MPR’s Dulcie Lawrence interviews violinist Charles Treger, who talks about competition, Polish audiences, playing with Stanisław Skrowaczewski, and the difficulty of Joachim’s Violin Concerto in D minor.
Treger was the first American to win a prestigious Henryk Wieniawski Violin Competition in Poznań, in Poland.
SPEAKER 1: Just this last time, I had-- I think it was about 12 concerts in three weeks and. It was-- I think it was my seventh trip since 1962. That's when the contest was held. That's when I won the competition. And that really got my career going.
SPEAKER 2: You were the first American to win that competition.
SPEAKER 1: Yes. And that, of course, afforded a lot of publicity.
SPEAKER 2: Is there any kind of a difference between the musical sophistication of a Polish audience, say a young Polish audience, and a young American audience?
SPEAKER 1: I think there is. Of course, in Poland, they have a great tradition of string playing. They understand the violin very well. They love violin music. So as a violinist, playing in Poland is very special experience. Because even the layman knows very, very much about the instrument, about the music, the different styles, periods of music. They know violin pieces very well.
And so you find really, even among the lay public, a very informed audience, a well-informed audience. People grow up with this. It is part of their tradition, part of their heritage, just as every young pole knows the history of his country backwards and forwards, dates, things that sometimes young people in this country tend to feel is irrelevant and superfluous.
The pole, I think regards this very deeply, and it's very much a part of his life. And it's possible because Poland has gone through such trying times in the centuries of being torn apart, and then coming together again. And it seemed every time a war was to be started, everybody would choose Poland to start the war on or at. And I think because of this, they're very conscious of their heritage, their history, and their culture.
SPEAKER 2: What about the piece that you'll be playing this evening and tomorrow?
SPEAKER 1: Welcome Concerto is a fascinating piece. It is totally disappeared from the repertoire. And it probably hasn't been performed in public since I started playing it about two years ago maybe 60, 70 years. And what makes this interesting, an interesting fact is, first of all, it was written 15 years before the Brahms violin concerto.
And Brahms used many of the ideas not, actual thematic material, but timbre of the orchestration in the writing of his concerto, which as you know Joachim helped very much, helped Brahms in this. And the Joachim and the Brahms were considered in that day to be the two major concertos for the violin.
SPEAKER 2: How do you explain the kind of disappearance from the repertoire of the Joachim?
SPEAKER 1: Joachim was not a great composer. And even though this is a very significant and important piece, I think somehow society tends-- well, he'd been doing this for a while. And I think now we're getting back. We call it nostalgia. But I think it's more important and deeper than that.
That's a little surface too, as you know, that we're interested now in nostalgia. I think what we're interested in are those wonderful things that came say in music from composers who are not considered nowadays as being the great composers, but they made some very important contributions.
SPEAKER 2: And this was his main contribution, was it?
SPEAKER 1: It was his major contribution.
SPEAKER 2: And only, would you say?
SPEAKER 1: I think when-- yes. If you take all his compositions, I think this is the outstanding composition. And so in itself, one really major composition is probably not enough to keep a composer himself everlasting in that way, but it's up to violinists, as it always has been, to keep this piece in the repertoire. I'm playing it about a dozen times this season. And everywhere I've played it, it's been met with wonderful success.
It's a very romantic piece. It could be if not the most difficult, it ranks with the most difficult ever written. There is absolutely everything in that concerto, and it's technically very demanding. Musically, it's not a fluff piece at all. I mean, it's in D minor and it's a very kind of gutsy piece and a lot of playing in it.
SPEAKER 2: Had you met Maestro Skrowaczewski before?
SPEAKER 1: Yes, I've played a number of times with him, and I adore playing with him. I always look forward to it because I feel he's one of the greatest accompanists, being a great as well as being a great conductor, but he's one of the great accompanists today. And for a soloist, it's always a thrill to have someone who is really superb.
And this rehearsal today, he had never conducted this before. The orchestra was reading it. And it is very difficult to follow. There's rubato and tempo changes all the time. And I have, from my point of view, really for the first time, it was quite remarkable, really remarkable.
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