Leonidas Kavakos admits he’s passionate about playing chamber music

Always a welcome guest at Symphony Center, violinist Leonidas Kavakos will return for an SCP Chamber Music recital on March 9. He will team up with pianist Daniil Trifonov, the CSO’s Artist-in-Residence this season. 

Their program pairs the classicism and romanticism of Beethoven and Brahms with the 20th-century modernism of Poulenc and Bartók. Kavakos and Trifonov will perform Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No. 4 in A Minor, Op. 23; Poulenc’s Violin Sonata; Brahms’ Violin Sonata No. 1 in G Major, Op. 78, and Bartók’s Rhapsody No. 1 for Violin and Piano.

In recent seasons, Kavakos has performed more chamber music as a means of exploring the close relationships that it generates. “I really like to do recitals, and I love playing chamber music," he said in an interview with the site Bachtrack. “I used to have my own chamber music festival. Now I go to the Verbier Festival [in Switzerland] every year to play chamber music, and I really enjoy that. With a recital, you get to play three or four big pieces, and for two hours you develop, with the audience, an atmosphere that is really unique. I love that.”

Kavakos did a similar program with pianist Yuja Wang several times over the last decade, including one featuring the three Brahms Violin Sonatas. Of the Brahms works, Kavakos told the site Violinist.com: "It’s just inspiring. It’s like being together with a great person; there are only things you can gain. These scores are such sources of wisdom and fantastic energy. The longer one works with them, the deeper one digs into the spirit that lies behind the notes, the better one becomes."

Asked if he has a favorite among the Brahms sonatas, Kavakos said answering that question is like asking someone if he has a favorite child: "It is. I can’t answer that question, sorry."

In the same interview, Kavakos spoke about Bartók and the influence of folk tunes on his music: "The great thing about him is that, even though he was such a talented and wonderfully gifted and skilled composer himself, he had the vision to understand how valuable the sources of the [folk] tunes are. Then he had the patience to travel and to collect them in a systematic way, in order to be able, later on, to embody what he collected, into the music that he wrote. His music is so fantastic because the folk music is at the center, it always has a human life to it.

"Therefore what comes out of that human life are the experiences — personal experiences or the collective experiences, because sometimes you have folk music that characterizes a country or religion or a tribe. Then all this folk music that is very unique, personal and pronounced, becomes part of Bartók’s music."

“With a recital, you get to play three or four big pieces, and for two hours, you develop, with the audience, an atmosphere that is really unique. I love that.” — Leonidas Kavakos

The Beethoven on the Chicago program is a violin sonata, but Kavakos and two other longtime chamber-music collaborators, pianist Emanuel Ax and cellist Yo-Yo Ma, have recorded a series called “Beethoven for Three” (Sony Classical) featuring transcriptions of the composer’s symphonies for a trio format. Their latest disc, the third in the series, has been nominated for a Grammy in the best chamber-music category.

The idea of playing arrangements of the composer’s symphonies emerged during the COVID-19 shutdown as way of providing listeners with a way of hearing these works when full orchestras could not perform them because of required spacing and other pandemic restrictions.

“Beethoven for Three” had its origins at the 2021 Tanglewood Music Festival, where Ax, Kavakos and Ma first played Beethoven’s Symphony No. 2 in the trio format. The performance was an instant success, and the first release in the series, “Beethoven for Three: Symphonies Nos. 2 and 5” (2022), was recorded soon after. 

After starting with an existing piano trio version of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 2, the three went on to commission transcriptions of other symphonies by the celebrated composer. “The music is incredible," Kavakos said in the disc’s liner notes. "And it’s so much fun to play the music we would never otherwise play because unfortunately or fortunately we’re not members of an orchestra.”

“We all feel that being able to participate in a symphony is such a wonderful thing to do,” Ma said in the liner notes. “One of the things that has separated people since recording began is the categories that we put people in, in which chamber musicians, orchestra players, people who play concertos, people who do transcriptions, people who compose, people who conduct, are all viewed as separate categories with no overlap.

That kind of siloed thinking discourages actual creativity and collaboration between people. And so we feel that one of the things that is really important to do today is to actually go back to the first principles of music, the simple interaction between friends who want to do something together."