Tonight, violinist Tessa Lark returns to Carnegie Hall for a recital. She wants you to know that while her program might seem unconventional, it will give you a good idea of who she is as a musician.
“When you look at the program it doesn’t seem like the pieces relate, but it’s really just types of music I’ve loved my whole life and I’m putting them together in one performance,” said Lark, sitting at a table in the student union at Florida Atlantic University after her appearance Jan. 22 with the South Florida Symphony in Boca Raton.
Lark, a native of Richmond, Ky., who won the Naumburg International Competition in 2012 and was the silver medalist at the Indianapolis competition in 2014, takes the stage at the Weill Recital Hall in New York tonight with the estimable pianist Roman Rabinovich as her accompanist.
“He’s really fantastic, and we jibe in a similar way musically,” she said.
Lark’s program leads off with a Schubert sonatina (in D, D. 384), then follows it with a world premiere work, Spoon Bread, written for her by the American composer Michael Torke.
“We met up once and we just hit it off. And I love his musical style, too,” said Lark, who won an Avery Fisher Career Grant last year. Torke, who composed a 10-piano suite evoking the sights and sounds of Miami for Mia Vassilev’s Miami Piano Circle in 2014, is perhaps best-known for his orchestral work Javelin, written for the Atlanta Olympics.
Also on the program is the Partita by the great Polish modernist Witold Lutoslawski, who wrote the work in 1984 for Pinchas Zukerman, followed by Lark’s own Appalachian Fantasy, which is receiving its New York premiere.
“It’s got hints of Schubert and Brahms in there. It sounds sacrilegious, but I swear it’s not,” she said, laughing. “I like to do that sort of thing to show people that Brahms and Schubert were taking from folk styles for inspiration, and I’m doing the same thing.”
Lark also loves to play traditional Appalachian fiddle music — her wildlife biologist father played banjo in a bluegrass band — and she’s featured on crossover fiddler Mark O’Connor’s 2014 recording, MOC4. Her fantasy makes use of Schubert’s song “Sei mir gegrüsst” as well as the traditional fiddle tune “Bonaparte’s Retreat,” all linked by Lark’s own music.
“I guess it’s a mashup of tunes that I know, but some of it has original interludes in between,” said Lark, who plans to keep exploring the compositional side of her musical personality. “That’s definitely in the long game for me. I won’t die feeling like a musician unless I compose something special.”
She and Rabinovich will close the program with Brahms’s Sonata No. 3 (in D minor, Op. 108), a tempestuous work and the last of his three sonatas. After tonight’s recital, she’s off to two more in Washington state, and follows that with three busy months of recitals and orchestral concerts across the country and one at Utrecht in the Netherlands.
With all the talented violinists on the scene today, it can be difficult to stand out, and Lark says she’s been working on discovering the elements of her brand.
”I’ve been thinking about that all the time, and I want to say the main part of my brand is sincerity. I just want to stay really true to myself; I don’t think Beethoven looks good in leather pants and that sort of thing,” said Lark, who holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the New England Conservatory in Boston.
“The way I’ve been branding myself to stand out from the crowd is just looking into what’s unique about my upbringing and my life,” she said. “And that happens to be, for me, Kentucky, and bluegrass music, and different styles of playing.”
Tessa Lark plays the Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall in New York City tonight at 7:30. Call 212-247-7800 for more information.