Impressive recital by violinist Stella Chen and pianist Gilles Vonsattel

By Eileen Wingard in La Jolla, California

Violinist Stella Chen and pianist Gilles Vonsattel offered an engaging recital Sunday, May 31 at the Conrad under the auspices of the La Jolla Music Society.

Chen grew up in Palo Alto, the daughter of immigrant parents.

When she was seven years old, after lessons in piano, she showed an interest in the violin and her mother took her to one of the best teachers in the area, Li Lin, of the San Francisco Conservatory. She remained under his tutelage until she was 18. He then moved to Juilliard where she followed him to study.

Others of her teachers at Juilliard and the New England Conservatory of Music included Itzhak Perlman, Donald Weilerstein and Miriam Fried. She received her doctorate from Juilliard, where she now serves as the assistant to her mentor, Lii Lin.

As first prize winner of the 2019 Queen of Belgium Competition, her career has blossomed, playing with orchestras and at recital venues throughout the world.

Pianist Gilles Vonsattel was born in Switzerland. Winner of the Naumberg and Geneva competitions, he has soloed with major symphonies in the United States and abroad. He currently serves as Professor of Piano at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Chen’s love for Schubert, whose music is in her debut album, Stella x Schubert, was evident as she and Vonsattel performed the opening work on the program, Franz Schubert’s Duo in A Major for Piano and Violin, a four-movement work written when Schubert was 20 years old and he lived for a short period in the home of a wealthy friend. It is full of sweet melodies which Chen projected with graceful candor, supported by Vonsattel’s judicious collaboration.

The second work was Igor Stravinsky’s Divertimento from The Fairy’s Kiss, another four-movement work. The Fairy Kiss is one of the composer’s less familiar ballets, which he wrote basing much of it on themes by his favorite composer, Tchaikovsky.

Stravinsky created this Divertimento when he was touring in the early 1930s, with the violinist, Samuel Dushkin.

Dushkin was a great champion of Stravinsky’s music and a fine violinist who premiered many pieces by his contemporaries.

He was also the brother of Alexander Dushkin, the head of the Education Department of the Hebrew University and a talented cellist in his own right. When, during the summer of 1961, my husband Hal, my three-year old daughter Myla and I were in Israel, on the way back from two years in Europe (Fulbright Program in Germany, Teaching on US Army Base in France), we stayed with the Dushkins at Beit Yanai, on The Mediterranean Coast and Alexander and I played duets. He often spoke with great pride about his brother Samuel.

Hal and I were friends with  Alexander’s daughter, Avima Lombard, and son-in-law, Emanuel Lombard. I actually played at their wedding.

Chen put additional fire into her playing of the Stravinsky work.

After intermission came the surprise of the program, the Sonata for Violin and Piano, written in 1926 by 25-year-old Ruth Crawford Seeger. Three loud dissonant chords and a glissando opened the first movement, Vibrante, agitato. The startling beginning soon melted into lyrical atonal passages. The movement ended with the same three chord gesture with which it began.

The second movement, Buoyant,  opened with playful sounding spiccatos. It resembled a Scherzo.

The third movement, Mistico, intense, was introduced by dark passages in the piano. There were singable sequences in the violin, and a feeling of mysticism prevailed.

The final movement: Allegro, was a display of virtuosiy, bringing back the three chords, this time, more consonant, to conclude this unusual work.

Crawford Seeger was a budding composer who married one of her composition teachers, Charles Seeger (father of Pete Seeger) with whom she had four children. During her marriage, she also worked to collect, edit and publish American folksongs and she contributed greatly to the revival of American folk music. She did not return to serious composition until she was 51 years old and produced an Impressive Suite for Wind Quintet. Unfortunately, she died the following year, succumbing to cancer.

The final piece of the program was Richard Strauss’ Violin Sonata. This was the work that the great Jascha Heifetz insisted on performing during his 1953 tour of Israel, even though music by Wagner, an avowed antisemite and Richard Strauss, who remained in the good graces of the Nazi regime during WWII, were unofficially banned in Israel. Heifetz’s staunch belief that music should be separated from the composer and his performance of the sonata resulted in his being assaulted, injuring his right wrist.

The assailant was never found, and Heifetz presented his recital the next day without including the Strauss, but he did not return to Israel again until a decade later.

Chen’s and Vonsattel’s performance of the Strauss was convincing and its beautiful themes and virtuosity showed why it continues to be a beloved vehicle for concert violinists.

Chen and Vonsattel are to be congratulated for choosing such an interesting and impressive program, including the sonata by an American woman composer, Ruth Crawford Seeger,

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Eileen Wingard. a retired violinist with the San Diego Symphony Orchestra, is a freelance writer specializing in coverage of the arts.