[photo credit: Pasadena Symphony and POPS]
On Saturday, that dual heritage becomes the through-line for a Pasadena Symphony concert pairing Edgar Meyer’s genre-crossing Violin Concerto with Mendelssohn’s Scotland-inspired Symphony No. 3 and Hebrides Overture. Music Director Brett Mitchell leads the program at Ambassador Auditorium at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m.
Lark, who received a Grammy nomination in 2020 for Best Classical Instrumental Solo, has built a career bridging traditions that classical institutions once kept separate. She performs on a circa-1600 G.P. Maggini violin on loan from the Stradivari Society, but her most recent album,”The Stradgrass Sessions,” features collaborations with bluegrass legends including Meyer himself, along with mandolinist Sierra Hull and fiddler Michael Cleveland.
Meyer, a seven-time Grammy winner and 2002 MacArthur Fellow, wrote his Violin Concerto in 1999 for Hilary Hahn. The New Yorker has called the double bassist and composer “the most remarkable virtuoso in the relatively unchronicled history of his instrument.” His concerto draws on the same American folk idioms that shaped Lark’s childhood.
The concert’s second half belongs to Mendelssohn, whose own encounter with folk tradition occurred in 1829 during a walking tour of Scotland with his friend Karl Klingemann. On July 30, visiting the ruins of Holyrood Chapel in Edinburgh, the 20-year-old composer wrote to his family that he had found “the beginning of my Scottish Symphony” amid the roofless chapel where Mary Queen of Scots was crowned.
A week later, sailing to the island of Staffa despite what he described as “horrible seasickness,” Mendelssohn sketched the opening of his Hebrides Overture, inspired by the basalt sea cave known as Fingal’s Cave. He completed the symphony only in 1842—making it, despite its designation as No. 3, the last of his five symphonies. Queen Victoria accepted its dedication.
Mitchell, in his inaugural season as the Pasadena Symphony’s sixth music director since the orchestra’s founding in 1928, has spoken of the chemistry he felt with the ensemble from his first guest appearance in March 2022.
“So many of our musicians are these iconic studio players whose work I’ve known and loved for decades,” the conductor said when his appointment was announced. “To now be able to work with them and experience their artistry in person is a thrill beyond words.”
The program Mitchell has assembled, spanning a 19th-century Romantic’s imagination of Scotland to a 21st-century American’s synthesis of classical and folk, finds its ideal interpreter in Lark. She won the 2012 Naumburg International Violin Competition and earned an Avery Fisher Career Grant, but she has never abandoned the music of her Kentucky childhood.
“I’m not crossing over,” Meyer once said of his own work between genres. “This is simply what I do.”
Lark might say the same.
A free pre-concert “Insights” dialogue with KUSC host Brian Lauritzen and Mitchell begins one hour before each performance. Lauritzen, the classical station’s weekday afternoon host, has become a familiar figure as a pre-concert lecturer across Southern California.
“Mendelssohn & Meyer” with violinist Tessa Lark and the Pasadena Symphony, Brett Mitchell conducting. 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. Saturday, January 24. Ambassador Auditorium, 131 S. St. John Ave., Pasadena. (626) 793-7172 or pasadenasymphony-pops.org.
