Cast
Hagai Shaham — Teacher, violinist
Suzan Yanki Karatas — Violinist
Sander Sittig — Pianist
Program notes
Hagai Shaham gives a master class on Ravel’s Tzigane.
Ravel's exotic showpiece Tzigane was inspired and premiered by Hungarian violinist Jelly d'Arányi, an inheritor of the virtuosic Joachim school of Hungarian violin-playing. The first performance in London on April 26, 1924–which featured the exotic accompaniment of a piano luthéal–was a huge success, despite d'Arányi's having received the completed score on a few days beforehand. Soon afterward, Ravel wrote a second version of the work with orchestral accompaniment.
Hagai Shaham teaches at the Buchmann-Mehta School of Music at Tel Aviv University and he is Artist in Residence at Stony Brook University, New York. Student of the late renowned Professor Ilona Feher, he is the co-founder and a board member of the Ilona Feher Foundation for promoting young Israeli violinists. Shaham's awards include first prizes at the ARD Munich Competition and the Israel Broadcasting Authority Competition. Shaham highly motivates his students to reach out for the best possible performance and possesses a lot of background knowledge of the repertoire.
