Biography

Canadian violinist Kerson Leong has been called “not just one of Canada’s greatest violinists but one of the greatest violinists, period” (Toronto Star). Le Monde described his playing as “a mixture of spontaneity and mastery, elegance, fantasy, intensity that makes his sound recognizable from the first notes.” Leong came to international attention by winning Junior First Prize at the Menuhin Competition 2010 in Oslo. For the 2018-2019 season he was Artist-in-Residence with Montreal’s Orchestre Métropolitain, hand-picked by conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin. A natural communicator on and off the stage, his passions include music outreach and pedagogy. Indiana University and the Sibelius Academy, among other institutions, have invited him to teach or lecture. One of Leong’s special interests is the physics of string resonance, a science that has strongly influenced his playing and philosophy of sound production. Together with his father, who introduced him to the subject, he has lectured in music schools as far-flung as Beijing, Oslo, and California. Leong is an associated artist of the Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel in Belgium. His recent recording of the six Ysaÿe solo sonatas has won the highest praise. Henry Fogel, writing in Fanfare magazine, compared his playing with that of Aaron Rosand, Berl Senofsky, Efrem Zimbalist and Nikolaj Znaider, and “in all cases, Leong belonged in their company. His playing is richly beautiful.” Leong performs on the “ex Bohrer, Baumgartner” Guarneri del Gesù violin, on loan from Canimex Inc. LMMC debut.

Jessica Xylina Osborne, a native of San Antonio, Texas, has been playing the piano since she was four years old. She studied at the Juilliard School, Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, Rice University and Yale University. The Washington Post described her as "a pianist with a refreshing mellowness and poetic touch". LMMC debut.

https://kersonleong.com/

Notes

Belgian conductor, composer, teacher and above all violinist Eugène Ysaÿe was one of the world’s most renowned musicians. His world travels brought him to Montreal in 1895 for a performance in the early years of the LMMC. As a composer, Ysaÿe wrote in a conservative, late-romantic style. In 1924, inspired by Joseph Szigeti’s performance of Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin, Ysaÿe embarked on a project to compose six similar works, dedicating each to a different contemporary virtuoso of the violin. The sonata dedicated to the legendary Fritz Kreisler (No. 4) reflects the qualities that distinguished Kreisler’s style of playing, particularly the big, robust sound he drew from the instrument. No. 5 went to Mathieu Crickboom, a former student of Ysaÿe’s and later second violinist in Ysaÿe’s quartet.

Gabriel Fauré himself said that his music exemplified “the eminently French qualities of taste, clarity and sense of proportion.” He hoped to express “the taste for clear thought, purity of form and sobriety.” To these qualities we might add meticulous workmanship, elegance and refinement, for in all these respects his Violin Sonata Op. 13, his first major masterpiece, certainly conforms.

Brahms composed the third and last of his violin sonatas between 1886 and 1888. It is music full of warmth, lyrical richness and melodic enchantment! The first movement is dominated by the long, soaring, impassioned theme that opens the work. Passages of lyric beauty and restless agitation fill the pages. The second movement is contemplative and evokes the epithet often applied to works of Brahms’s later years, “autumnal.” The third movement is not, strictly speaking, a scherzo, but it could pass for one, for it is imbued with a light, deft touch, and trips along, albeit wistfully perhaps. The exuberance and even youthful vitality of the final movement recall the Brahms of earlier years.

It is entirely fitting that today’s recital conclude with Franck’s Violin Sonata. It was written in the same year (1886) as Brahms began his Third Sonata, and it is dedicated to his friend Ysaÿe, who, like Franck, was born in Liège. Ysaÿe gave the first public performance. Franck’s most significant contribution to musical form lay in his use of cyclical elements  ̶  the unification of a multi-movement work by recurrent use of one or more themes in successive movements.

Robert Markow