Vadim Gluzman was heading to St. Petersberg, Russia, last month just as the arctic chill was settling in for a treacherous winter run.
He wasn’t looking forward to the cold — he said he was much more excited to return to Tucson this weekend, when the weather will feel more like spring in his adopted home of Chicago than late fall. But the Ukranian-born, Israeli violinist was anticipating how pure and pristine his 1690 ex-Leopold Auer Stradivari was going to sound in Russia’s dry cold.
“Actually it is strange but it feels beautiful in the cold, which is normally mostly dry,” he said. “But when it is humid and hot, it doesn’t like it.”
His violin must love Tucson.
“I remember that it felt and sounded wonderfully the last time I was there” in 2010 to play Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, he said during a phone interview he squeezed in hours after returning to Chicago from concerts in Europe and 48 hours before he got back on a plane for Russia.
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He makes his way to Tucson this weekend to perform Prokofiev’s Second Violin Concerto with the Tucson Symphony Orchestra, the encore to his TSO debut in 2010.
“It was fantastic, both musically and personally,” he recalled of that trip. “Of course I couldn’t complain about the weather and nature. It’s absolutely gorgeous.”
During our conversation, the 41-year-old Gluzman, who lives in Chicago with his tween daughter and pianist wife Angela Yoffe, talked about returning to Tucson, the Prokofiev and his reputation for keeping alive 18th and 19th century violinistic traditions.
“I’m really looking forward to being back with the TSO and to work with George (Hanson). He is a fantastic musician,” he said. “This is his last season so it is even more exciting for me.”
What about the Prokofiev excites you?
“I don’t play pieces that I do not love. I’m lucky to have a wide take, so to speak. This one is particularly special because he wrote it in 1936 at the same time that he is writing one of his most famous pieces, ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ the ballet. In this concerto we have this absolutely amazing contrast between Prokofiev’s daredevil … and Prokofiev the lyricist, Prokofiev in love.”
It sounds very distinctly Russian.
“It is of course, as is everything that Prokofiev wrote with the exception of the year he spent in Paris. He was influenced by what he heard around him. He was influenced most (during this time) by Stravinsky, who was Russian, but that period he did not really sound Russian. He is essentially a Russian composer. You judge the first of four parts of the concerto, the violinist playing alone. It’s typical Russian song, which could have been folk — it’s not in this case — but it could have easily been a Russian folk song: haunting, dark, deep, gorgeous.”
What’s your favorite moment of playing this piece?
“Oh that’s impossible. It’s like for someone who has more than one child asking which kid is your favorite.”
You were just named in a recent book as one of the top three violinists of the 21st century.
“It was very humbling to see my name among all my wonderful colleagues. Many of them are my close friends. It was a beautiful surprise.”
Some critics have said that you are keeping alive the rich violinistic traditions of the 18th and 19th centuries.
“Every artist has in their imagination what he hopes he sounds like. My idea comes from what’s called the golden era — Heifetz, Milestein, David Oistrakh. I grew up listening to them. I grew up listening to their recordings. And while I am a very different musician and I — well, this almost sounds sacrilege — disagree with things they have done, choices they have made musically. So I play many things differently. Yet the core idea of why I am on stage, I’m on stage for the music and nothing else. I think what was different back then was that people made music for the sake of music, just because it was beautiful. … In some way this has been lost in recent years.”
