They come, they play, they wow, and they leave.
Durango is fortunate to have top-notch soloists and musicians participate in the Music in the Mountains classical music festival each summer, and 2016, its 30th season, is no exception.
Whether they have been coming for almost 20 years, as in the case of virtuoso violinist Vadim Gluzman; are returning for a second season, as award-winning conductor Karina Canellakis will; or are debuting at the festival for the first time, as Stephen Prutsman is, their stories are much the same, and very different.
“Going to Durango is like going home in a way,” Gluzman said. “I just love Durango. It is where I played chamber music with my teachers, got to rehearse with them, go on stage with them, drink wine with them.”
The musicians and directors at Music in the Mountains aren’t always sure Durangoans appreciate the caliber of musicianship and standing in his field Gluzman has achieved.
“He’s one of the top violinists playing today,” said Greg Hustis, artistic director of the festival. “He’s playing with orchestras like the Berlin Philharmonic, one of the best in the world.”
Gluzman, though, is sceptical about rankings.
“That’s a few people’s opinion,” he said. “I’m not playing a humble game here. What it takes in general, despite talent and luck, is enormous dedication. Music expects certain sacrifices, but it pays 100 times back.”
Now 42, he came for the first time when he was 23 or 24 with his teacher Arkady Fomin, the founder of Conservatory Music in the Mountains. Beside studying with Fomin in Dallas, Gluzman earned an advanced performance certificate from the The Juilliard School in 1996 before beginning his professional career.
Born in the Ukraine while it was part of the Soviet Union, Gluzman began violin studies at the age of 7. His father was a clarinetist and conductor, his mother a musicologist, so one might say he went into the family business. He moved to Israel in 1990, where he still has a home base in Tel Aviv in addition to a home in Chicago.
He and his wife, pianist Angela Yoffe, who is originally from Latvia, often record and perform together. The couple has a daughter, Orli, who is “12 going on 17,” Gluzman said.
“She plays the violin, but I don’t think she’ll be a professional from what I see, although she adores her teacher,” he said about Orli. “She goes to ballet four or five times a week, but I don’t know if she will do that either. It will be her choice, which is great, because we grew up in a country where choices were made for us.”
Gluzman lives a life on the road, and jet lag is a normal state of being. By the end of a stay somewhere, he has adjusted to the time zone, and then he’s off again, he said.
“In the last month-and-a-half, I’ve had a day-and-a-half in Chicago and four days in Tel Aviv,” he said in a phone interview from Boulder, where he is artist-in-residence at the Colorado Music Festival. “In between, I have been in Australia, France and now, Colorado. At the end of the month, I will premiere a Lera Auerbach work (“The Infant Minstrel and His Peculiar Menagerie”) commissioned for me at Royal Albert Hall in London, and I will be together with my family for August.”
His days are full of practice, rehearsal and performances, either live or for recordings. On Friday, he practiced four hours in the morning, conducted an interview with a journalist, was preparing to listen to his latest recording, Brahms, to send notes to his producer, then planned to practice at least another four hours.
Gluzman has won numerous awards for his recordings, including Gramophone Editor’s Choice, Classica Maganix’s Choc de Classica and Disc of the Month by The Strad, BBC Music Magazine and ClassicFM. He just released his 12th CD with Yoffe, featuring two sonatas by Prokofiev.
One of his greatest honors, though, may be access to the ex-Leopold Auer 1690 Stradivarius violin he plays on extended loan from the Stradivari Society of Chicago.
“To think that a young (Jascha) Heifetz (considered one of the greatest violinists of all time) heard this played in Russia,” he told an interviewer in Ohio recently, “to hold this piece of history in your hands not to mention getting to play it and record with it. There is an endless array of colors you can project with this instrument. I play music like it is the last time, and it is, because we will never be able to repeat tomorrow what we do today.”
A female standout conductor in a heavily male field, Canellakis recently won the 2016 Sir George Solti Conducting Award, named after the legendary conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
“Her career is skyrocketing since she won that award,” Hustis said.
Her career has gotten so busy, Music in the Mountains had to rearrange its schedule to accommodate her bookings, the festival’s Executive Director Angie Beach said.
“I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to get her again,” Beach said.
Canellakis, 34, grew up in a musical household – her father is a conductor, her mother a pianist – and she remembers falling asleep in her mother’s lap at her father’s concerts when she was very little. An appearance by Itzhak Perlman on “Sesame Street” kicked off her musical career when she was 3 – it led to a request for a violin.
Canellakis, who earned her bachelor’s degree in violin from the Curtis Institute of Music, began her career as a violinist with the Berlin Philharmonic and Chicago Symphony.
At the urging of a mentor, she earned a master’s degree in orchestral conducting from Juilliard. She began winning awards for her conducting while still in school and was named a conducting fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s summer home, in 2014.
Just finishing a two-year stint as the assistant conductor of the Dallas Symphony, Canellakis will crisscross the world this year as she conducts in Sweden, England, Scotland, France, Norway, Canada, Hong Kong and Italy as well as cities across the U.S. She will conduct opera projects, including the world premiers of David Lang’s “The Loser” and Peter Maxwell Davies’ “The Hogboon.”
