Certificate Recital: William Gu, Cello

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685 – 1750) wrote his iconic cello suites in his late
twenties during his time serving as the Director of Music in Cöthen, Germany.
However, his cello suites were not widely known or performed until the early
20th century, when then renowned cellist Pablo Casals wandered into a
second-hand music store in Barcelona and picked up a manuscript of Bach’s
cello suites. Struck by Bach’s compositional style and the suites’ emotional
depth and technical musicality, Casals spent years studying Bach’s cello suites
before finally performed the suites publicly for the first time in 1913, in London,
where they gained widespread attention and grew in popularity, now
considered a cornerstone of cello repertoire. If it weren’t for Casals, Bach’s half
dozen cello suites may have been overlooked and forgotten in history, rather
than their status now as a staple of western classical music.

Bach’s Cello Suite No. 3 in C Major is the second most performed of his six
total cello suites. Taking advantage of the cello’s standard C, G, D, and A string
tuning, the first movement, Prelude, is warm and extroverted, with a steady
stream of 16th notes that showcase its sensuous harmonies and implicit
melodies. The latter half of the movement climaxes at an extended passage of
moving arpeggios gliding over an open G string, before arriving at repeated
cadenzas of four-note chords, leading listeners to a series of false endings
before finally closing on a resonant C-major chord. The movement is best
known for its liberating, exuberant spirit and alluring energy.

Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto in E minor, remains one of the most popular
concerto works for solo cello today. Like Bach’s cello dance suites, the concerto
did not gain widespread attention until decades after the passing of the
influential English composer in 1934, when cellist Jacqueline Du Pre performed
the concerto with the London Symphony Orchestra in 1965, establishing the
work as a cornerstone of the cello repertoire and cementing its place in the
canon of Western classical music.

Elgar was fiercely patriotic, widely considered the first native-born English
composer to gain international prominence after the death of Henry Purcell in
1695. Despite his successes, the early war-torn decades of the 20th century
were especially devastating for Elgar, who owed much of his successes as a
composer to German conductors and audiences. Disillusioned by the losses of
his close friends during World War I and in ill-health, Elgar’s cello concerto,
written in the summer of 1919, reflects his deeply-seated lament and despair.
That same summer, Elgar’s wife, Alice, also fell ill. Elgar described her as
growing “mysteriously smaller and more fragile… fading away before one’s
very eyes.” The summer of 1919 was their last summer together—Alice passed
away a couple months later.

Introspective and profoundly sad, the four-movement concerto begins with a
funereal cello passage followed by long, flowing elegaic theme that recurs
throughout the movement. With brief flickering movements of hope, the
movement mingles resignation with bitterness. The second movement begins
with a pizzicato allusion to the opening of the first movement, before
proceeding to a virtuosic scherzo that is first introduced hesitantly, before
taking off in a quick-footed, slightly sinister theme.

The third movement (Adagio) is the heart of the concerto, characterized by its
meditative and searching nature, and flows naturally into the final movement,
which begins with a brief cello cadenza. What follows is an spirited and
energetic main theme in free rondo form built on previous motifs, though the
underlying pessimism can hardly go unnoticed. As the concerto comes to a
close, the cello recalls a single heartbreaking sentence from the previous
Adagio movement and reminiscences with a final, closing statement of the very
phrase that started the first movement.

Csárdás, by Vittorio Monti, is a popular and lively work originally composed
for violin and orchestra, first published in 1904. The piece is based on the
traditional Hungarian folk dance called “csárdás”, which features a fast-paced
tempo and an alternating rhythm between two beats and three beats. This
arrangement, for solo cello and classical guitar, is relatively rare, though not
unpopular. The combination of cello and guitar can be particularly effective in
creating a warm, intimate, and expressive sound, as the instruments can
complement each other’s strengths and textures. The cello can provide a rich,
deep, and resonant bass sound, while the guitar can provide a delicate and
intricate harmonic accompaniment.

The opening of Csárdás features a slow and melancholic introduction, played
by the solo cello , which builds up to a fast and energetic dance section. The
cello plays virtuosic and intricate runs, accompanied by the classical guitar, in a
dazzling display of technical skill and musical expression.

Csárdás has become a popular work in the classical and folk repertoire, loved
for its catchy melody, virtuosic writing, and infectious dance rhythms. Its
combination of Hungarian folk music and classical music elements has made it
a favorite of audiences and performers alike.

