Music Worcester Presents 2023 Artist-in-Residence, Violinist Vijay Gupta in Recital

Music Worcester will present its Artist in Residence, violinist Vijay Gupta in a recital titled When the Violin, at Worcester's Mechanics Hall on Wednesday May 10 at 7pm. Tickets and information are available at
musicworcester.org.

Gupta, as the 2023 Artist-in-Residence at Music Worcester, is delivering a series of recitals and performances throughout the year, including collaborative presentations with The Worcester Chorus, Worcester Youth Orchestra, OpperTUNEity, and The Worcester County Jail and House of Corrections. In addition, he will participate in outreach in local middle and high schools, masterclass opportunities for college students, and coaching for young artists.

When the Violin is the title of a poem by the Sufi mystic Hafiz on the power of forgiveness and new identities, and provides the frame for this performance of works by JS Bach and Reena Esmail in collaboration with dance artist and choreographer Yamini Kalluri.

The recital will open with Bach's 2nd Partita in D minor with its concluding "Ciacona" - considered an Everest for violinists. The performance will present new choreography of the preceding baroque dance movements of Bach's Partita by Kalluri, who is trained as a classical Indian dancer as well as in the Martha Graham school of avant-garde ballet.

Following the D minor Partita comes Esmail's When The Violin, originally composed for choir and cello, and a companion work to the 16th century Spanish composer Victoria's O Vos Omnes. "The text of O Vos Omnes is asking, simply, to be seen in a moment of sorrow - to be beheld through suffering and darkness," said Esmail. "And Hafiz's text responds in such a beautiful way - it moves through that darkness and begins to let those very first slivers of light in."

Concluding the program is Bach's equally monumental 3rd Sonata in C major, which is believed to have been written for the occasion of Pentecost. The Sonata's 2nd movement, a revolutionary 3- part fugue written for a four-stringed violin, sets a Lutheran hymn "Komm, Heiliger Geist" (Come, Holy Spirit), and famously reverses the hymn subject in a feat of contrapuntal mastery."

Vijay Gupta is the founder and Artistic Director of Street Symphony, a community of musicians creating spaces of connection for people in reentry from homelessness, addiction and incarceration in Los Angeles. Vijay is also a co-founder of the Skid Row Arts Alliance, a consortium dedicated to creating art for - and with - the largest homeless community in America. For his work in "bringing beauty, respite, and purpose to those all too often ignored by society," Vijay was the recipient of a 2018 MacArthur Fellowship.