NLM Presents First Light: Rabia Brooke, Haddon Kay and Tamila Salimdjanova

Nova Linea Musica opens its Artists-in-Residence season with violinist Rabia Brooke, cellist Haddon Kay, and pianist Tamila Salimdjanova in a program built entirely from music written between 1835 and 1909. That is a deliberate choice for an organization known for premieres. Before the world premieres that follow in January, March, and April, First Light asks a different question: what do these artists hear in the repertoire they grew up inside, and what happens when they play it with the same immediacy they bring to ink that is three weeks old? The evening opens with Ravel's Jeux d'eau, a study in water and light from 1901 that gives the concert its title. Brooke and Kay follow with Glière's Eight Pieces for violin and cello, all eight miniatures from 1909, moving from a Bach-shadowed Prelude through a gavotte, a berceuse, and a canzonetta to a closing Etude, written for two instruments alone with no piano to lean on. Salimdjanova returns for Chopin's First Ballade, the 1835 work that invented an exciting new form at the height of the Romantic Era. Kay and Salimdjanova then take the Allegro from Franck's A Major Sonata of 1886, heard here in its cello incarnation. The program ends with Bazzini's La ronde des lutins, an 1852 scherzo fantastique that sends a violinist chasing goblins through ricochet bowing and false harmonics, and which arrives two weeks before Halloween entirely on purpose. A further work will be announced from the stage.