Saturday, March 18, 2023, 8pm
All Saints Parish
1773 Beacon Street, Brookline, MA 02445

Tickets are $15 general admission, $10 for students and seniors, and free for children 12 & under.

COVID Policy: You do not need to show proof of vaccination or a negative test result to enter All Saints Parish. To ensure the safety of everyone, the members of Brookline Symphony Orchestra are fully vaccinated and we strongly recommend our audience members to wear a mask. Please stay home if you are sick or have COVID-19 symptoms; you have been directed to self-isolate or quarantine; or you are awaiting the results of a COVID-19 test. Note: These policies are subject to change as the COVID-19 pandemic and community transmission rates evolve.

William Walton, Violin Concerto, movements 1 & 3

with Concerto Competition winner Amos Lawrence

Sir William Turner Walton was an English composer. During a sixty-year career, he wrote music in several genres and styles, from film scores to opera. In 1936, Walton was offered commissions from both Jascha Heifetz (a Russian-born American violinist), as well as from Joseph Szigeti (Hungarian violinist) and Benny Goodman (American clarinetist), who wanted a work for violin and clarinet. After meeting Heifetz in London, Walton chose to accept his commission for a violin concerto, but he did not begin work on the piece until early 1938. The British Council hoped to present the premiere of the concerto during the 1939 New York World's Fair, along with new works by Ralph Vaughan Williams, Arthur Bliss and Arnold Bax given during the event, but Heifetz was otherwise committed on the proposed date of the concert. It was subsequently agreed that he should premiere the work in Boston, with Walton conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and then, after several more performances in the US, Heifetz would give the British premiere in London in March 1940. However, the outbreak of World War II in September 1939 forced Heifetz and Walton to abandon their plans. Walton could not travel to the US, and the world premiere of the concerto was given by Heifetz and the Cleveland Orchestra conducted by Artur Rodziński on December 7, 1939. The British premiere was later given on November 1, 1941, with soloist Henry Holst and Walton himself conducting.

Concerto Competition winner and Brookline Symphony Orchestra concertmaster Amos Lawrence won the Sanford Competition at age 14, enabling him to attend the North Carolina School of the Arts where he studied with Vartan Manoogian on a full scholarship. At sixteen, he was the youngest member of the "International Orchestra," which toured Italy in the summer of 1977. At the age of eighteen, he entered the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where he studied with Ivan Galamian and Jascha Brodsky. Lawrence received his Master's degree with a "Distinction in Performance" honor from the New England Conservatory of Music where he was a concertmaster, and won the Charles Ely Scholarship Award. He was a prize winner of the Courts Sonata Competition, and a winner of the NEC Chamber Music Gala Competition. He participated with Russian artists in the "Making Music Together" Festival in Boston in 1988 playing for composers Alfred Schnittke, Leon Kirchner, and Gunther Schuller. Performances in Jordan Hall include Arnold Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, and Ode to Napoleon. He collaborated in chamber music performances with members of the Toho Gakuen School from Japan. In addition, he has played in master classes for such artists as Yehudi Menuhin, (Vieuxtemps Concerto #2) and Nathan Milstein (Ysaye Ballade). He has played over 25 performances of Vivaldi's Four Seasons in the Piccolo Spoleto Festival in Charleston South Carolina including two all solo Bach programs. He also attended the Meadowmount School of Music for eight years, where he performed Alban Berg's opus #3 string quartet, Igor Sravinsky's Duo Concertante, and William Walton's Violin Concerto.

Amos Lawrence has performed in the "Maggio Musicale Fiorentino" in Florence Italy, the "International Musicians Seminar" at Prussia Cove in Great Britain, the Casals Festival in Puerto Rico, the Scotia Festival in Halifax Nova Scotia, Chamber Music of Saugatuck in Michigan, the the Colorado Festival of Music in Boulder Colorado, the Baroque Performance Institute in Oberlin Ohio, the Breckenridge Music Institute in Colorado, Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara California, "Summer Strings" in Woodstock Vermont, the Bowdoin Music Festival in Maine, the "Castello di Cennina" in Bucine Italy, and the Israel Festival in Caesarea Israel. He has also been a soloist with the Charleston Symphony, playing such works as Sarasate's Zigeunerweisen, Saint Saens Havanaise, Vivaldi's Concerto for Two Violins and Four Seasons, Schindler's List, Elgar's Concertino for String Quartet, Jon Deak's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and Fritz Kreisler's Preludium and Allegro. He has performed concerti by Mendelssohn and Wieniawski, and Sarasate's Carmen Fantasy with the Charleston Metropolitan Civic Orchestra, as well as with the College of Charleston Orchestra, and the Ocean City Pops in New Jersey.

Mr. Lawrence served on the faculty of the Brevard Music Center in North Carolina, the Piano and Strings Workshop at the College of Charleston, and the Tennessee Valley Strings Camp in Huntsville Alabama. He was an adjunct professor at the College of Charleston, played in the Charleston Symphony String Quartet and for twelve years he was Assistant Concertmaster of the Charleston Symphony Orchestra. He played in the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra, the North Carolina Symphony, and the Charlotte Symphony.

Amos Lawrence was a member in 1979-1981 of the very last studio class of the legendary pedagogue Ivan Galamian. Mr. Galmian’s enormous success as a teacher was not solely because he was “old school” or “old World,” or from the fact that he was a fabulous musician with a vast violin knowledge, but essentially because he was a compassionate and kind-hearted human being, who treated his students like beloved children. Lawrence’s performance is dedicated to the memory of Mr. Galamian.

 
Béla Bartók, Concerto for Orchestra

Béla Viktor János Bartók was a Hungarian composer, pianist, and ethnomusicologist. Béla displayed notable musical talent very early in life: by the age of four he was able to play 40 pieces on the piano and his mother began formally teaching him the next year. Béla gave his first public recital at age 11, and among the pieces he played was his own first composition: a short piece called "The Course of the Danube". His later music was influenced by such composers as Richard Strauss, Claude Debussy, Johannes Brahms, and a growing interest in folk music.

The Concerto for Orchestra is a five-movement orchestral work composed in 1943. It is one of Bartók’s best-known, most popular, and most accessible works. It premiered on December 1, 1944, in Symphony Hall, Boston, by the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Serge Koussevitzky to great success. Bartók said that he called the piece a concerto rather than a symphony because of the way each section of instruments is treated in a soloistic and virtuosic way. The work was written in response to a commission from the Koussevitzky Foundation (run by the conductor Serge Koussevitzky) following Bartók's move to the United States from his native Hungary, which he had fled because of World War II. Bartók revised the piece in February 1945, the biggest change coming in the last movement, where he wrote a longer ending. Both versions of the ending were published, but the revised ending is almost universally performed.