Marsalis, Benedetti and Măcelaru album featured on WCRB
Wynton Marsalis’ Violin Concerto & Fiddle Dance Suite Decca Classics album received a GRAMMY Award on January 26, 2020 (Photo credit: Jake Turney)
Composer Wynton Marsalis and violinist Nicola Benedetti were recently featured on WCRB’s “Out of the Box” program with Chris Voss. The show presents new classical releases each week. This week's “Out of the Box” segment highlights Marsalis’ Violin Concerto and Fiddle Dance Suite — in which Nicola Benedetti and Cristian Măcelaru recently won Best Classical Instrumental Solo GRAMMY awards. Listen to the show here and read more about it below.
Out of the Box: Marsalis’s GRAMMY-Winning Violin Music
By Chris Voss
99.5 WCRB
February 7, 2020
Jazz legend Wynton Marsalis weaves multiple music traditions together and crafts an entirely unique Violin Concerto and Fiddle Dance Suite for classical violinist Nicola Benedetti.
WHAT: Wynton Marsalis: Violin Concerto and Fiddle Dance Suite / Nicola Benedetti, violin with The Philadelphia Orchestra and Cristian Măcelaru
MUST LISTEN: I particularly enjoy the Blues movement from the Violin Concerto, as well as As the Wind Goes and Nicola's Strathsbey from the Fiddle Dance Suite.
WHY THIS MUSIC: I've wanted to feature this music since I first heard it last summer because it's so cool and taps into so many musical traditions. And with Nicola Benedetti winning this year's GRAMMY for Best Solo Classical Performance, this is as good a time as any! Plus, this album and the music on it are a celebration of having multiple passions and interests, which I deeply appreciate. Why love just one thing? Love it all!
Wynton Marsalis is one of those musicians who crosses genres with ease.
Born in New Orleans in 1961, Wynton Marsalis picked up the trumpet at an early age and intended to follow a classical performance path, before jazz took hold of him in '80s. Since then, he has kept his feet firmly planted in both worlds, releasing multiple jazz and classical albums over the last thirty-plus years. In fact, he is the only musician to win a GRAMMY in both jazz and classical traditions in the same year.
Today he is best known for his work as a jazz musician, composer, and bandleader, and as artistic director of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. But his most recent compositions, his Concerto in D for Violin and Orchestra and his Fiddle Dance Suite, are actually for (and in collaboration with) the Scottish classical violinist Nicola Benedetti. Both pieces are entirely unique, taking their cues not only from the jazz and classical worlds, but from folk and blues traditions too.
Fusing all of those compositional traditions together is no easy task, a fact not lost on the composer. "I love jazz music and I love the orchestra," says Wynton Marsalis in a BBC documentary on the writing of his Violin Concerto. "Now, I think the two can come together. I may not be the person to do it, but somebody can do it."
For Nicola Benedetti, whom Marsalis has mentored since she first broke onto the international concert scene in 2004 at age 16, there is no doubt as to who the person is to do it.
"I mean," she enthused to me in a recent interview, "try to think of other musicians who have genuinely loved, played, studied, and analyzed the music of Bach, Beethoven, Bartók, and Shostakovich, just as much as they have Duke Ellington or John Coltrane or Miles Davis, and equally that of all the folk traditions, and the early Blues traditions!"
The end result is fantastic, and both the Violin Concerto and the Fiddle Dance Suite achieve exactly what Marsalis intended to do: to faithfully weave a multitude of musical traditions together, creating pieces that are not wholly jazz nor classical, but something entirely new.
To read the full article, click here.