James Ehnes, violin & Orion Weiss, piano

Saturday, March 13, 2021 | 8:00 pm

Virtual Spring

Duke Performances is excited to present our virtual season – The Show Must Go Online! High-quality, commissioned films featuring artists originally slated for in-person performances will premiere on Vimeo for ticket holders. Each film, shot following local safety protocols, is made in collaboration with an audio and video crew in each artist’s home city. 

General admission tickets are $10 per presentation and Duke Student tickets are available free of charge through the support of the Provost and the Vice Provost for the Arts at Duke University. Chamber Arts Series subscriptions, including all three concerts, are available at a discount of 25% off for $22.50. Tickets go off sale at 8 PM ET on the day of the presentation. Ticket buyers will receive a unique Vimeo link to watch the presentation online from the Duke University Box Office before the listed start time. Films will be available for viewing for 72 hours.

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Renowned recitalist James Ehnes makes his Duke Performances debut with pianist Orion Weiss in a programme of violin sonatas from across two centuries. Ehnes, ‘a violinist in a class of his own’ (The Times), leads with a light, lyrical sonatina by Schubert, before moving on to Prokofiev’s Sonata No. 2 in D Major, which is both virtuosic and expressive due to the fact that it was originally written for flute. The pair will then turn their attention to Sonatine, a recent work by Aaron Jay Kernis, one of the youngest composers to have ever been awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Kernis and Ehnes are longterm collaborators, having won a Grammy together in 2019 for the violinist’s recording of the Kernis’s Violin Concerto, which BBC Music Magazine praised as being an ‘incredibly powerful live performance, the taxing violin part superbly executed.’ Stepping back again to the 19th century, Saint-Saëns’s First Sonata concludes the evening, a piece first premiered in 1885 with the composer himself at the piano.

— Freya Parr

Click to view the full program for this performance.

Program