The Viano Quartet and Augustin Hadelich Have Seasoned Their Performances from Summer Experience
By David Lewellen
Ravinia’s long-running summer training program for young professional musicians, the Steans Music Institute, has nurtured many careers— over 1,600 individual artists since 1988—at impressionable moments, and those who go on to bigger things often return in later years as part of main- stage programming. Among others, this summer violinist Augustin Hadelich will solo with the Chicago Symphony on July 25, more than 20 years after he spent a summer at the Steans Institute playing chamber music. And on July 18, the Viano Quartet will appear in the Martin Theatre, only four years after their virtual Steans experience during the pandemic year of 2020.
From its founding, the Steans Institute has concentrated on chamber music for classical piano and strings (later adding programs focused on classical voice and instrumental jazz), but it’s also an opportunity for young performers to make new connections and learn more about how to build a career. “You meet new people, and you share something with people who have a different perspective,” said Hao Zhou, violinist for the Viano Quartet. “It’s a great contrast, but it’s also a chance to meet people with the same passion as you.”
In the Viano’s case, when the pandemic shut down in-person gatherings, the Steans Institute’s pivot to streaming and Zoom meetings was reassuring to them. It displayed a commitment to the participants, Zhou said, and they could “still work on music and share ideas with each other.”
The foursome—Zhou, violinist Lucy Wang, violist Aiden Kane, and cellist Tate Zawadiuk—got together as undergraduates at the Colburn School in Los Angeles, and have stayed together through graduate school at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia and many other residencies and festivals. “You grow with these people,” Zhou said. “I think we’re very lucky that we met the way we did and grew with each other. Musically, we all get along very well.”
“My time at the Steans Institute in 2003, as an awkward teenager not used to being away from home, was a time of discovery,” Hadelich said. “It was there, actually, that I fell in love with chamber music.” Up until then, he had had relatively little experience in the genre, but “when I went to the Steans Institute, my goal was just to play great chamber music with great players, for inspiring coaches.”
Although the majority of his schedule is now solo appearances with orchestras, Hadelich said, “chamber music remains the foundation of my playing.” For that reason, he said, “I don’t think chamber music programs are career-building, per se. They are more in the category of musician-building.”
Hadelich’s turn as a soloist with the CSO will be in the Mendelssohn concerto, a staple of the repertoire since its premiere in 1845. “Despite its wonderful orchestration and beautiful, rich orchestral parts, the violinist is the hero of the story, the center of attention,” he said. “The violin enters straight away at the start of the piece, with great urgency. The lyrical moments are the highlights for me. For example, the opening of the piece is unforgettable, it’s such a soaring, beautiful melody, unfolding over an anxious heartbeat rhythm in the orchestra.”
Mendelssohn was also a prolific chamber music composer, and Hadelich has played the octet frequently. “But every piece of his that I played helped me understand the concerto and him better,” he said.
And that approach can be extended across all repertoire and all composers. “I discovered eventually that there isn’t all that much difference between chamber music and concerto playing,” Hadelich said. “The hall might be bigger, but a soloist still has to be aware of, listen to, reach to the orchestral parts.”
That is a skill that is honed in small-group playing. The Viano Quartet does not have a designated first or second violinist—Zhou and Wang switch from one piece to the next. But even in the traditional arrangement, Zhou said, everyone gets a voice. “You can feel it if someone’s dissatisfied,” he said. Negotiating musicians’ different ideas can be hard, but ideally everyone gets something.
And at an other summer festival, his group learned a lasting lesson in that approach. “Ultimately the music is the boss,” Zhou said. It was at the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival in Connecticut when Miró Quartet violinist William Fedkenheuer [himself a Steans alum, from the summer of 1999] talked to the young ensemble about leadership. “The dynamics in the group shift with different parts of the music,” Zhou said. “He told us, ‘Who would you want to deliver the musical message? Who are you looking to for cues?’” The answer might be different at any specific moment in a piece, and that perspective “helped us weave the threads together in a way we hadn’t thought of before.”
At another festival in Montreal, Zhou remembered, members of the Alban Berg Quartet helped them to learn how to comment on one another’s work in a way that was direct but not hurtful. “That’s what summer festivals are for,” he said.
Their Ravinia program, in conjunction with guitarist Miloš Karadaglić, explores themes of immigration and identity, with single movements from a guitar quintet by Mario Castelneovo-Tedesco spaced throughout the program of short works by composers from the Baroque period to the present day.
“It’s relevant to all five of us, because we’ve moved around a lot,” Zhou said. Castelneuovo-Tedesco fled Italy in 1939 to escape Mussolini’s regime, and “stories like that can enrich our music-making,” he said. To the vexed question of how music crosses cultures, Zhou said that approaching with humility is important —“an attitude of ‘what can I learn that’s new that might blow my mind?’” The music on the program, he said, focuses on how composers “have gone through something in their life and made discoveries and put different styles together.”
Summer festivals may also offer a chance to learn more about the business or logistics of a musical career. “Tate knows that every airline is different on how they handle a cello,” Zhou said, referring to Viano cellist Zawadiuk. “We’ve learned about rental cars, and how to stuff a quartet into one vehicle. When we did our first European tour, there was a lot of dealing with travel, making sure that a train delay here didn’t mess up our concert in the next city.”
Looking back over his own career, Hadelich thinks that “the most important choice of all” was moving to the United States in 2004, one year after his Steans summer. “When I came to New York to study, it was in some ways a new beginning for me,” he said. “I was starting over in a new place.”
Now that the Viano Quartet members are in their late 20s, they are in a position to offer some advice to younger players. The foursome has worked at Southern Methodist University for three years doing side-by-sides and coaching sessions. “The day you think you have it all figured out is the day you stop improving as an artist,” Zhou said.
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David Lewellen is a Milwaukee-based journalist who writes regularly for the Chicago Symphony, Milwaukee Symphony, and other classical websites.