CSOradio
CSOradio
Violin soloists occasionally turn to conducting, dividing their time between the two roles or combining them at times. Famous examples include Pinchas Zukerman, formerly music director of the English Chamber Orchestra and St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and National Arts Centre Orchestra in Ottawa, and Joshua Bell, music director of the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields in London. Andrew Manze, a once-revered Baroque violinist, gave up the instrument in 2009 and has devoted himself since to conducting, with two posts, including chief conductor of the NDR Radiophilharmonie in Hanover.
What links most of these instrumentalist-turned-conductors is that they made the move by choice, as a way of complementing their solo work. When Peter Oundjian made the switch in 1995, however, he had no choice. He was diagnosed with focal dystonia, a neurological disorder that causes involuntary muscle contractions — in his case, in the left hand. It ultimately made it impossible for him to continue as first violinist of the Tokyo String Quartet, one of the world's premier ensembles.
Fortunately, he has gone on to a second career as impressive as his first. Along with serving as music director of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra from 2004 through 2018, he headed the Royal Scottish National Orchestra for six years. In 2019, he took over as music director of the Colorado Music Festival and has quickly built its profile. Indeed, Oundjian has enjoyed such success on the podium that many younger classical fans may not be aware of his earlier work as a major chamber musician.
At the Ravinia Festival, Oundjian the conductor will join violinist Itzhak Perlman, one of the world's most recognized classical musicians, for a concert Aug. 18 with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Perlman is among four-star violinists and conductors who have intervened in Oundjian’s life at key moments and served as mentors to him. “What I’m impressed with is the way Peter was able to change careers, which for me is really an amazing feat,” Perlman said.
Born in Toronto to Armenian parents, Oundjian, 66, first became interested in the violin through Manoug Parikian, a former concertmaster of London’s Philharmonia Orchestra, also of Armenian descent and a good friend of his father. When the violinist would visit, Peter would insist that Parikian play something before he went to bed. “I identified very much with the violin,” he said. But the youngster first started taking piano lessons when he was 6 and switched to the violin a year later, after his family moved to England.
After Oundjian graduated from high school and attended the Royal College of Music for 18 months, his father pressured him to go to Salzburg to study. That’s where the first of his famed mentors stepped in. Zukerman was scheduled to give a master class at the Brighton Festival, and one of the students scheduled to take part had fallen ill. Could Oundjian fill in? Of course. After the session, Zukerman suggest that he should come to New York’s Juilliard School. But Oundjian explained that his father was insistent on Salzburg. Zukerman spoke to the parent and quickly won him over to the idea of New York, insisting he would look out for his son.
“I’m telling you now, you have the hands of a conductor.” — Herbert von Karajan to Peter Oundjian, then a violinist
Perlman entered his life around the same time. Oundjian reached out to philanthropist Ian Stoutzker, then-chairman of the Philharmonia Orchestra and an amateur violinist, asking to play for him before auditioning at Juilliard. When he was ushered in, he was amazed to see Perlman in the living room. “So, that’s how I met Itzhak, and he was so delightful and so helpful,” Oundjian said. Perlman remembers the encounter and the “obviously very talented” young violinist. “What impressed me about him was, first of all, he is a very nice fellow,” Perlman said. “That always makes a difference to me.”
Although Oundjian had a trio at the Royal College of Music and played chamber music with his family, he was intent to prove he could be a soloist. “The young ego says, ‘Thank you very much, but I can play the Sibelius Concerto just fine.’ ” He went on to win first prize at an international violin competition in Viña del Mar in Chile. Then the Tokyo String Quartet invited him to become its first violinist, an offer he couldn’t turn down. “I loved their playing,” he said. “It was unbelievable.” Oundjian joined the group during the same week he graduated from Juilliard in May 1981.
He enjoyed enormous success with the quartet, but its grueling schedule —140 concerts a year — began to take its toll on him. “The pressure started to build, and my hand didn’t feel like it was moving normally,” he said. In October 1993, two of his fingers “collapsed” and he suspected what turned out to be the case: he was suffering from focal dystonia, the condition that forced pianist Leon Fleisher to perform with just his left hand for many years. “I knew I had to get off the stage before I was booed off the stage,” Oundjian said. He managed to stay on with the quartet until its 25th anniversary, with performances worldwide of the complete set of Beethoven quartets, finally stepping down in 1995.
That same year, Oundjian, who has taught at Yale University since 1981, joined the faculty of the Steans Institute, Ravinia’s nationally known summer training program, coaching chamber groups and individual violinists. “I was always intent on teaching these people to play the violin in such a way that nothing would happen to them that happened to me,” he said. Too often, he said, musicians are told to practice intensely with little thought to its effects on the body. He exhorts his students to use their muscles in the right way. “Most musicians who want to do this are not as patient as they might need to be when they are practicing. They try to force themselves to get to a certain level a little more quickly than they should.”
After Oundjian left the Tokyo String Quartet, the big question was what to do next. To find an answer, he looked back at a significant experience at Juilliard, when he crossed paths with another future mentor. Conductor Herbert von Karajan came to give master classes, and Oundjian served as the concertmaster of the participating orchestra. Karajan asked him if he conducted, and in fact, Oundjian was a conducting minor. The conductor left 20 minutes at the end of the second session for Oundjian to lead Brahms’ First Symphony, and his fellow players worked hard to make the stand-in conductor look good. “I’m telling you now, you have the hands of a conductor,” Karajan told the young violinist.
Those words came echoing back in 1995, and Oundjian decided to give conducting a try. The first person he told about his idea was conductor and friend, André Previn. The maestro had Oundjian over to his house and shared some of the things he would need to know, including some of the tricks that musicians would play on unsuspecting conductors. Previn allowed Oundjian to share the podium during a concert as part of the 50th anniversary season of the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts near Katonah, N.Y. That outing went so well that Oundjian went on to serve as the organization’s artistic director from 1997 to 2003 and artistic adviser and principal conductor from 2004 to 2007.
Jeffrey Haydon, who took over as president and chief executive officer of Ravinia in 2020, had held a similar position at Caramoor, where he quickly became aware of Oundjian’s impact there. “He did an amazing job of raising the profile of Caramoor,” Haydon said. When Haydon arrived there in September 2012, he decided the next season needed a big orchestral concert featuring someone with special meaning to the festival. “Very quickly, all eyes went to Peter Oundjian,” Haydon said. He called the conductor, who maintains a residence about 35 minutes from the grounds, and Oundjian quickly agreed.
When Haydon and Marin Alsop, Ravinia’s chief conductor, were planning the 2022 Chicago Symphony season, they shared lists of conductors they wanted to book. One name on both lists was Oundjian’s. He and Alsop were classmates at Juilliard. “I’ve known her for ages, and I’ve always liked her and always admired her,” he said. When Alsop served as music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra from 2007 through 2021, Oundjian was a guest conductor almost a dozen times, and he now serves as principal conductor of the Colorado Symphony, which Alsop led early in her career.
Perlman is not often able to perform at Ravinia, due to scheduling conflicts. But this year, the timing worked out, and Perlman will join the CSO for Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto. “This is a rare moment to see him perform live,” Haydon said. The Ravinia leader asked Oundjian if he would be willing to lead the concert, not knowing the history between the two performers, and he jumped at the chance. “He is an extraordinary person on many, many levels,” Oundjian said of Perlman. “I can’t believe what he gives to all of us. To be on the stage with him is just a thrill.”
Excerpted with permission from Ravinia Magazine.
