- It's, of course, been a interesting year.

I've been pleasantly surprised by the response to consuming music and art online, and it actually forced a lot of us to be creative in the way we presented music, and people were very thirsty for music.

- This time gave us the opportunity to work a new repertoire for us because we are always in different parts of the world.

And first of all, we've enjoyed each other's company more than we would have ever had.

- I think a lot of what we discovered during this process, I think, will continue on after we are back in the swing of things.

[wistful music] [singing in foreign language] My partner here for this concert, Larisa Martinez, and I, since we live together and we're married, we were the only ones we could make music with during this time, and it was very fortunate that I had a wife that sings so beautifully and we could make music together.

So that actually spurred us on to create some new arrangements of music and make music together in ways that we might not have done had it not been for the pandemic, so there were some silver linings during this time.

I always put Mozart and Mendelssohn together.

They were these two, the two greatest child geniuses of all time, and certainly there's a sensibility to Mendelssohn that sort of comes from Mozart in a lot of ways.

If you ask most singers who their favorite composer is, I'd say nine out of 10 will say Mozart.

- Well, he wrote this aria for his sister-in-law, who he once had a crush on.

He wanted to marry her instead, but that didn't happen and he married her sister instead, but that's another story.

He wrote it for her to show off at another opera, not even his own opera.

Just another composer of the time had written an opera, and he wrote it as an insertion aria for her to show off in this opera.

[mellow music] [singing in foreign language] [people applauding] - We talk about Mendelssohn and Mozart being the great child prodigies, but Wieniawski himself was an incredible prodigy.

Of course, he was traveling Europe, playing as a virtuoso as an early teenager, but also as a composer, he wrote his first violin concerto, which I love, the other one, when he was only 16 years old.

And so in a way, this program is full of these prodigy composers.

The "Wieniawski Concerto Number Two" is really one of the pieces that made me fall in love with the violin.

At summer camp when I was 11 years old, someone gave me a cassette tape, that's how long ago it was, and I had a little cassette recorder player.

This was a tape of Jascha Heifetz, who became my idol, and was playing this Wieniawski concerto.

And I remember, lights out at the summer camp, you were supposed to be asleep, but I would actually listen to music, listen to this tape for pleasure.

The beauty of playing these pieces by violin composers, like Vieuxtemps or Wieniawski or Paganini is that it's just, it's written in a way that exploits the instrument in a way that even Beethoven could not do.

There's something that this offers that's, it milks the instrument for everything it's worth technically.

I refer to Wieniawski sort of as the Chopin of the violin.

They were both from the same country, Poland, and there's a lot of this similar sort of songwriting in the music that I find a lot of comparisons between the two.

And actually lately I've been doing a lot of Chopin and arranging Chopin piano music for the violin.

So after doing that and going back to the Wieniawski, I'm seeing it in new ways, and this is a piece I've played for almost 40 years now.

And it's constantly changing, and I've recently just kind of fallen in love with the piece again in a new way.

The centerpiece of the concerto is the middle movement, the slow movement, which is sometimes played on its own because it's just such a beautiful melody; it's the romance.

It's a perfect centerpiece before you get into the gypsy zingara last movement, which just takes off like wildfire and then erupts into this joyous gypsy elements.

And then, of course, it ends with a bang.

It's really anything one would ever want from a violin concerto.

[pensive music] [poignant music] [dynamic music] [people applauding] [poignant music] [people applauding]