Violinist Alexi Kenney is forging a career that defies categorization, following his interests, intuition, and heart. He is equally at home creating experimental programs and commissioning new works, soloing with major orchestras around the world, and collaborating with some of the most celebrated musicians of our time. Alexi is the recipient of an Avery Fisher Career Grant and a Borletti-Buitoni Trust Award.

In the 2024/25 Alexi will appear as a soloist with the Asheville, Reno, San Diego, Florida, and Cape Symphonies. He will play solo recitals at La Jolla SummerFest, Boston Celebrity Series, Spoleto Festival and more. Much of this season for Alexi will be devoted to his chamber music quartet, Owls. He will be touring Owls both nationally and internationally with performances scheduled at the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts, Tippet Rise Arts Center, University of Chicago, and the 92nd Street Y in New York City.

In the 2023/24 season, Alexi appeared as soloist with the Dallas, Pittsburgh, and Milwaukee Symphonies, leading a program of his own creation with the New Century Chamber Orchestra, and debuting a new iteration of his project Shifting Ground at the Baryshnikov Arts Center and the Ojai Festival, in collaboration with the new media and video artist Xuan. Shifting Ground intersperses seminal works for solo violin by J.S. Bach with pieces by Matthew Burtner, Mario Davidovsky, Nicola Matteis, Kaija Saariaho, Paul Wiancko, and Du Yun, as well as new commissions by composers Salina Fisher and Angélica Negrón. The album version of Shifting Ground was released in June 2024.

In recent seasons, Alexi has made solo appearances with the Cleveland Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, l’Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Detroit Symphony, Rochester Philharmonic, Indianapolis Symphony, Gulbenkian Orchestra, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Oregon Symphony, Louisville Orchestra, and l’Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne, as well as in a play-conduct role as guest leader of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. He has played recitals at Wigmore Hall, on Carnegie Hall’s ‘Distinctive Debuts’ series, Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival, Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, 92nd Street Y, Mecklenberg-Vorpommern Festival, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Winner of the 2013 Concert Artists Guild Competition and laureate of the 2012 Menuhin Competition, Alexi has been profiled by Musical America, Strings Magazine, and The New York Times, and has written for The Strad.

Chamber music continues to be a major part of Alexi’s life, regularly performing at festivals including Caramoor, ChamberFest Cleveland, Chamber Music Northwest, Kronberg, La Jolla, Ojai, Marlboro, Music@Menlo, Ravinia, Seattle, and Spoleto. He is a founding member of Owls—an inverted quartet hailed as a “dream group” by The New York Times—alongside violist Ayane Kozasa, cellist Gabe Cabezas, and cellist-composer Paul Wiancko. Alexi is also an alum of the Bowers Program (formerly CMS 2) at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.

Born in Palo Alto, California in 1994, Alexi is a graduate of the New England Conservatory in Boston, where he received an Artist Diploma as a student of Miriam Fried and Donald Weilerstein. Previous mentors in the Bay Area include Wei He, Jenny Rudin, and Natasha Fong. He plays a violin made in London by Stefan-Peter Greiner in 2009 and a bow by François-Nicolas Voirin.

Outside of music, Alexi enjoys hojicha, modernist design and architecture, baking for friends (especially this lumberjack cake), and walking for miles on end in whichever city he finds himself, listening to podcasts and Bach on repeat.

JEAN SIBELIUS
Born 1865, Tavastehus, Finland
Died 1957, Järvenpää, Finland

Violin Concerto in D Minor, op.47

Sibelius composed his Violin Concerto (his only concerto) in 1903, between his Second and Third symphonies. This was a time of transition for the 38-year-old composer, who was moving away from an early Romantic style influenced by Tchaikovsky and toward a leaner, more concise language. Sibelius was dissatisfied when he heard the concerto premiered in Helsinki in 1904 by Viktor Novácek, and he revised it completely. The final version was first performed in Berlin on October 19, 1905, with Karl Halir as soloist and Richard Strauss conducting.

It is difficult to characterize this haunting music. The second movement sings gracefully and the finale is full of energy, but the prevailing impression the concerto makes is of an icy brilliance. The orchestral sonority emphasizes the darker lower voices—cellos, violas, and bassoons—so that the violin, which often plays high in its range, sounds even more brilliant by contrast. Sibelius was a violinist who had hoped to make a career as a soloist before he (fortunately) gave up that dream and turned to composition, and he fills the solo part with complex technical hurdles. Long passages played in octaves, great leaps, sustained writing in the violin’s highest register, and such knotty problems as trilling on one string while simultaneously playing a melodic line on another, make this one of the most difficult of all violin concertos.

The Allegro moderato opens with a quiet mist of string sound, and over this the solo violin presents the long, rhapsodic main theme: singing, dark, surging. Certain features of this theme—a triplet tag and a pattern of three descending notes—will assume important thematic functions as the movement develops. The originality of this movement appears in many ways. There are three main theme-groups instead of the expected two, but before we get to the second, Sibelius defies all expectations by giving the soloist a brief cadenza. The sober and steady second subject arrives in the dark sound of bassoons and cellos, while the vigorous third is stamped out by the violin sections. And then, another surprise: Sibelius presents the main cadenza, which is long and phenomenally difficult, before the development begins. Then the development and recapitulation are truncated, and the ending is abrupt: Sibelius drives with unremitting energy to the close, where the solo violin catapults to the top of its range as the orchestra seals off the cadence with fierce attacks.

