At this summer’s third Carte Blanche Concert, Yura Lee, award-winning violin/violist and recipient of the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant, offers a colorful recital juxtaposing Czech and Hungarian folk-inflected works for violin and piano. Lee offers some insights into this dynamic program.
How did you go about choosing the repertoire for your recital program?
What I had in mind, when choosing the repertoire for this program, is an exploration of two seemingly contradictory ideas coexisting, one of organization/structure and one of improvisation. Much of folk music was taught “by ear” and explored with a certain sense of freedom that may be different from a traditional classical training. However, these composers took the elements of freedom, improvisation, and spontaneity in folk music and brought them to a whole new level of form, structure, and innovation while never letting go of that core element, inspiration, and emotional strength of folk music.
It’s a demanding program, in terms of stamina, stylistic variety, technical demands…What’s the biggest challenge for you in presenting this recital?
What is written on the music by a composer is, for a player, a rather objective matter that’s set in stone (on paper). But if you give five people the exact same story, every person will understand/interpret it a bit differently because of the threads of our own individual lives, our culture/background, our own individual pulse (our actual heartbeat and also what each of us perceives as an absolute pulse), et cetera. For me, I have to understand the composer’s intentions and, at the same time, understand what my instincts are telling me and somehow combine the two in the most truthful way.
Do you have a personal favorite among the pieces on your program?
Every single piece of music is my favorite at the moment I’m delving into it.
If you could ask any of the composers on your program one question…
Enescu wrote at least three or four instructions for practically every single note he wrote. Right-hand bow instructions, left-hand pitch (slides, intonation, exact string and finger we must use) instructions, dynamic instructions, tempi, the list goes on and on. Reading his music is like reading a blueprint for a building. But when I hear him play, it feels almost like the exact opposite of what you see—it is the most free, most hypnotic kind of violin playing imaginable, seemingly without rules or restrictions. I would like a map of his thought process. Does he organically find order through spontaneity, or does he “plan” spontaneity through carefully thought-out order?