Meet Avi Avital, Israeli Mandolin Virtuoso About to embark on a limited tour, the charming musician uses an unusual instrument to lend welcome new textures to familiar classical music. By David Mermelstein
https://www.wsj.com/articles/meet-avi-avital-israeli-mandolin-virtuoso-1486668539
At a time when many classical musicians are scrambling to book trendy alternative venues (mostly bars and clubs), the Israeli mandolin virtuoso Avi Avital is doing exactly the opposite—taking his folk instrument to concert halls around the world to perform with musicians more typically at home in such places.
Last September, Mr. Avital, age 38 and based in Berlin, made his debut with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, performing Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” for an audience of around 10,000 at the Hollywood Bowl. In December, he appeared with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, performing both a concerto he commissioned from Avner Dorman in 2006 and one by Vivaldi. Later that month, he joined the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center for two concerts of Baroque music at Alice Tully Hall in New York.
On Thursday, he and the harpsichordist Kenneth Weiss perform a nearly all-Baroque program at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, right before Mr. Avital and the Dover Quartet resume a tour that sandwiches three appearances on the West Coast between dates in Toronto on Saturday and Vancouver on Feb. 19. The programs include arrangements of six miniatures by the Georgian composer Sulkhan Tsintsadze, a favorite of Mr. Avital’s, and a 23-minute piece from 2013 written for mandolin and string quartet by David Bruce, which Mr. Avital and the Dover plan to record. In addition, Mr. Avital will perform a transcription of the Chaconne from Bach’s Second Partita for Solo Violin.
Mr. Avital first gained wide attention in 2012, when Deutsche Grammophon, with whom he now has an exclusive contract, released an album of Bach transcriptions he produced himself. His arrangement there of Bach’s First Violin Concerto makes a compelling case for his instrument’s ability to lend welcome new textures to familiar music without compromising the score’s integrity. That principle received ideal expression on his second album: the aptly titled “Between Worlds,” a gratifying compendium of folk-inflected music by composers as diverse as Béla Bartók, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Manuel de Falla, Astor Piazzolla and Ernest Bloch. His third and most recent CD, an all-Vivaldi record, returned him to the classical mainstream, albeit in music largely adapted for his instrument—the fecund composer having written just two works expressly for mandolin. (Mr. Avital’s next album, “Avital Meets Avital,” arriving this spring, pivots in another direction, pairing him with the jazz bassist and composer Omer Avital, no relation, in music that pays homage to their shared Moroccan heritage.)
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