Lenox — Members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, violinist Bonnie Bewick, violinist Bracha Malkin, violist Danny Kim, and cellist Mickey Katz will appear at the Linde Center for Music and Learning on Sunday, March 23, to perform a program of Dohnányi, Ponomarev, and Tchaikovsky.
The full program for March 23 is as follows:
- Dohnányi — Serenade in C, Op. 10
- Oleg Ponomarev (Arr. Bonnie BEWICK) — “Polonez” for string quartet
- Tchaikovsky — String Quartet No. 1 in D, Op. 11
I spoke with Bonnie Bewick by telephone last month to learn about the thinking behind Sunday’s program. We also talked about her work transcribing and arranging music for violin and small ensembles—specifically, her arrangement of the piece on Sunday’s program written by Russian-born violinist Oleg Ponomarev. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Your program for the 23rd looks fantastic.
It’s going to be fun.
I want to focus on “Polonez,” the piece by Oleg Ponomarev that you arranged for string quartet. It’s amazing!
Isn’t it?
Yeah! Did you keep all of that insanely virtuosic violin solo stuff at the opening?
Yes.
Who’s going to play that? You and Bracha?
Yeah, Bracha and I. We’re dividing it up a little bit. That cadenza thing at the beginning has to be played by somebody. So she had a lot on her plate around that time, and I asked her to do it. She’s like, “Yeah, sure. Fine.” And then I ending up doing it because I wrote it and she had a lot on her plate. So I’m going to do that, but it’s pretty evenly divided after that opening cadenza. And I also divvied it up so that the viola gets some very cool stuff too.
I originally arranged it for string quartet plus bass and guitar. And the guitar has a lot of rhythmic kind of stuff, so I’m going to have to divvy that up between us and just do a little bit of percussion on instruments and that kind of thing. So we’ll be working that out at the first rehearsal, I think.
Tell me more about that piece. How did you select it?
I got into folk music probably 20 years ago, and I was doing a lot of listening, mostly in the Celtic genre and jazz. I was doing a lot of imitating of Stéphane Grappelli and some of that gypsy jazz crossover stuff. And just as a well-trained classical musician, I think a lot of us are in this category: We’re very good listeners and very good imitators, so I was doing a lot of that in order to just get into the folk scene.
And also, as I got more into it, I started arranging pieces for a group that I played with called Childsplay, a violin sort of orchestra all featuring instruments made by Robert Childs. He’s a Boston violin maker, and his clients were mostly folk musicians. And so he had this whole group of people that got together to play his instruments, and we became a band, and there were Celtic, Scottish, jazz, bluegrass, and some Swedish fiddlers. And then I used to be the featured classical freak show, like the odd man out.
The token classical player?
Exactly. Yeah. And then I started getting more into the folk stuff, and then they stopped featuring the classical thing because it was just really out of the ordinary, and the group hung together better with the folk stuff.
It wasn’t just me that was arranging pieces for this group. A lot of artists in the group would arrange different segments of the program.
So the first piece I arranged that was in this genre was a piece off the same CD called “Turka,” and that piece is really—it’s like a gypsy version of “Orange Blossom Special.” And the Childsplay group just did a fantastic job with that, and we played it for three or four years, and it actually made it onto our CD. It was a favorite of that group.
And I also have played that with Classical Tangent, a group that I have with the BSO. So that has gotten a lot of mileage. This piece was me going back to that CD and saying, “What else can I work with?”
So I arranged this one. I think it’s pretty short on the CD, so I added a section. There’s a whole section in the middle that’s just my material, and it has some foot stomping in it and—I don’t know—just some stuff that I thought would be fun for the group, ’cause it was a little repetitive and it just didn’t have quite enough to it to be a separate piece and not just a track on a CD.
So that’s the story of the piece I arranged.
That sounds like fun. You didn’t happen to be in the Shed when Augustin Hadelich played “Orange Blossom Special” were you?
Oh, yes. I was there, and I have since clicked on the various YouTube videos of him playing it in different venues, and it’s crazy, just otherworldly. He merges those two—the folk tradition and the blues, and the bluegrass and his virtuoso technique. It’s just off the charts amazing.
Is there anything else we should know about the piece you arranged?
Just that whatever group I’ve worked with has always just embraced it and had a really, really great time with it. Whenever I work with my BSO colleagues and do folk music, they’re super supportive of what I arrange, and we always have a really great time. And it’s always meaningful and fun to pair these pieces that I arrange, or that I write, with legit classical music.
I don’t know of any other other violinist in a major symphony orchestras who has done what you are doing with folk music.
But I think it’s becoming more and more common for people to really look at this crossover category and try to just be on the lookout for folk traditions, for tunes, for that practice to creep into our classical world.
We’re constantly looking for arrangements. I know that Danish Quartet has done some really excellent work, both playing and publishing some of these chamber music versions of their traditional folk tunes.
So we’re always on the lookout for that, and that’s been a goal of mine for the past couple of decades, and I will continue. Definitely.
Do you count mandolinist Chris Thile among the musicians who have helped instigate a sort of folk music crossover movement?
Absolutely. He’s spearheaded that, hasn’t he?
It seems like it. Playing Bach Partitas at the end of bluegrass shows?
Yeah, he’s amazing with that. He makes that sound so easy too, and it’s not.
Who else plays Bach Partitas on a mandolin? There must be someone…
I bet you David Grisman did.
That wouldn’t surprise me.
Yeah. For all the work he did with Stéphane Grappelli… there was some gypsy crossover there too. They did a fantastic album together.
Are we likely to hear some Grappelli stylings from you in the future? Maybe an arrangement?
I have done that. I’ve been featured with the Boston Pops in a couple of different Grappelli arrangements. One of them was something that I pulled together and wrote. It was almost like a theme, like a doctoral theme thesis for me. And I had some help from an arranger, this piece called “Dark Eyes,” which is a traditional Russian tune that I arranged for violin and orchestra, but also some straight-up Grappelli tunes. He did “Skylark” and “Sweet Georgia Brown.” I’ve played that with the Boston Pops, with the band backing me up, and wow! The highlight of my career!
I love it!
It was so fun.
Let’s talk briefly about the Tchaikovsky. You’re playing his String Quartet No. 1. Why did you choose it?
Bracha chose that. With her Russian background, I think she wanted to pull that forward. And that’s another reason why I incorporated the gypsy piece with it, because there’s some tangential relationship there. But the piece is beautiful. I think it was from a very happy time in his life. The slow movement is a very famous slow movement that’s been arranged in different configurations for solo violin and for—I think I saw some piano arrangements, and it’s often featured…
That movement is popular by itself. And it made Leo Tolstoy cry.
Did it?
Yes.
That’s a fun fact.
Yeah. Tell me more about that piece.
I’ve played the quartet with other members of the Boston Symphony, so it’ll be my second adventure into it. And it’s really like a miniature symphony. It has the same kind of licks and runs as you run into in a Tchaikovsky symphony.
And the false endings?
Definitely. It’s just some uplifting, happy Tchaikovsky. And Bracha—she’s such an amazing violinist, and it’s going to be great to hear her really shine on that piece.
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Hear members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra at the Linde Center for Music and Learning on Sunday, March 23, 3 p.m., performing a program of Dohnányi, Ponomarev, and Tchaikovsky. More information and tickets are available here.
