Barber & Glass: Violin Concertos – Zorn: Partita for the Firebird

Violinist Geneva Lewis’s debut album is a frank, deeply personal statement — recorded shortly after her move to New York City, she chose three works that mirrored that moment of reinvention: Barber’s Violin Concerto, Op. 14, “an old and dear friend in which you feel you can fly”; John Zorn’s Partita for the Firebird, receiving its first recording; and Philip Glass’s Violin Concerto No. 1, which she says “haunted my thoughts” for years. The Barber — commissioned under famously fraught circumstances by industrialist Samuel Fels for his protégé Iso Briselli, who ultimately rejected its breathless perpetuum mobile finale — remains one of the 20th century’s most lyrically generous concertos. Zorn’s Partita, written for violinist Jennifer Choi after she was loaned the 1718 “Firebird” Stradivarius once owned by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, layers Stravinsky references over a Baroque dance-suite frame the composer himself warned would “kill you.” Glass’s Concerto, composed to honor his late father’s love of the violin repertoire, embeds a spelled-out “D-A-D” motif within an unusually operatic, dramatically charged structure.

Recorded with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under Gemma New — one of several collaborators Lewis singles out by name, alongside mentor John Zorn and producer Philip Hobbs — at BBC Studios Glasgow, the album captures a young artist translating a specific, lived moment into sound.

Geneva Lewis, violin
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Gemma New, conductor