Sarasota Orchestra explores the ‘Genius of Youth’

Although it’s Mozart and Britten on the Sarasota Orchestra’s next “Discoveries” program, it’s Brahms that guest violist Jordan Bak would most like to get together with for a drink.

“First of all, I think I’d want to gossip about Clara (Schumann, Brahms’s unrequited love). I’d want to know all of it,” said Bak, who will join with violinist Maria loudenitch and the orchestra under the baton of guest conductor Stephen Mulligan. “I’m a huge fan of Brahms’s music. I’d just want to know the musical process he thinks of when writing. He was such a complex human being. I’d like to know what is the reason for the complexity.”

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That said, he’s thrilled to be playing Mozart’s Sinfonia concertante for Violin, Viola and Orchestra as part of a program celebrating the “Genius of Youth.” Bak is 27; Ioudenitch is 25. Mozart composed the Sinfonia when he was 23 and his Symphony No. 5 in G Minor, also on the program, when he was just 17. The concert also includes Benjamin Britten’s Sinfonietta Op. 1, composed when he was 18.

The Britten Sinfonietta has never been performed by the Sarasota Orchestra, said Mulligan, who guest-conducted the orchestra for the first time last year.

“It’s a favorite of mine,” said Mulligan, associate conductor of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and music director of the Atlanta Symphony Youth Orchestra. “It’s extraordinarily colorful. He first wrote it for single instruments, and it’s very taut, so there are not that many compositional ideas, but the way that he works them and weaves them together, it’s wonderful. It goes very fast and the solo instruments keep changing, always with surprising colors and surprising harmonies.”

The three musical selections together cover two of the defining characteristics of youth: romance and unrest. The Symphony No. 5, said Mulligan, was “written during the Sturm und Drang movement, a pre-Romantic era that highlights dramatic contrasts…the Sinfonia concertante is a tragic love song, a love duet between the violinist and the violist. And the Britten is also very stormy, not exactly youth in revolt, but actually unrest, a contrast between an agitated, stormy state, and a really bright, youthful charismatic brilliance.”

Bak has performed both the principal violin and viola parts of the Sinfonia. He said the work’s second movement in particular “is such a heartbreaking movement, one of the most beautiful movements he’s ever written.”

But it is technically difficult and confusing, he said, while still being “really, really beautiful trying to convey those emotions.”

The concert will bring together two soloists and a guest conductor who have not worked together before, and indeed, Mulligan’s past conducting of the orchestra was during last season’s concerts that were limited to chamber ensembles when he worked with just 11 musicians.

“There’s usually a chance to meet with the soloists before we stand in front of the orchestra,” said Mulligan. “I really treasure that time; try to get a meal and talk about your families and your feelings. Whether we all have an amazing chemistry, that remains to be seen.”

Discover Mozart

Genius of Youth. Sarasota Orchestra. 7:30 p.m. Saturday, May 14, Sarasota Opera House, 61 N. Pineapple Ave., Sarasota. Tickets $27-$57. 941-953-3434; sarasotaorchestra.org.

Read more arts stories by Susan L. Rife

This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Orchestra taps into the youthful sounds of Mozart and Brahms