Festival Orchestra takes ‘a tour of England’ – JH News&Guide

This Friday and Saturday in Walk Festival Hall, Amihai Grosz will play the viola concerto of English composer William Walton (1902-1983) with GTMF Music Director Sir Donald Runnicles conducting the Festival Orchestra, which will give audiences a great opportunity to see and hear all that the instrument is capable of.

“It’s a beautiful concerto,” he said, “very melancholic, with lots of colors. I think for me, to be there in nature, that will help me to evoke those colors and atmosphere.”

Born in 1979 in Jerusalem, Grosz helped found the much-acclaimed and widely recorded Jerusalem Quartet in 1995 and toured with it until 2009. In 2010, he became the principal violist with the Berlin Philharmonic. With the quartet and as a soloist, he has won top competitions and awards, premiered new works for his instrument, and worked with fellow artists such as Yefim Bronfman, Mitsuko Uchida and Daniel Barenboim.

In 2011, Runnicles guest conducted the Berlin Philharmonic.

“We clicked,” Grosz said. “He’s a wonderful conductor and a wonderful human being. It’s very easy to share the stage with him and to talk about music.”

The following year, Runnicles was conducting Wagner’s opera “Tristan” with the Deutsche Oper Berlin, where he also is music director, when that ensemble’s principal violist got ill.

“He called me,” Grosz. “Luckily, I had just played it with my orchestra like three months earlier.”

Grosz clearly made a positive and lasting impression, as a decade later Runnicles and the festival issued an invitation to come play in the Tetons.

“I’m really excited to come to Jackson Hole,” he said. “It will be one of my first big concertos in the U.S.”