Stringing together Dear friends reunite as WSO season kicks off with visit from Israeli-Ukrainian violinist By: Alan Small Posted: 5:38 PM CDT Wednesday, Sep. 13, 2023

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This article was published 13/09/2023 (1048 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A two-decade friendship renews Thursday night (Sept. 14) when the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra opens its new season at the Centennial Concert Hall.

Vadim Gluzman, the Ukrainian-Israeli violinist who joins the WSO on two works Thursday, has been pals with WSO music director Daniel Raiskin since both were in the early parts of their classical music careers in the early 2000s.

“We have played so many concerts in so many different countries it would be difficult to count, if it was possible,” Gluzman says in a telephone interview from Baltimore, where he is a distinguished artist-in-residence at Johns Hopkins University’s Peabody Conservatory.

“He’s one of my absolute dearest musical and personal friends,” Gluzman says of Raiskin. “One of those people that you have complete trust as an artist. This is really very special.”

They first met in Germany when Raiskin was the chief conductor of the Staatsorchester Rheinische Philharmonie in Koblenz, a group Gluzman would eventually join as an artist-in-residence.

“It was such a wonderful chemistry with the orchestra,” Gluzman remembers. “We did numerous concerts during that season, playing all sorts of repertoire, always very adventurous.

“With Daniel we were always exploring and we will be exploring (with the WSO).”

Their busy touring schedules — both Raiskin and Gluzman perform all over the world — mean they haven’t seen each other in two years.

Calling it a musical reunion is a bit much — Gluzman and Raiskin keep in contact regularly by phone, text or email, even when they’re separated by oceans when both are on tour — but a collaboration with the WSO has been a long time coming.

“To be onstage together, it’s a gift. I’m really looking forward to it,” he says.

Gluzman was first scheduled to perform with Raiskin and the WSO in 2021, but the concert was postponed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

When Gluzman did get his turn in the concert hall spotlight on March 12, 2022, Raiskin was with his wife Larissa in Slovakia, helping to bring her ailing mother, Galyna Reznikova, from Kharkiv, which was besieged by missile attacks during the early days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Reznikova died after contracting COVID-19 in a Bratislava hospital shortly after.

“When I was not rehearsing, I was on the phone and texting (Raiskin), getting updates what was happening. It was excruciating,” the violinist says.

Gluzman will perform on two of the four pieces on the program, which is the debut of the WSO’s Thursday Classics series.

“To be onstage together, it’s a gift. I’m really looking forward to it.”–Vadim Gluzman on performing with Daniel Raiskin

Thursday night’s main piece featuring Gluzman will be Max Bruch’s Concerto No. 1 for Violin & Orchestra, which he recorded in 2011 with Norway’s Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, but he’s most looking forward to Baal Shem (Three Pictures of Chassidic Life), Suite for Violin & Orchestra, a 1923 work by Swiss-American composer Ernest Bloch that blends classical with the spontaneity of Jewish folk music and klezmer.

“For me this is what makes our life exciting. Of course, (playing) all the great masterworks is incredibly inspiring, but I think it is just as inspiring to go to a work that is less often played. It needs to be heard and it needs to be performed.”

The performance couldn’t be more timely — Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, begins Friday night — and the piece is named after Baal Shem Tov, the founder of the Hassidic movement.

Gluzman recorded it on a 2009 album with Brazil’s Sao Paulo Symphony Orchestra, but says it’s rarely performed live, especially accompanied by a full orchestra.

Thursday night’s performance will be the first time Raiskin and Gluzman have performed Baal Shem together.

“It is quite challenging, to be honest, for orchestra, the soloist and the conductor. It does take an incredible conductor to put it together,” Gluzman says. “It’s a glorious piece. You might call it the earliest version of what we know today as a crossover.

“For me personally, being Israeli, playing Jewish music is very dear and important.”

The WSO will open Thursday night’s concert with Vltava (The Moldau) by Czech composer Bedrich Smetana and will finish with another Czech composer, Antonin Dvořák, and his Symphony No. 8.

Gluzman, 50, moved to Israel from Ukraine with his family in 1990, when he was 17, and splits his time away from the stage between Kfar Yona, near Tel Aviv, and the United States.

“It’s (Baal Shem) a glorious piece. You might call it the earliest version of what we know today as a crossover.”–Vadim Gluzman

Watching the suffering and destruction caused by Russia’s invasion has been heartbreaking for him to watch from afar.

“This happened to me in Winnipeg. Sitting in my hotel room, I was glued to the TV and I saw the block where my grandparents lived, where I visited every summer, completely destroyed,” he says. “I only recognized it because I recognized the remains of the school that was beside their block.

“I’m sure you know that Jewish history in Ukraine is not always bright. But what is happening now is not justified by any situation. It’s unbelievable to think this could actually happen in the 21st century, that such a war could take place.”

alan.small@winnipegfreepress.com

X: @AlanDSmall