Festival Guest: Chloë Hanslip
Festival Guest: Chloë Hanslip
Chloë Hanslip and the NZSO are presenting a concert of mainly American music as part of the New Zealand International Festival of the Arts.
One piece Hanslip is playing is a work by contemporary American composer John Corigliano, who deserves to be better known in New Zealand, says NZSO Artistic Planning Manager Rachel Hyde. For the past decade or so, his music has been very popular overseas, but we have been slow to catch on here, she says.
“Everyone who saw that film The Red Violin would recognise his music from that soundtrack. It did a lot for Joshua Bell’s career, too.”
Hyde is looking forward to hearing Hanslip play with the NZSO in the Festival programme, “Resonances”. She will play the Chaconne from The Red Violin.
A greater part of the programme will be taken up with another American composer better known here, John Adams. That hypnotic blend of Romantic harmony and minimalist structure, Shaker Loops, opens the programme, and one of his latest works, the Doctor Atomic Symphony, closes it. The symphony is based on Adams’ opera about the development of the atomic bomb. It was completed only last year.
Hanslip has been in the public eye since a very young age. At the age of ten she appeared as the “infant prodigy violinist” in Ralph Fiennes’ film adaptation of Pushkin`s Evgeny Onegin, and her participation in a masterclass with Maxim Vengerov, at the age of 11, was widely broadcast on BBC Channel 4.
Somehow, despite a heavy practice schedule she has maintained for years – she has been playing since she was three, and studying seriously since she was five – Hanslip finds time for a fun-loving life outside of music. She loves cars – Minis and Mercedes Benzes especially – despite a hair-raising encounter with a 40-ton lorry on the M25 last year that spun her into a wall. Nothing daunted, she still enjoys watching Formula One racing. And not unlike last year’s youthful, atheletic player Leila Josefowicz, who does kick-boxing to relax, Hanslip does Bhangra and salsa dancing at the gym.
Now at the age of 20, she is already
an established international artist of distinction. Her
recent recording for Naxos of the John Adams Violin Concerto
with the RPO under Leonard Slatkin entered the UK Classical
Charts at number 2, and Philip Clark, writing in Gramophone,
concluded that “Playing like this should secure Chloë
Hanslip's reputation for life”. Her two earlier CDs with
the London Symphony Orchestra for Warner Classics, won her,
respectively, the German “Echo Klassik Award for Best
Newcomer” in 2002, and “Young British Classical
Performer” at the Classical BRITS
2003.
Resonances
Saturday, March 1
Michael Fowler
Centre, Wellington, 8pm
CHLOË HANSLIP Violin
JONATHAN
STOCKHAMMER Conductor
NZSO
Programme:
ADAMS Shaker
Loops
CORIGLIANO Chaconne from The Red Violin
PIAZOLLA
arr ADAMS La mufa; Todo Buenos Aires
BRETT DEAN:
Ceremonial
ADAMS Doctor Atomic Symphony
Visit New Zealand International Arts Festival website for more information