Composer Lisa Bielawa & Violinist Tessa Lark: New Violin Concerto
Photo of Tessa Lark by Lauren Desberg, photo of Lisa Bielawa by Desmond White
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Lisa Bielawa & Tessa Lark: New Violin Concerto Brochure
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Christina Jensen, christina@jensenartists.com
Gina Meola, gina@jensenartists.com
646.536.7864
“Tessa brings forth a ‘humankind’ in her playing that envelops you in the warmth of her Kentucky roots...She exudes a graciousness that welcomes you to join her in the exploration of the music. Her sound is rich, yet always maintains an underlying purity”
“[Bielawa’s] music boasts a distinctive blend of Romantic effusion and steely, almost austere contemporaneity...a fluid and arresting creation that is at once dramatic and probing.”
2023 Guggenheim Fellow, Rome Prize and American Academy of Arts & Letters Award-winning composer Lisa Bielawa is pleased to offer a new violin concerto, written for GRAMMY-nominated violinist Tessa Lark.
The new piece will bring together the regional, traditional music- making that Lark grew up with in her home state of Kentucky with her identity as a virtuoso classical performer – a concerto written expressly for an artist who can explore the technical and expressive underpinnings of two discrete musical worlds, built through her lifetime of music-making in both.
Although Bielawa and Lark were neighbors in New York City, living in the same building, the catalyst for this new collaboration came when Bielawa relocated to Louisville, KY for the 2022-23 season as one of Louisville Orchestra’s “Creators Corps” members.
Bielawa says, “Over my time in Kentucky, Tessa was my main technical resource and composer’s guide for regional traditional music-making. As a listener I leaned into some of the expressive tropes of Kentucky, like the pervasiveness of a kind of yearning that evokes both placelessness and nostalgia. I found that my Appalachian excursions, sitting in on song circles with traditional music veterans and meeting young singer-songwriters in Hazard, began to influence my own music as well – not in obvious, stylistic ways, but in ways that operated far below the surface of the sound itself. I started to see and hear connections. For example, the way that traditional players communicated pulse and rhythmic nuance as if by telepathy, with no one person leading – I saw the same kind of communication happening between Tessa and the conductor in her performances of composers like Ravel and Vaughn Williams, with seamless rubatos and indescribably graceful tempo evolutions. I heard the ambiguity of certain scale tones in Bluegrass, and how the harmonies around them sustained their ambiguity in delicious and often deeply affective ways – and I saw plainly that my own harmonic language does exactly the same thing, in its own completely different way.”
Duration: 20-25 minutes
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Composer Lisa Bielawa
Composer, producer, and vocalist Lisa Bielawa (b. 1968) takes inspiration for her work from literary sources and close artistic collaborations. Bielawa was named a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, joining a diverse group of 171 exceptional individuals. Gramophone reports, “Bielawa is gaining gale force as a composer, churning out impeccably groomed works that at once evoke the layered precision of Vermeer and the conscious recklessness of Jackson Pollock.” Her music has been described as “ruminative, pointillistic and harmonically slightly tart,” by The New York Times, and “fluid and arresting ... at once dramatic and probing,” by the San Francisco Chronicle. She is the recipient of the 2017 Music Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters and a 2020 OPERA America Grant for Female Composers. She was named a William Randolph Hearst Visiting Artist Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society for 2018 and was Artist-in-Residence at Kaufman Music Center in New York for the 2020-2021 season.
Lisa Bielawa’s music is frequently performed throughout the U.S. and abroad. Her work has recently been premiered at the NY PHIL BIENNIAL, Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, The Kennedy Center, SHIFT Festival, Town Hall Seattle, Naumburg Orchestral Concerts Summer Series in New York’s Central Park, National Sawdust, Le Poisson Rouge, Rouen Opera, Helsinki Music Center, Arsenal de Metz, and MAXXI Museum in Rome, among others. Orchestras that have championed her music include The Knights, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, American Composers Orchestra, and the Orlando Philharmonic; she has also written for the combined forces of The Knights, San Francisco Girls Chorus, and Brooklyn Youth Chorus. Premieres of her work have been commissioned and presented by leading ensembles and organizations including the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Miami String Quartet, Brooklyn Rider, Seattle Chamber Music Society, American Guild of Organists, American Pianists Association, California Music Center, Akademiska Sångföreningen (Helsinki), Paul Dresher Ensemble, SOLI Chamber Ensemble, the Washington and PRISM Saxophone Quartets, Ensemble Variances (commissioned by Radio France), and more.
Violinist Tessa Lark
Violinist Tessa Lark is one of the most captivating artistic voices of our time, consistently praised by critics and audiences for her astounding range of sounds, technical agility, and musical elegance. In 2020 she was nominated for a GRAMMY in the Best Classical Instrumental Solo category and received one of Lincoln Center’s prestigious Emerging Artist Awards, the special Hunt Family Award. Other recent honors include a 2018 Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship and a 2016 Avery Fisher Career Grant, Silver Medalist in the 9th Quadrennial International Violin Competition
of Indianapolis, and winner of the 2012 Naumburg International Violin Competition. A budding superstar in the classical realm, she is also a highly acclaimed fiddler in the tradition of her native Kentucky, delighting audiences with programming that includes Appalachian and bluegrass music and inspiring composers to write for her.
Tessa has been a featured soloist at numerous U.S. orchestras, recital venues, and festivals since making her concerto debut with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra at age sixteen. She has appeared with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra; the Louisville Orchestra and the Buffalo Philharmonic; the Albany, Indianapolis, Knoxville and Seattle symphonies; and has been presented by such venues as Carnegie Hall, New York’s Lincoln Center, Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, the Music Center at Strathmore, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, San Francisco Performances, Ravinia, the Seattle Chamber Music Society, Australia’s Musica Viva Festival, and the Marlboro, Mostly Mozart, Bridgehampton, and La Jolla summer festivals.