“The Breakers Mansion reverberated with the fire and passion on Tuesday as Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E Minor, Op. 64 in the hands of the brilliant young virtuoso closed the Newport Classical Summer Festival. Numerous reviews in this journal attest to the brilliance, passion, natural musicality of this dynamic young performer, and his work last night lived up to all the accolades. Despite the very fine arrangement for the smaller forces of a strings-only chamber sized orchestra by Richard Tognetti, director of the Australian Chamber Orchestra for the past 35 seasons, the piece does lose some of its charm and clarity without the winds, which provide not only color and contrast, but also allow the whole of the texture to be more open and sonorous. Here the often-close harmonic reconfigurations often had the parts running into each other, and with an all-strings sound this created something of a tangle for the ear. That did not take anything away from the energy from both soloist and orchestra; with flawless technique, Jackiw drove the outer movements forward, yet always commanded a bright, shining sound.”
-Stephen Martorella, The Boston Musical Intelligencer
