Festival Guest: Chloë Hanslip

Festival Guest: Chloë Hanslip

Chloë Hanslip and the NZSO are presenting a concert of mainly American music as part of the New Zealand International Festival of the Arts.

One piece Hanslip is playing is a work by contemporary American composer John Corigliano, who deserves to be better known in New Zealand, says NZSO Artistic Planning Manager Rachel Hyde. For the past decade or so, his music has been very popular overseas, but we have been slow to catch on here, she says.

“Everyone who saw that film The Red Violin would recognise his music from that soundtrack. It did a lot for Joshua Bell’s career, too.”

Hyde is looking forward to hearing Hanslip play with the NZSO in the Festival programme, “Resonances”. She will play the Chaconne from The Red Violin.

A greater part of the programme will be taken up with another American composer better known here, John Adams. That hypnotic blend of Romantic harmony and minimalist structure, Shaker Loops, opens the programme, and one of his latest works, the Doctor Atomic Symphony, closes it. The symphony is based on Adams’ opera about the development of the atomic bomb. It was completed only last year.

Hanslip has been in the public eye since a very young age. At the age of ten she appeared as the “infant prodigy violinist” in Ralph Fiennes’ film adaptation of Pushkin`s Evgeny Onegin, and her participation in a masterclass with Maxim Vengerov, at the age of 11, was widely broadcast on BBC Channel 4.

Somehow, despite a heavy practice schedule she has maintained for years – she has been playing since she was three, and studying seriously since she was five – Hanslip finds time for a fun-loving life outside of music. She loves cars – Minis and Mercedes Benzes especially – despite a hair-raising encounter with a 40-ton lorry on the M25 last year that spun her into a wall. Nothing daunted, she still enjoys watching Formula One racing. And not unlike last year’s youthful, atheletic player Leila Josefowicz, who does kick-boxing to relax, Hanslip does Bhangra and salsa dancing at the gym.

Now at the age of 20, she is already an established international artist of distinction. Her recent recording for Naxos of the John Adams Violin Concerto with the RPO under Leonard Slatkin entered the UK Classical Charts at number 2, and Philip Clark, writing in Gramophone, concluded that “Playing like this should secure Chloë Hanslip's reputation for life”. Her two earlier CDs with the London Symphony Orchestra for Warner Classics, won her, respectively, the German “Echo Klassik Award for Best Newcomer” in 2002, and “Young British Classical Performer” at the Classical BRITS 2003.
Resonances

Saturday, March 1
Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington, 8pm

CHLOË HANSLIP Violin
JONATHAN STOCKHAMMER Conductor
NZSO

Programme:

ADAMS Shaker Loops
CORIGLIANO Chaconne from The Red Violin
PIAZOLLA arr ADAMS La mufa; Todo Buenos Aires
BRETT DEAN: Ceremonial
ADAMS Doctor Atomic Symphony

Visit New Zealand International Arts Festival website for more information

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