CHIMACUM — Port Townsend native and violinist Larissa Freier will be the featured musician with the Port Townsend Community Orchestra for a performance of the Bruch Violin Concerto at 2 p.m. Sunday.
The free performance will be at the Chimacum High School auditorium, 91 West Valley Road.
Freier, a native of Port Townsend, began her violin studies when she was 5.
She graduated magna cum laude from the University of Puget Sound in May 2017.
While at school, Freier acted as co-concertmaster of the University Symphony Orchestra and performed in recitals alongside faculty on the University of Puget Sound Jacobsen Concert Series.
Her summers were spent at music festivals around the country, including Bowdoin in Maine, Brevard in North Carolina and Kairos Lyceum in Eastern Washington.
She has performed on stage with Itzak Perlman, Garrick Olson and Vadym Kholodenko. Currently, she lives and teaches violin and viola in Tacoma and Gig Harbor.
“Playing the Bruch Violin Concerto now brings back memories of my junior year of high school, when I first learned and performed parts of the piece,” Freier said.
“While preparing for this concert, I discovered how my interpretation and understanding of the music has changed over the last six years and also how much technical progress I have made. I am excited to play it with full orchestra this time around.”
While Max Bruch wrote three of them, this one is considered one of the top 10 violin concerti of all time, organizers said.
Taking four years and dozens of revisions to create, Bruch on one hand includes the rich sound of the mid-19th century Romantic music, and on the other showcases the full range of the violin’s capabilities.
Also on the schedule is Verdi’s “Nabucco,” based loosely on Babylonian ruler Nebuchadnezzar.
The overture contains several arias and melodies of this popular opera.
These include “l maledetta non ha fratelli” (The damned one has no brothers) and “Va, pensiero” (Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves).
Many other themes from the opera are included throughout the overture.
Rounding out the concert is Jean Sibelius’ “Karelia Suite.”
Sibelius lived during a period when Finnish nationalism was growing even though the people lived within the Russian empire, Karelia being a region overlapping the current Finnish-Russian border.
Drawing on Karelian tunes, Sibelius painted a picture with an 11-movement tableau.
Unsatisfied with it as a concert piece, he extracted three movements and combined them into the suite we know today.
For more information, go to www.porttownsend orchestra.org.
