Katariina Maria Kits (Katariina Kits) is an Estonian violinist born (in
Tallinn, Estonia) on May 2, 1995. She is
known for having more than 815,000 views on a YouTube post when she was only 15
years old. Here is that post. Unless I am seriously mistaken, she is still
a student at one of five music conservatories (I don’t know which one) in
Trossingen, Germany, although she has been concertizing since she was a
teenager. She is also known to love
violin competitions. I do not know at
what age she first began her violin studies but in 2002 she entered the Tallinn
Music School. She was 7 years old. Her first teacher there was Marge Lille. She has studied (in masterclasses) with Pavel
Vernikov* in Italy and Alf Kraggerud in Norway.
Kits won second prize in the Estonian National String Competition when
she was barely 11 years old. A year
later she won second prize in the Enescu Violin Competition in Romania. She has already toured Europe and Australia
as soloist with different orchestras. Here is an outstanding video of hers playing the 5th Mozart concerto in a competition. It is a mesmerizing and memorable performance (second to none) and it is not yet on YouTube. It is quite possible (although I don't know for sure) that Kits has a twin brother who is a cellist with whom she sometimes performs. Kits speaks three languages fluently - German, French, and English. As
do other young prominent violinists, she plays a modern violin made in Cremona,
Italy, in 2007.
Melanie
Clapies is a French violinist, teacher, and composer born (in Paris) on
December 16, 1981. She is one of less
than a handful of concert violinists who currently write works for their own
use, in the style of so many violinists of past generations – Tartini, Corelli,
Nardini, Geminiani, Biber, Vivaldi, Locatelli, Mozart, Leclair, Paganini, Viotti,
Lipinski, Gavinies, Spohr, Wieniawski, Joachim, Ernst, Vieuxtemps, De Beriot, Conus,
Enesco, Ysaye, Kreisler, Spalding, and Markov are among them. In fact, the tradition of the
violinist-composer has so much been neglected that violinists do not even write
their own cadenzas to concerti anymore.
Clapies does. As did Bronislaw
Huberman so many years ago, Clapies has had a good number of teachers. She began her violin studies at age 5 in
Paris and later, in the southern coastal city of Toulon, beginning at age 8,
with Solange Dessane (Toulon is located about 520 miles south of Paris but only
25 miles west of Saint-Tropez.) Her
public debut came at age 14. She later
studied with Pavel Vernikov and Christophe Poiget at the Lyon
Conservatory. She graduated in
2003. While studying in Lyon, she also
studied with John Glickman at the Guildhall School in London as an exchange
student. She later entered the Paris
Conservatory where she was a student of Ami Flammer and Claire Desert, graduating
in 2011. Clapies also received her
Master’s from Yale University in the US this year (2014.) Her chamber music studies were under the
tutelage of the world-famous Tokyo String Quartet and the Emerson String
Quartet. Clapies has already taught at
the conservatories in Toulon and Bordeaux, and at the Alfred Cortot Music
School in Paris (Zino Francescatti, Pablo Casals, Charles Munch, Jacques
Thibaud, and Paul Dukas were once teachers there.) She has also founded (with French cellist Yan
Levionnois) a Chamber Music Festival in Burgundy, France. Clapies has performed most extensively in
England, France, Italy, Russia, Canada, and the US. Leonard Bernstein once said that “music can
name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.” In a similar vein, Clapies has stated that
her compositions are attempts to catch something from the inexpressible. She has also stated the following: “To me, a
good interpreter is a researcher, someone able to find new ways to express and
reveal what the pieces possess. I find a
direct path to composition from there.
For me, composing is a means by which to interrogate my surroundings; to
make deeper my relation to it.” She
formerly played a Tommaso Carcassi violin and a modern violin by Italian
luthier Carlo Colombo Bruno but her current violin is a Joseph Gagliano from
1781. Nonetheless, Clapies also plays an
authentic (period instrument) baroque violin on occasion. Among the works in her extensive repertoire
is one of my favorites – the Schumann concerto.
Here is her recording of the second movement from it on YouTube with the
Amadeus Chamber Orchestra. You will
immediately notice that her playing is intensely poetic. Her recordings include a collection of duo
works – in a more contemporary vein - for violin and cello, available here. She is currently organizing a piano trio in
New York as well as a project which will feature the music of Ravel which
combines music and mime. In addition,
Clapies is also interested in conducting!
In her upcoming performances of the Beethoven concerto, she will be
using her own cadenza. (There are at
least ten cadenzas to the Beethoven concerto out there (Kreisler’s and
Joachim’s being the most played) and Heifetz used his own too (some of it
borrowed from Leopold Auer), but there are no contemporary violinists who play
their own original cadenzas so this will be a unique joy for her audiences.) Photo of Melanie Clapies is used courtesy of
Francois Olivier de Sardan.
