Violinist Returns For Appearance With Symphony
Reiko Watanabe began playing the violin at 3, an age when many children are beginning to get serious about playing with blocks. Now in her 20s, Watanabe has compiled a series of career highlights that would be impressive for a violinist twice her age. She has won major competitions such as the Viotti and Paganini; she’s played recitals and concerts with orchestras in the world’s major cities; and last season she appeared in Spokane as soloist with the Spokane Symphony, playing Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons.”
Tonight, Watanabe returns as soloist with the symphony, this time playing a work from the late romantic repertoire. She will perform Sibelius’s formidably difficult Violin Concerto in D minor on a program that includes Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 and the world premiere of Don Caron’s “Paradigm Shifts.” Fabio Mechetti, the orchestra’s music director, will conduct.
Following her early start on the violin, Watanabe became, at 14, the youngest grand-prize winner of the All-Japan Music Competition. In Japan, she studied with Kyoko Suzuki. She came to the United States as a teenager and became a scholarship student of Josef Fuchs at the Juilliard School, attending master classes with such renowned violinists as Josef Gingold and Mathan Milstein.
Watanabe’s range of repertoire runs from such baroque masters as Vivaldi through the 19th-century virtuoso concertos of Bartok, whose Concerto No. 2 she performed in her orchestral debut with the NHK Orchestra in Tokyo. The Sibelius concerto Watanabe will perform tonight was inspired by the Finnish composer’s having heard a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto. Tchaikovsky himself is represented by his popular Symphony No. 5.
Mechetti begins tonight’s concert with “Paradigm Shifts,” a work for which Spokane composer Don Caron was commissioned, to commemorate the Spokane Symphony’s 50th season. Caron, 41, has had many works, from short piano pieces to full-length ballets, performed in Spokane. His activities here have included teaching, performances on piano and electronic keyboards, conducting and concert production. In addition to his involvement in classical composition, Caron also writes music for corporate videos as resident composer and sound designer for a production firm.
The composer will deliver a preconcert talk on the work at 7 p.m. in the Opera House auditorium and present brief remarks to the concert audience before the orchestra’s performance of the work.
Caron’s “Paradigm Shifts” is the first work commissioned with money from the Bruce Ferden Memorial Fund for 21st-Century Music, with additional funding from the Olga Forrai Foundation.
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MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: The Spokane Symphony Orchestra with violin soloist Reiko Watanabe Location and time: Opera House, tonight, 8 Tickets: $12 to $27 at the symphony ticket office (624-1200) and G&B