by Stephen Kaye
On Saturday, July 20, Geneva Lewis played a solo violin in the Sunken Garden at Caramoor in Katonah. We went because Geneva is playing in an ensemble at The Stissing Center on October 13, and we wanted to get an idea of what she would do as a soloist. We were also curious about how her solo violin would sound in an outdoor setting. As it turned out, we had heard her at Zankel (one of the three halls at Carnegie Hall) as a member of the Kronberg Academy recent grad group that appears annually at Carnegie.
Since her solo debut at age 11 with the Pasadena POPS, Geneva has gone on to perform with orchestras including the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Pasadena Symphony, Sarasota Orchestra, Pensacola Symphony and Duluth Superior Symphony Orchestra and with conductors including Nicholas McGegan, Edwin Outwater, Michael Feinstein, Sameer Patel, Peter Rubardt, and Dirk Meyer. The 2022-23 season includes performances with the Auckland Philharmonia, North Carolina Symphony, Augusta Symphony, Kansas City Symphony, Austin Symphony, and Arkansas Symphony. In recital, recent and upcoming highlights include performances at Wigmore Hall, Tippet Rise, Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, Washington Performing Arts, Merkin Hall, and the Dame Myra Hess Memorial Concerts.
The theme of the concert was Music and Meditation. The formality of the symmetrical walled garden is softened, by the colorfully informal planting which makes for an inviting and warm setting against a background of graceful tall trees offering partial shade. The acoustics were blissfully perfect: the air was still, the trees stood silently, we could hear the buzzing of bees and the birds twittering; the violin did well in the humidity, a work by G.B. Guadagnini, c. 1766.
Her job was to play for 45 minutes solid without a break between the seven pieces that included Telemann, Bach, Saariaho, and Ysaye played non-stop with respectful pauses; clarity, finesse, as well as gentleness, were her hallmarks. She brings us into each piece gently: she develops it with care, and showers us with her devotion to music that she knows so well she barely needs a score. Complex double stopping, plucking, and the challenges of Ysaye were handled adroitly. The audience was rapt. We could relax in the spaciousness of our surroundings devoting our attention to the unraveling of what she was playing. Children sat transfixed without a murmur. It was indeed a meditation.
Geneva has won a series of awards: the 2022 Borletti-Buitoni Trust Award, a 2021 Avery Fisher Career Grant, and the Grand Prize winner of the 2020 Concert Artists Guild Competition. Additional accolades include Kronberg Academy’s Prince of Hesse Prize; she was a Performance Today Young Artist in Residence, and Musical America’s New Artist of the Month. Most recently, Geneva was named one of BBC Radio 3’s New Generation Artists.
She has ample exposure on YouTube; she is an Evinan Rising Star, an award from Caramoor.
