Credits:

Glass, Philip (1937-)

Description:

Norwegian Talented Violinist Sara Åvinge to Perform with Edward Gardner! The talented Norwegian violinist Sara Åvinge will perform with Edward Gardner in a curious program featuring Philip Glass's Violin Concerto No. 2 "The American Seasons" and the Violin Concerto by Norwegian composer Setyr Bjerkestran. The program was full of curiosity. The "American Seasons" was written by Glass for violinist Robert McDuffie in 2009. It was written with Vivaldi's "The Four Seasons" in mind, but unlike Vivaldi, it does not specify which season corresponds to each movement, leaving it open to interpretation by the performer and listener. The work is also unique in that it does not have a cadenza as in a regular concerto, but instead has a "prologue" before the first movement and an unaccompanied "song" movement for the soloist before each of the other three movements. The synthesizer part is generally played with a baroque harpsichord-like tone, but Ovinge creates a more electroacoustic sound, creating a different kind of sound.Shetyr Bjerkestrand is a Norwegian musician who works in a wide range of musical styles from classical as well as rock and pop to folk and film music and contemporary. He is also known as an arranger for Ray Charles and Keith Emerson. Åvinge says he found what he was looking for when he met Bjerkestrand in 2019. The album explores the theme of "the coexistence of the electronic and the organic." Sara Åvinge began playing the violin at the age of four, made her first soloist appearance with her hometown orchestra in Norrkoping at the age of nine, and after receiving her Bachelor's degree from the Royal College of Music in Stockholm at the age of 16, she received solo diplomas from the Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo and the Royal College of Music in London. In addition to being the youngest ever to complete a diploma at the Norwegian Academy of Music, he has received numerous awards, including the "Listener Award" at the Swedish Soloist Awards.She has performed as a soloist with many of Scandinavia's leading orchestras, including the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, Norwegian Radio Orchestra, and Trondheim Symphony Orchestra, and is steadily gaining a reputation as a violinist. Tokyo M-Plus