In 2014, she made headlines in Dallas when she stepped in on less than 24-hour notice when Music Director Jaap van Zweden had to cancel because of an injury. The Dallas Morning News selected it as one of the top 10 classical music moments of 2014:
“Even allowing for van Zweden’s painstaking preparation,” reviewer Scott Cantrell said, “this was the most brilliant conducting debut I can recall.”
That was the first time she was called in as a last minute substitute, but it wasn’t the last.
She did it again in February with the Dallas Symphony, conducting a complex program including a Mozart piano concerto and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7, considered “a challenge under any circumstances,” reviewer Wayne Lee Gay of the Dallas Observer said at the time.
“This listener entered the concert hall confident that van Zweden would pull this off with style,” Gay wrote, “and left even more impressed with the young conductor who achieved the same accomplishment on short notice.”
Canellakis also subbed in for Venezuela conductor Rafael Payare with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra when he had visa problems, for Yuri Termirkanov with the Danish National Symphony Orchestra and with the ailing Nikolaus Harnoncourt, who died earlier this year, with the Concentus Musicus Wien in Graz, Austria.
While her travel schedule is as intense as Gluzman’s, she seems to thrive on the demanding pace.
“There’s the communication with musicians and that kind of eye-contact that you get with, say, a woodwind player right before they play a beautiful solo,” she said to Catherine Womack of D Magazine, “those little moments are so emotional and gratifying. I live for those moments.”
While this is Prutsman’s first time at Music in the Mountains, it’s not his first rodeo, so to speak.
After bursting on to the world scene by winning the gold medal at the Tchaikovsky International Competition in 1990, the San Franscisco-based musician went on to win a gold medal at the Queen Elisabeth (of Belgium) International Music Competition and an Avery Fischer Career Grant in 1991.
He also started young.
“When I was about 3, I started playing by ear,” he said in a phone interview from New Orleans, “Folks that play by ear often use a similar process, selecting pictures out of the air.”
He began official training at the age of 5, eventually studying at the University of California Los Angeles and the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore.
His career path is a little different from that of many classical musicians. Prutsman has been a keyboard player with rock bands such as Cerberus and Vysion; been a solo jazz pianist; and organized music festivals in locations as diverse as El Paso, Texas; Guam; and Cartagena, Colombia. He has been a music arranger for a nationally syndicated televangelist television program, played the piano on the soundtrack of “Immortal Beloved” and is a prolific composer of works for artists including Tom Waits and cellist Yo-Yo Ma.
His collaboration with the Grammy Award-winning Kronos Quartet has included more than 40 arrangements and compositions.
And he has traveled the world as a guest artist with orchestras and chamber groups, as music lovers will see in his performance with the Music in the Mountains Festival Orchestra on Saturday.
Asked what he likes most, he quoted the Dalai Lama, “The best moment is right now.”
“It’s hard to say any one thing is my favorite,” he said, “but the two best parts when I’m composing are when I’m conceptualizing a great movement, and when things are over, and I have it finished.”
Now he only travels about 20 percent of the time, he said.
“It’s not like before, I have a disabled son,” he said about his child, who has been diagnosed with autism. “That meant changes on the home front.”
Prutsman and his wife, Sigrid Van Bladel, decided to use music to help other families with children who have special needs along the autism spectrum.
“Our ‘Azure’ events aim to make music and the performing arts accessible to audiences for whom regular performances are typically off limits or difficult,” said the website for Autism Fun Bay Area, the nonprofit they founded in 2012, “due to behaviors or sensory challenges.”
Prutsman also makes time to advocate on autism issues. Most recently, he said, that has been on behalf of adults with autism.
abutler@durangoherald.com
If you go
There are still almost two weeks of Music in the Mountains concerts and events. See a complete schedule and purchase tickets at www.musicinthemountains.com, by calling 385-6820 or by stopping by the festival office at 1063 Main Ave.
Stephen Prutsman will play Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor in a concert called Mountain Majesty at 5:30 p.m. Saturday at the Festival Tent at Purgatory Resort.
To learn more about Prutsman, visit http://stephenprutsman.com/. To learn more about his foundation Autism Fun Bay Area, which provides performances for families with special needs, visit http://www.autismfunbayarea.org/.
Vadim Gluzman will play Bruch’s Violin Concerto in G minor in the Voices of Destiny concert, which also includes the Durango Choral Society singing Bach’s “Magnificat,” at 5:30 p.m. Sunday at the Community Concert Hall at Fort Lewis College.
To learn more about Gluzman, visit http://vadimgluzman.com/. Visit http://www.bbc.co.uk/events/emnzc8 to register to hear his premiere of Lera Auerbach’s “The Infant Minstrel and his Peculiar Menagerie” after he performs it at Royal Albert Hall in London on July 31.
Karina Canellakis will conduct Epic Grandeur at 5:30 p.m. July 29 at the Festival Tent. The rehearsal will be open to the public from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. that day. She will also conduct a master class at 10 a.m. Tuesday in Jones Hall 209 at Fort Lewis College that is free and open to the public.
Visit http://karinacanellakis.com/ to learn more about Canellakis.
The tickets to all three concerts are $54 for premium seating, $44 for regular seating and $20 for students.
