Adam’s Apple

This album is my tribute to two figures of enormous importance to me: Zbigniew Seifert and John Adams. Seifert's playing has inspired me almost since the beginning of my career, but I came across the music of John Adams relatively recently, in 2016. Even in that short time the American composer has changed my approach to music completely. I saw beauty in new places, and I understood that symphonic music can be jazz in spirit and swing in its own way. I saw that a single coherent form can hold seemingly contradictory elements: beauty and ugliness, gentleness and brutality, tonality and atonality, monumentalism and minimalism, expressionism and impressionism.

The title piece, Adam's Apple, is on the one hand my attempt to tell the biblical story of the poisoned apple, and on the other a direct reference to John Adams, whose work had a great influence on this composition. Placing Zbigniew Seifert's concerto and my own on one album was deliberate: it was meant to show how different the directions can be that an improvising violin takes in the company of a symphony orchestra.