’s wonderful about chamber music is the dialogue between the piano and the violin,” Haywood said. “It’s been really enriching for me to talk to Bell in ‘music language.’”
Richard Fu ’13, a classical music student relations advisor at the Hop, said Haywood remains approachable to younger artists. Fu met Haywood when Haywood performed with Bell on campus in 2011 and again when Fu was on the music Foreign Study Program in London.
“Watching [Bell and Haywood] perform live is very different from a recording because they bring you closer to the music,” Fu said. “You can feel the energy of their performance.”
Such a high caliber performance should appeal to all students, though trained musicians may also pay attention to Bell’s superior technique and sound, Fu said.
Lawrence said she most enjoys Bell’s unpredictablility as an artist. She remembered a past Bell show, when the concert was near its end and the entire audience took to its feet for a standing ovation before Bell emerged for a final encore.
While Bell has achieved national and international fame, he maintains a humble attitude, Lawrence said. Whenever he performs, he “immerses himself in the music, really searching for the core of the music,” she said.