Woodwind duets introduce the second movement before the violin enters with the intense main theme, played entirely on the G string. This movement, in ternary form, rises to a great climax and falls back to end quietly and gently. The tempo indication for the last movement, Allegro, ma non tanto (Fast, but not too fast), is crucial: Timpani and low strings set the steady tread that marches along firmly throughout much of this movement. The violin’s vigorous dotted melody dominates this rondo, but even here the mood remains somber. This movement has been described in quite different ways. The English musicologist Donald Francis Tovey called it “a polonaise for polar bears,” while Sibelius is reported to have referred to it as a “danse macabre.” The concerto concludes as the violin climbs into its highest register and, with the entire orchestra, stamps out the concluding D.

— Program Note by Eric Bromberger

JOHANNES BRAHMS
Born 1833, Hamburg
Died 1897, Vienna

Symphony No. 1 in C Minor, op.68

Brahms waited a long time to write a symphony. He had impetuously begun one at age 23 in reaction to Schumann’s death, and he got much of it onto paper before he recognized that he was not ready to take on so daunting a challenge and abandoned it. Brahms was only too aware of the example of Beethoven’s nine symphonies and of the responsibility of any subsequent symphonist to be worthy of that example. To the conductor Hermann Levi, he made one of the most famous—and honest—confessions in the history of music: “You have no idea how the likes of us feel when we hear the tramp of a giant like him behind us.”

Brahms began work on what would be his first completed symphony in the early 1860s and worked on it right up to (and after) the premiere on November 4, 1876, when the composer was 43. He was concerned enough about how his first symphony would be received that he chose not to present it in Vienna, where all of Beethoven’s symphonies had been first performed. Instead, he said, he wanted “a little town that has a good friend, a good conductor and a good orchestra,” and so the premiere took place in the small city of Karlsruhe in western Germany, far from major music centers. Brahms may have been uncertain about his symphony, but audiences were not, and the new work was soon praised in terms that must have seemed heretical to its composer. Some began to speak of “the three B’s,” and the conductor Hans von Bülow referred to the work as “the Tenth Symphony,” suggesting that it was a worthy successor to Beethoven’s nine. Brahms would have none of it; he grumbled: “There are asses in Vienna who take me for a second Beethoven.”

There can be no doubt, however, that Brahms meant his First Symphony to be taken very seriously. From the first instant of the symphony, with its pounding timpani ostinato, one senses Brahms’ intention to write music of vast power and scope. The 37-bar introduction, which contains the shapes of the themes of the first movement, was written after Brahms had completed the rest of the movement, and it comes to a moment of repose before the exposition explodes with a crack. This is not music that one can easily sing. In fact, themes are here reduced virtually to fragments: arpeggiated chords, simple rising and falling scales. Brahms’ close friend Clara Schumann wrote in her diary after hearing the symphony: “I cannot disguise the fact that I am painfully disappointed; in spite of its workmanship I feel it lacks melody.” But Brahms was not so much interested in melodic themes as he was in motivic themes with the capacity to evolve dramatically. After a violent development, the lengthy opening movement closes quietly in C major.

Where the first movement was unremittingly dramatic, the Andante sostenuto sings throughout. The strings’ glowing opening material contrasts nicely with the sound of the solo oboe, which has the poised second subject, and the movement concludes with the solo violin rising high above the rest of the orchestra, almost shimmering above the final chords. The third movement is not the huge scherzo one might have expected at this point. Instead, the aptly named Un poco allegretto e grazioso is the shortest movement of the symphony, and its calm is welcome before the intensity of the finale. It opens with a flowing melody for solo clarinet, which Brahms promptly inverts and repeats; the central episode is somewhat more animated, but the mood remains restrained throughout. That calm, however, is annihilated at the beginning of the finale. Tense violins outline what will later become the main theme of the movement, pizzicato figures race ahead, and the music builds to an eruption of sound. Out of that turbulence bursts the pealing sound of horns.

Many have commented on the nearly exact resemblance between this horn theme and the Westminster chimes, though the resemblance appears to have been coincidental (Brahms himself likened it to the sound of an Alpenhorn resounding through mountain valleys). A chorale for brass leads to the movement’s main theme, a noble (and now very famous) melody for the first violins. When it was pointed out to Brahms that this theme bore more than a passing resemblance to the main theme of the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, he replied tartly: “Any ass can see that.” The point is not so much that the two ideas are alike thematically as it is that they are emotionally alike: Both have a natural simplicity and spiritual radiance that give the two movements a similar emotional effect. The development of the finale is as dramatic as that of the first movement, and at the climax the chorale is stamped out fortissimo as the symphony thunders to its close.

— Program Note by Eric Bromberger