Featuring Tamás Kocsis, Violin

Tamás Kocsis is Concertmaster for The Jackson Symphony, bringing to the orchestra a distinguished international career as a violinist, soloist, chamber musician, and orchestral leader.

Born in Hungary to musical parents, Kocsis began studying violin and piano at age five and was accepted into Budapest’s prestigious Franz Liszt Academy of Music by the age of ten. One year later, he made his debut on Hungarian Radio, beginning an extraordinary early career that included numerous solo and chamber recordings.

His talent soon carried him beyond Hungary. In 1989, Kocsis received a full scholarship to Indiana University, where he studied with renowned violinist Josef Gingold, before continuing his training at The Juilliard School under legendary teacher Dorothy DeLay. Shortly after completing his studies, he won the position of Concertmaster with the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra, launching a career that would place him in leading artistic roles with orchestras across the United States and Europe.

Kocsis later served as concertmaster of the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra, the Savannah Symphony, and the Ulster Orchestra in Belfast. In each role, he became known not only for his technical mastery, but also for his expressive depth, musical leadership, and ability to elevate the ensemble around him. His 2022 solo recording of Kurt Weill’s Violin Concerto No. 2 with the Ulster Orchestra further showcased the artistry and interpretive strength that have defined his career.

As Concertmaster for The Jackson Symphony, Kocsis brings world-class experience, collaborative leadership, and a deep commitment to artistic excellence. He also serves as Director of Strings for The Jackson Symphony Music Academy, where his work with young musicians reflects a lifelong belief in mentorship, discipline, and the power of great music to shape future generations.

Program Notes

Gioachino Rossini

Overture to The Barber of Seville

Here is a composer who retired at 37 and lived to 86.

Gioachino Rossini wrote 34 operas before he was 31, secured a lifetime pension from the French government, and then essentially stopped. For nearly four decades he cooked elaborate dinner parties, grew famous for his wit, and composed almost nothing of consequence. When asked why, he shrugged. He had said what he needed to say.

You can't really argue with the logic once you've heard what he left behind.

The Barber of Seville is widely considered the greatest comic opera ever written. The story, lifted from a Beaumarchais play that Mozart also raided for The Marriage of Figaro, follows the irrepressible Figaro, everyone's favorite scheming barber, as he outmaneuvers a jealous old guardian to unite a pair of young lovers. It is pure, delicious farce. Rossini reportedly wrote the entire opera in under three weeks, composing as fast as the librettist could hand him pages. The result sounds like a man having the time of his life.

The overture you're about to hear was not, strictly speaking, written for this opera. Rossini had used it twice before for other productions, and since his overtures never quote themes from their operas anyway, it fit perfectly well. This was not laziness so much as confidence. He knew exactly what an audience needed before the curtain rose.

What he gives us is a masterclass in building excitement out of almost nothing.

The overture opens quietly—a slow, singing melody floating in the woodwinds, unhurried, almost innocent. Then the main section ignites, and Rossini deploys his most famous weapon: a theme that begins as a whisper and repeats, and repeats, and repeats, each time a little louder, the orchestra adding instruments like a pot coming slowly to the boil. By the time it finally erupts, the audience is leaning forward without quite knowing how it happened.

This "Rossini crescendo" is one of the great tricks in all of music. Simple, irresistible, and absolutely his own. By the end of the overture, you'll already be smiling. That was always the point.

Samuel Barber

Violin Concerto

In the summer of 1939, Europe was about to burn.

Samuel Barber knew it. He was 30 years old, sitting in a serene Swiss mountain village, writing a violin concerto on commission, and watching the horizon darken. By September, war had broken out and he fled to Pennsylvania, finishing the piece in the Pocono Mountains. You can hear both landscapes in this music: the alpine calm of those first two movements and something more urgent underneath.

But before we get to the music, there's a story. And it's a good one.

The commission came with strings attached, or rather, one very opinionated string player.

A wealthy Philadelphia soap manufacturer named Samuel Fels wanted a concerto for his protégé, a gifted violinist named Iso Briselli. Barber and Briselli were old friends, classmates at the Curtis Institute. Simple enough.

Except that Briselli had a coach in New York. And the coach had opinions. Barber's first two movements were, according to this coach, not sufficiently virtuosic, "childish in details," and would put Briselli at "great risk" to perform. The coach graciously offered to perform a "surgical operation" to improve them. Barber said no.

Then the finale arrived, late, and Briselli didn't like that either. Too short. Too lightweight. Wrong. For decades afterward, the rumor circulated that he'd rejected it because it was unplayable, a slander that recent scholarship has demolished. Briselli was simply too good a violinist for that to have been true. Barber kept every note, never received the second half of his commission fee, and the two men remained friends for life.

The concerto opens with one of the most disarming gestures in the repertoire. No fanfare, no dramatic introduction. The violin simply begins—alone, spinning out a long, arching melody that has no interest in impressing you, only in speaking to you. The orchestra joins as a partner rather than a backdrop, and the movement unfolds with an almost embarrassing generosity of beautiful ideas.

The slow movement is even more intimate. A solo oboe opens with a theme so song-like you might mistake it for an aria, which makes sense, since Barber trained as a singer. When the violin enters, it seems to float in on the warm sound of the horns, building to an aching climax before subsiding into stillness.

And then the finale hits. Perpetual motion, literally. Relentless, sparkling, slightly mad. It doesn't last long because it couldn't possibly last longer without combusting. This is the movement Briselli rejected. Listen and form your own opinion.

Barber spent his career writing melodies while the world told him he should be doing something more complicated. Audiences disagreed. The Violin Concerto took decades to find its place, and then, quite suddenly, it was simply there, as if it had always belonged.

Which, of course, it had.

Ludwig van Beethoven

Symphony No. 5 in C minor

Imagine the worst year of your life.

You're going deaf. The emperor you once admired is marching through your city. Your brother has just married someone you despise. You're broke, and you've written to your patron essentially begging: "I am not well. Things are going badly with me."

Now imagine writing the Fifth Symphony.

That's where Beethoven was in 1808, and it matters, because this music isn't abstract. It's a man in crisis deciding, through sheer force of will, that he will not be destroyed. Every time those four famous notes slam open the door, da da da DUM, you're hearing that decision being made in real time.

Those four notes are almost absurdly simple. Three short, one long. Beethoven could have written them in his sleep. Instead, he spent nearly eight years shaping them into something that still stops a room cold. The entire first movement grows from that single gesture,it whispers, it screams, it pants in the low strings, it refuses to let go. An oboe gets one brief, singing moment of freedom before the grip tightens again. By the end, you've been somewhere.

The second movement offers breathing room, a warm, rocking melody in the cellos, like someone finally exhaling. But listen closely: that rhythmic shadow keeps returning, restless, underneath.

The third movement begins almost in darkness. Cellos and basses murmur something uneasy before the horns burst through, heroic, unstoppable. Beethoven connects this movement directly to the finale without a break, so when the fourth movement arrives in a blaze of C major, with trombones appearing in a symphony orchestra for the very first time in history, the effect is seismic. You feel the light.

That journey, from darkness to light, from crisis to triumph, was entirely new in 1808. No composer had ever structured a symphony around that kind of emotional arc. Beethoven invented a template that composers from Brahms to Shostakovich to John Williams have followed ever since.

At the premiere (a five-hour marathon in an unheated Viennese theatre on a December night) audiences heard this and knew something had changed. They were right.

Leonard Bernstein, never one for understatement, put it best: "Beethoven broke all the rules and turned out pieces of breathtaking rightness, the power to make you feel at the finish: Something is right with the world."

Tonight, let it be right with yours.

 [TK1]