Timothy Judd

A native of Upstate New York, Timothy Judd has been a member of the Richmond Symphony violin section since 2001. He is a graduate of the Eastman School of Music where he earned the degrees Bachelor of Music and Master of Music, studying with world renowned Ukrainian-American violinist Oleh Krysa. The son of public school music educators, Timothy Judd began violin lessons at the age of four through Eastman’s Community Education Division. He was a student of Anastasia Jempelis, one of the earliest champions of the Suzuki method in the United States. A passionate teacher, Mr. Judd has maintained a private violin studio in the Richmond area since 2002 and has been active coaching chamber music and numerous youth orchestra sectionals. In his free time, Timothy Judd enjoys working out with Richmond’s popular SEAL Team Physical Training program.

Ives’ “The Unanswered Question”: Perennial Mysteries in a Cosmic Expanse

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The fifth installment of Leonard Bernstein’s 1973 Harvard lecture series, The Unanswered Question, takes on “The Twentieth Century Crisis.” Drawing upon linguistics and its subcategory of phonology, Bernstein outlines an aesthetic crisis: the gradual over-saturation of ambiguity which, amid increasing chromaticism, stretched tonality and 19th century Romanticism to the breaking point, resulting in the twelve-tone music pioneered by Arnold Schoenberg. Underlying the aesthetic crisis is a deeper and more terrifying reality: With the …

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Remembering György Pauk

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György Pauk, the renowned Hungarian violinist and teacher, passed away last Monday, November 18 in Budapest. He was 88. Pauk lost both of his parents to the Holocaust. He was raised by his grandmother in a Budapest ghetto where he experienced “hunger, cold, and fear.” Pauk began playing the violin at the age of 5. At 13, he was admitted to the Franz Liszt Academy of Music, where his teachers included violinist …

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Walter Piston’s Sinfonietta: American Mid-Century Neoclassicism

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It can be argued that, far from being restrictive and stifling, rules and parameters create conditions for the ultimate creativity. Such is the case with the music of American composer Walter Piston (1894-1976), with its sublime contrapuntal lines and adherence to neoclassical structure and form. Born in Rockland, Maine, Piston taught for many years at Harvard University, and contributed three significant text books on the technical building blocks of music: Harmony (1941), Counterpoint (1947), …

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Brahms’ Tragic Overture: Mysterious and Melancholy

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By habit, Johannes Brahms often composed pairs of contrasting works in the same genre. Brahms’ two concert overtures, written during the summer of 1880, follow this pattern of compositional yin and yang. The impetus for the witty and celebratory Academic Festival Overture, a collection of frolicking student songs intricately developed, was an honorary doctorate, awarded to the composer by the University of Breslau. Tragic Overture, Op. 81 formed the companion piece. Describing …

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Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 28 in A Major: Impressions and Reveries

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Composed during the summer of 1816, the Sonata No. 28 in A Major, Op. 101 is the first of Beethoven’s five “late period” piano sonatas. It is music filled with mystery and divine revelation. Isolated from the world as a result of nearly total hearing loss, Beethoven, in his final years, conceived of music unlike anything which came before. Gone is the classical charm, and ferocious revolutionary struggle of the earlier periods. …

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Shunske Sato Plays Vivaldi: “Autumn” from “The Four Seasons”

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Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons (Le quattro stagioni) is one of the earliest and most iconic examples of programmatic music. Vivaldi composed the collection of four violin concerti, each depicting a season of the year, during his tenure as music director at the court chapel of Mantua. Together with eight additional concerti, the works were published in Amsterdam in 1725 under the enticing title, Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’inventione (“The Contest Between Harmony and …

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Sondheim’s “Pacific Overtures”: Five Excerpts From a Kabuki Musical

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Patrons of Broadway were met with a surprise when, on the evening of January 11, 1976, they packed the Winter Garden Theatre for the opening of Stephen Sondheim’s Pacific Overtures. Sondheim later called the show “the most bizarre and unusual musical ever to be seen in a commercial setting.” (Finishing the Hat) Directed and produced by Hal Prince, with a book by John Weidman, Pacific Overtures chronicles the 1853 American “gunboat diplomacy” of …

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