William Gu began his classical music training through piano at the age of 4, and
began his cello training 3 years later, studying under Sieun Lin, of Juilliard Pre-
College faculty, and Jonathan Koh, of U.C. Berkeley and the San Francisco
Conservatory of Music.

William served as principal cellist of the San Jose Youth Symphony’s premier
Philharmonic Orchestra from 2016 – 2019. He has previously soloed with the SJYS
Chamber Orchestra, performing Haydn’s Cello Concerto in C, as well as with the
Philharmonic Orchestra, performing Tchaikovsky’s Variations on a Rococo Theme
and Dvorak’s Cello Concerto in B minor, with solo performances ranging from the
California Theatre to Carnegie Hall. In 2019, William was honored to tour South
America as a soloist, performing the Saint-Saëns Cello Concerto No. 1 in A minor
across internationally acclaimed opera houses and concert halls, notably, the
Teatro Solís in Uruguay, Argentina’s Teatro Colon and Bueno Aires’ Centro Cultural
Kirchner, the third largest concert hall of its kind in the world.

William has been the recipient of major awards for music performance, including
the 2018 U.S. Open Music Competition, 2018 ENKOR International Music
Competition, 2018 Rising Talents of America Strings Competition, 2017 Burlingame
Music Competition, 2017 VOCE Competition, and the 2016 American Protégé
International Piano and Strings Competition. William has also played alongside the
California All-State String Orchestra, California Music Preparatory Academy, and
the Meadowmount School of Music.

William is honored to have worked with internationally acclaimed cellists, playing in
masterclasses for Tamás Varga, principal cellist of Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra,
Astrid Schween of the Juilliard Quartet, Nicholas Canellekis of Curtis Institute of
Music, and Gloria Chien of the Chamber Society of Music at the Lincoln Center.

At Princeton, William will be graduating in the spring of 2023 as an Economics
major, with certificates in Music Performance and Finance. He is a former
student of Princeton’s Alberto Parrini, and currently studies under Nayoung
Baek. On campus, he is a member of La Vie en Cello and Princeton University
Orchestra, with which he toured internationally for the fifth time in the spring of
2023.

Guitarist Nicholas Padmanabhan ’23 was a prizewinner in the National YoungArts
Foundation competition in both 2018 and 2017. He appeared in 2018 as a soloist
on National Public Radio’s classical-music program From The Top, recorded
before a live audience in San Francisco and broadcast nationally. Nicholas was the
first-place winner in the 2018 Mission College Young Artist Concerto Competition,
the Sierra Nevada Guitar Competition in 2016 and 2014, and the 2016 California
statewide guitar competition of the American String Teachers Association. He was
runner-up in the 2017 Mondavi Center Young Artists Competition, where he was
also awarded the Bouchaine Young Artists Prize for Festival Napa Valley. Nicholas
is a former student of Laura Oltman at Princeton and Scott Cmiel and Jon Mendle
at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music’s Pre-College Division.

At Princeton, Nicholas is majoring in computer science and is a member of the
Opus Chamber Music Group.

Kairy Koshoeva, on the faculty of the New School for Music Study since 2015,
holds a Doctorate in Musical Arts from the University of Missouri, Kansas City, in
addition to Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from the Gnessin Academy of Music
in Moscow and an Artist’s Diploma from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. Dr.
Koshoeva has garnered awards from around the globe including top prizes at the
International Piano Competition in Vicenza, Italy, the N. Rubinstein Competition in
Paris, the Gold Medal at the 2004 Rachmaninoff Awards in Moscow, and first prize
at the Chautauqua Music Festival concerto competition in New York.

Dr. Koshoeva has played internationally, in Israel, France, Germany,Russia, Turkey,
Switzerland, as well as in the United States. She has performed as a soloist with
many prominent orchestras including the Kansas City Symphony and the
Chautauqua Music Festival. She has also performed with the Moscow chamber
orchestra “Cantus Firmus.” Dr. Koshoeva has been the recipient of major awards for
performances in collaboration with the Owen/Cox Dance Group. In 2013 she was
awarded the prestigious title of Honored Artist of Kyrgyzstan. In 2019 The Royal
Academy of Music honored her as a Teacher of Distinction in Carnegie Hall. Most
recently she won First Prize at the 2020 “Musica Classica” International
Competition in Moscow, Russia.