Biography

Born in Toronto in 1994, Blake Pouliot studied violin with Marie Berard and Erika Raum, then with the renowned pedagogue Robert Lipsett at the Colburn Conservatory of Music in Los Angeles. Pouliot has established himself as a consummate 21st-century artist. He has performed with all the major Canadian orchestras as well as with many abroad. In 2017 Pouliot toured South America as a soloist with the Orchestra of the Americas performing Piazzolla’s Four Seasons. His many distinguished awards and prizes include the Montreal Symphony’s Manulife Competition in 2016, the Dorothy Delay Award, Grand Prize from the Canadian Federation of Music Festivals, and the Canada Council Michael Measures and Virginia Parker Prizes. He served as Soloist-in-Residence with Montreal’s Orchestre Métropolitain in the 2020-2021 season. In 2022 Yannick Nézet-Séguin invited Pouliot to perform with the Philadelphia Orchestra, with which he played Corigliano’s Red Violin. He also served as Soloist-in-Residence three years in a row with the National Youth Orchestra of Canada. Pouliot’s debut album on Analekta Records of music by Debussy and Ravel earned a five-star rating from BBC Music Magazine and a 2019 Juno Award nomination for Best Classical Album. Pouliot  performs on a 1729 Guarneri del Gesù instrument on loan from from an anonymous donor. 2nd LMMC concert.

https://www.blakepouliot.com/

Henry Kramer, pianist, received international recognition in 2016 with a Second Prize win in the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels. In 2019, he was awarded an Avery Fisher Career Grant by Lincoln Center. He joined the Music faculty of Université de Montréal in September 2022. LMMC debut.

https://www.henrykramerpiano.com/

Notes

Hungarian-born Miklós Rózsa a few generations ago was wildly popular as a composer of film scores like Spellbound, Quo Vadis, El Cid, and Ben-Hur. But Rózsa turned out a good number of strictly classical compositions as well. Among these is the Variations on a Hungarian Peasant Song, written in 1929 while Rózsa was still a student in Leipzig. Characteristic of much of Rósza’s writing, it is full of rhythmic verve and vibrant melody.

Clara Schumann must be ranked as one of the most remarkable women in the history of music. In an age and land (mid-nineteenth-century Germany) so inhospitable to the creative ambitions of women, she mustered the courage and determination to be both a composer and a traveling piano virtuoso. The Three Romances were written for the famous violinist Joseph Joachim. A Berlin review noted that “the conception of all three pieces is characterized by a fervent mood and the tender, airy manner of composition.”

Passionate themes, poetic ideas, rich textures, and rhythmic urgency infuse the first of Robert Schumann’s three violin sonatas. In the opening bars, the violin plunges headlong into a sweeping theme full of romantic yearning and grand gestures. The piano joins in close partnership, but each instrument retains its melodic independence. The second theme extends rather than relieves this darkly turbulent mood. Contrast arrives in the following movement with a capricious but sunny principal theme in F major that alternates with two short episodes. The turbulent, agitated mood returns in the finale.

Chausson wrote the Poème, his most famous work, in 1896 for the great Belgian violinist Eugène Ysaÿe. The introduction is dark and mysterious. Out of the melancholic gloom emerges a long, sinuous theme on the solo violin. Several subsidiary ideas are also presented, but it is the initial theme that receives the most extended treatment, and is the one Chausson reserves for the emotional climax.

Ravel’s first attempt at a violin sonata was in 1897, but it was abandoned and not performed or published until 1975.The sonata we hear today is a late work, begun in 1923 and completed four years later. Stylistically, it represents Ravel the neoclassicist, not the impressionist. There is a sense of coolness and detachment, textures are transparent throughout, the piano writing in particular spare and economical. Ravel  deliberately intended to emphasize the differences in color and sonority between the two instruments.

Robert Markow