Asbury Park Press previews Winter Festival with Zukerman

The Asbury Park Press previews the NJSO’s 2017 Winter Festival, which spans three January weekends of concerts with acclaimed violinist and conductor Pinchas Zukerman:

Each year the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra presents its Winter Festival, a mini-season of concerts designed to lift the spirits of concertgoers schlepping through the post-holidays drab of mid-winter.

This year, the group welcomes classical music star Pinchas Zukerman, violinist extraordinaire and conductor, as artistic director for the coming Winter Festival, a suite of three concerts in January featuring violin concertos by J.S. Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven, plus Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 (the “Eroica”), Arnold Schoenberg’s revelatory “Verklarte Nacht,” and an evening of music by Tchaikovsky.

Zukerman is something of a legend in the classical music world, with a nearly half-century career as soloist and conductor ... he is currently Principal Guest Conductor with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in London and Artist-in-Association with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. He also has many engagements as guest soloist and conductor with orchestras around the world, performs with the Zukerman Trio, and chairs the Pinchas Zukerman Performance Program at New York’s Manhattan School of Music.

...

For those of you who know the name Schoenberg mostly through his notoriety as a champion of thorny dissonance, the Romantic style of “Verklarte Nacht” will come as a shock ... What the modern listener hears is a passionate testament of late night soul searching, a confrontation with difficult realities, straining mightily against the darkness that blind spiritual understanding.

The German title translates as “Transfigured Night,” and it is indeed a work of transformation, a musical and personal epiphany. It makes a gorgeous complement to Beethoven’s iconic music of agonized triumph [in his Third Symphony, “Eroica,” which the NJSO performs on the same Winter Festival program].

» Read the full preview at www.app.com

» Explore the 2017 Winter Festival