New Year’s Eve Concert: 5 Highlights

1. Violinist Vadim gluzman

Considered one of the great violinists of the 20th century, Vadim Gluzman‘s playing is described as “pyrotechnic and passionate” (San Antonio Current).

“Most remarkable was his ability to sustain … romantic emotionalism without falling into vibrato-drenched clichés. Gluzman did it by unleashing an astounding palette of colors from his violin: a golden hive-like droning, finger-snap pizzicatos, and a plunging dive-bomber wail that had me thinking of klezmer — and of Jimi Hendrix calling down fire from heaven in ‘Machine Gun.’ …

For folks who prefer the classics, I’d sum up Gluzman this way: He is better than Itzhak Perlman, better than Midori, better than Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg and all the other big-name string titans…”
—Chris Waddington, The Times-Picayune

2. the violin: a 1690 “auer” stradivari

“Leopold Auer taught at the St. Petersburg Conservatory for almost 50 years. His students included Jascha Heifetz, Mischa Elman, Nathan Milstein, Oscar Shumsky, Efrem Zimbalist, and Kathleen Parlow. It’s hair-raising to think of all these great musicians listening to this very instrument in the most formative years of their life!”
—Vadim Gluzman

3. Bruch’s VIOLIN CONCERTO nO. 1

In 2011 Vadim Gluzman won the Diapason d’Or de l’Année award for Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 1 in G Minor, Op. 26, with the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Andrew Litton on BIS Records. Joseph Illick told the Albuquerque Journal, “Vadim Gluzman will play Bruch like no one has ever heard before.”

4. Ava Pine, soprano