Composed 1999; 10 minutes

John Corigliano writes: “These Caprices, composed in conjunction with the score for François Girard's film The Red Violin, take a spacious, troubadour-inspired theme and vary it both linearly and stylistically. These variations intentionally evoke Baroque, Gypsy and arch-Romantic idioms as they examine the same materials (a dark, seven-chord chaconne as well as that principal theme) from differing aural viewpoints. The Caprices were created and ordered to reflect the structure of the film, in which Bussotti, a fictional 18th-century violin maker, crafts his greatest violin for his soon-to-be-born son. When tragedy claims wife and child, the grief-stricken Bussotti, in a gesture both ardent and macabre, infuses the blood of his beloved into the varnish of the instrument. Their fates thus joined, the violin travels across three centuries through Vienna, London, Shanghai and Montreal, passing through the hands of a doomed child prodigy, a flamboyant virtuoso, a haunted Maoist commissar, and at last a willful Canadian expert, whose own plans for the violin finally complete the circle of parent and child united in art.”

With a father (John Corigliano, Sr.) being a solo violinist and concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic (1943-66), American composer John Corigliano comes by his affinity with the violin honestly.  He refers to the instrument as ‘my first love’ when describing his first violin concerto in 2003 as “an attempt to write the piece my father would love to play.”  Corigliano’s score for François Girard’s film The Red Violin, won the 2000 Academy Award for Best Original Score.  It generated the source material for the concerto and the seven-minute Red Violin Chaconne which preceded it.  The Red Violin Caprices (1999), a theme and five variations, pay tribute to both the violin and the legendary Caprices of virtuoso violinist Nicolò Paganini (1782-1840).