David Bowlin was drawn to the violin at an impressionably young age: he heard a violinist play at a church service—where his mother was the organist—when he was four years old. He even remembers the piece: the famous “Méditation” from Massenet’s opera Thaïs. Immediately he wanted violin lessons.
“I pestered my parents for two years for lessons, and finally, when I was six, they signed me up,” he recalls.
That tenacity never ceased, resulting in a major career that brought him, just this fall, to the Eastman School of Music where he is a new professor of violin. Bowlin presents his first Faculty Artist Series concert on Friday, October 4 at 7:30 p.m. in Kilbourn Hall. He’ll be accompanied by his husband, Tony Cho, who also joined Eastman’s faculty as an assistant professor of chamber music and collaborative piano.
Bowlin joins Eastman’s faculty after 17 years of serving on the faculty at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music as well as summer posts teaching at the Kneisel Hall Chamber Music Festival—where he’s already had the chance to work with Eastman alumni and incoming students—and formerly at the Bowdoin International Music Festival. Bowlin is also an active chamber musician: he was a founding member of the International Contemporary Ensemble, has toured with Musicians from Marlboro, and was a member of the Naumburg award-winning De Capo Chamber Players. In addition, he has performed as guest concertmaster with orchestras including the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra.
Along the way, Bowlin crossed paths with many of Eastman’s current faculty. He played a concert in the earlier 2000s with the Continuum Ensemble in New York with Renée Jolles, who is Eastman’s Wegman Family Professor of Violin. He got to know the Ying Quartet—Eastman’s string quartet-in-residence—while teaching at the Bowdoin Music Festival, where members of the quartet are artistic directors. He toured with violinist Robin Scott, now a member of the Ying Quartet and an associate professor of violin and string chamber music at Eastman, years ago with Musicians from Marlboro. He met cellist Joseph Johnson—also new faculty member this year—while playing as a guest with the Toronto Symphony. He taught at Aspen with colleague Juliana Athayde, an associate professor of violin and orchestral repertory at Eastman. And such connections led him to give a master class at Eastman in 2016.
Although the music world is small, he says it is unusual to know so many people in one place. “There are just a lot of connections that go way, way back, a lot of roots that come together with my coming here,” Bowlin says of coming to Eastman. “I know most of the string faculty here and the opportunity to work with them and Eastman students was really interesting to me.” In addition to the opportunity to work with friends, he was interested in teaching graduate students, which he couldn’t do at Oberlin, which offers only undergraduate degrees in violin performance.
Bowlin and pianist Cho have a long-developed musical relationship, too: They met while teaching at Oberlin and have been performing together as the Bowlin-Cho Duo for the last six years. They recently released a recording of Roussel Violin Sonatas Nos. 1 and 2, and his string trio, for the Naxos label. It’s their second recording together; they recorded a work by Martin Besnick, who served as a visiting professor of composition at Eastman from 2002–03, in 2018.
“We were looking to sink our teeth into something that was a little bit less usual,” says Bowlin about the Roussel’s works. A French composer who lived over the turn of the twentieth century, Roussel’s works bring in an unusually varied musical language, says Bowlin. “That first sonata is very French romanticism, almost pre-impressionistic, almost in-between Franck and Debussy. But then some of his later stuff is a little wilder.”
That recording project has dovetailed into another upcoming one for Naxos, recording the violin sonatas of Joseph Bologne, the Chevalier des Saint-Georges, a Classical-era, eighteenth-century French composer, violinist, and composer who was one of the first composers of African descent to find success across Europe. Bowlin and Cho will open their FAS recital at Eastman with Bologne’s third violin sonata, which is one of three that will be on the forthcoming recording.
After the Bologne sonata, Bowlin and Cho will perform Ives’ Second Violin Sonata, a quintessentially Ives work that Bowlin says is “ecstatic, chaotic Americana that is just fun for audiences.” And they follow it with the Divertimento from Stravinsky’s The Fairy’s Kiss Suite, a ballet suit based on a Hans Christian Andersen tale, but one that Stravinsky gives a sunnier outlook. “It’s quite lively, playful, the last movement is a circus,” he says.
Prokofiev’s Violin Sonata No. 1 in F Minor, Op. 80 closes out the recital after the intermission, which Bowlin calls “one of my all-time favorite sonatas of the twentieth century.” If the Stravinsky work is a comedy, this one is a tragedy, he says, “a beautifully evocative brutal and heart tugging work.” The first movement has a moment with soft, hazy scales that are meant to sound like the wind in a graveyard, and the second movement is brusque, and the third is a distant song. A powerful work, the first and third movements were played at Prokofiev’s funeral.
Bowlin remembers playing the Prokofiev in a Chicago recital in 2009 and a man in the front row was in tears by the end of the second movement. The man got up and left before the third. Creating that for an audience member, “it was extraordinary,” he says. “The experience was memorable. It’s a special piece.”
Faculty Artist Series: David Bowlin, violin, and Tony Cho, piano
Friday, October 4
Kilbourn Hall | 7:30 p.m.
Tickets are $10: Free to URID holders