by Kevork Keushkerian
PASADENA, Calif. — The Pasadena Symphony opened its 2023-2024 season on Saturday, October 21, with a classical concert that awed the audience. It was held at the Ambassador Auditorium under the baton of Conductor Brett Mitchell. The concert featured as a soloist violinist Diana Adamyan, 23.
The carefully selected program consisted of the following compositions: Garages of the Valley by Mason Bates, Violin Concerto No.2 in E Minor by Felix Mendelssohn and Symphony No. 4 in F Minor by Pyotr Tchaikovsky.
Adamyan is quickly gaining an international reputation as one of her generation’s most outstanding violinist after winning First Prize at the 2018 Yehudi Menuhin International Competition and First Prize in the 2020 Khachaturian Violin Competition.
She first attended Komitas State Conservatory in Yerevan and then the Tchaikovsky School of Music in Yerevan. Currently she studies at the Munich University of Performing Arts.
Diana appeared as a soloist in Gala Concert of Ottawa’s National Arts Center, alongside Maestro Pinchas Zukerman and Itzhak Perlman.
At the end of her flawless presentation and upon the audience’s repeated standing ovations, she returned to the stage and performed Gomidas Vartabed’s Groong (Crane). I think she was being true to her national identity and I admired her for that honest feeling.
Mason Bates is a Bay Area composer that wrote this piece in 2014. It is a tribute to the Silicon Valley’s great inventions of our time; such as Apple, Intel and Google. These visionaries he says, “Conjured new worlds within the bright Valley’s dark garages.”
Mendelssohn took 6 years to finish this concerto, which was written for his friend, the famed violinist Ferdinand David, concertmaster of the Gewandhaus Orchestra of Leipzig. David premiered it in Leipzig in 1845, but Mendelssohn was ill and unable to attend.
Tchaikovsky composed this symphony in 1877. He was strongly influenced by the events in his life that year. He dedicated the work to Mme. von Meck, expressing his confidence in the new work: “I feel in my heart that this work is the best I have ever written.”
