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XomokyH t1_iqwg9yr wrote

  1. What have been the most difficult pieces of your career? Both in terms of violin performance and in terms of ensemble cohesion. I’ve been listening to a lot of Charles Ives and my mind boggles at the group coordination required to nail the timing on those intricate pieces.

  2. Are there pieces that you listen to specifically for one moment? For example the key change in the 2nd movement of the Ravel string quartet is always magical for me. The Barber violin concerto has a few of those moments as well. I want to hear yours!

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MainlyMozartSD OP t1_iqwgwfd wrote

Difficulty is always an interesting question, because people typically expect some kind of staggering intellectual or technical difficulty. Pieces of that sort include Berg's Chamber Concerto (where arguably playing the trio version of the Adagio with clarinet and piano, conductorless, was more difficult than playing the complete work), the "Seven Trumpets" from Messaien's Quartet for the End of Time, and Brett Dean's "Hamlet" which we played at the Met last season.

In the end, however, apparently simple pieces of sheer poetry are always more difficult -- Bach, Mozart, Schubert.

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MainlyMozartSD OP t1_iqwhbo9 wrote

In terms of your second question, I have had such moments in the past but I rarely listen just for one moment. I can think of one such example though: when the horn motif in the last movement of Sibelius 5 gets going .....

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