Eugene Fodor, Violin Virtuoso

[MargaretAnne]

I met Eugene Fodor decades ago when he appeared as a guest soloist with a local symphony orchestra on March 8th,1976. I didn't remember the date so I looked it up on the Portland Symphony Orchestra website. He appeared at the Augusta Armory on March 8th (1976) and in Portland on March 9th. The link below is where I found the dates. I scrolled down where it says searching and there's a search box below that. I typed the name Eugene Fodor and it brought up two concerts, the one for March 8 in Augusta and the one for March 9 in Portland. I didn't go to the concert in Portland.

psohistory.org/index.php/performances

Tibor Jozef Pusztai (Hungarian) was the Guest Conductor for the performance. The conductor died on Jan. 10, 2016 at the age of 69. Since 2005, the conductor and his wife had been living on Mount Desert Island in Maine.

Eugene played beautifully. Words aren't sufficient. I was just reading the article in the New York Times. I looked it up because I couldn't remember when he died (Feb. 26, 2011). He's from Turkey Creek, Colorado. He's the only musician I ever met. Of course, I know musicians. I should have said a musician with that much notoriety. It's the only concert that I've attended of any kind. After the performance, I had the opportunity to meet him. He asked someone to take a picture of us. It was his idea.

There's an interview with his wife, Susan Davis. Actually, the article in the New York Times at the time of his death said, "According to Susan Davis, his first of two wives, whom he remarried in November, Fodor was suffering from liver disease when he moved from Colorado to her Virginia home." The interview with Susan was a year ago. You won't see her at the very beginning. The name of the program is Radical Imagination and the interview is tagged "Imagining and Remembering the Artistry and Virtuosity of Eugene Fodor." The program is just under an hour. I was about 25 minutes into it when I came over here.

m.youtube.com/watch?v=VJYhUkuvGTg

I just listened to Violin Concerto, Op. 64 in E Minor: Allegro molto appassionato, (composed by Felix Mendelssohn)

m.youtube.com/watch?v=8P-7BBA09Ik

I found a very useful list of classical music terms. When I saw the word andante tagged on the end of one of the titles available for Eugene Fodor, I looked it up. I remember my piano teacher using many of these same terms. Every time my teacher introduced me to a new composer, she would tell me everything she knew about him. If I didn't pay enough attention to rests on the sheet music, she would remind me by gently tapping my hand with her pointer. A lot of the music terms have to do with the tempo in which the music is played. If you type the search words Glossary of Classical Music Terms, you'll find it. It's on a blog called Classical Candor.

Classial Music Terms

[MargaretAnne]

In the PSO History Timeline Section, there were more details.

Last of the candidates for the position, on March 8 in Augusta and also the next evening at City Hall Auditorium in Portland, Tibor Pusztai “finished the guest conductor concerts with a powerful account of the Prokofiev Symphony No. 5, main work on a program that introduced to this area young Eugene Fodor, winner of the Tchaikowsky competition at Moscow.” The EE look-back article added, “Restless, full of energy, showing an exceptional baton skill, he filled the big feature work with vitality, but the performance was governed by a heavy dynamic pulse. It lacked balance. At rehearsal he was quick, imaginative, very concerned about intonation.” A report in the Maine Sunday Telegram (HS: This was the first PSO Archive source that I came across that) mentioned that multiple-competition winner Eugene Fodor played Tchaikowsky’s technically difficult Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 35. (HS: A look through a concert program from this evening that resides in the PDO Archives revealed that an ultimate achievement for him had occurred in 1974, when at age 24, he became the first and only string player in the Western World to win top honors in the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow.) The two evening concerts began with the Overture to “Russlan and Ludmilla”, by Mikhail Glinka. Reviewer Harrison Brown raved about both the violinist and the guest conductor “dazzle-ing” the audience. (HS:  There is curious irony that having fled Hungary during the 1956 uprising when 12 years old, the conductor chose to present an all-Russian program.)