Dean Poling
VALDOSTA — Violin virtuoso Robert McDuffie is a man who has learned to compartmentalize, balancing a diverse life, having famed composers create works specifically for him, traveling the world to perform, living in New York City, and teaching in his native Macon, Ga.
This weekend, McDuffie comes to Valdosta for a concert with the Valdosta Symphony Orchestra, to play Tchaikovsky’s passionate and challenging Violin Concerto, and re-acquaint an old friendship.
McDuffie and Valdosta Symphony Orchestra conductor Howard Hsu have known each other for several years.
They met in the late 1990s in New York. Hsu worked at the Harlem School of the Arts, where McDuffie served on the board. The superstar violinist simply introduced himself to Hsu as “Bobby.”
“He impressed me with his passion for arts education for the underserved areas of Harlem and the Bronx,” Hsu says. “As busy as he was with his highly successful, international solo career, he still managed to donate his time, energy, and enthusiasm to the school.”
He was also generous in offering young musicians opportunities. McDuffie discovered Hsu’s interest in conducting. McDuffie was a soloist with the New York Philharmonic and invited Hsu to attend rehearsals. “That, of course, was incredible,” Hsu says.
Now, 10 years later, Hsu has invited McDuffie to perform with the Valdosta Symphony Orchestra. Despite a hectic schedule, McDuffie found the time. Just as McDuffie found the time for a recent phone interview with The Valdosta Daily Times.
Reviewing McDuffie’s schedule is a whirlwind of activities and pursuits. On the phone, however, his voice is the calm at the center of the maelstrom.
Recent appearances include concerts in the Netherlands, France, Korea, Taiwan, Israel, a 16-city American tour.
In Rome, the Italian city’s mayor presented McDuffie with the Premio Simpatia in recognition of the musician’s contribution to the city’s cultural life.
He has earned Grammy nominations. His recordings include performances of works by Mendelssohn, Bruch, Adams, Glass, Barber, Rosza, Bernstein. He has been profiled on NBC’s “Today” show, CBS Sunday Morning, etc.
He regularly returns to Macon where he is a distinguished university professor of music at Mercer University. A few years ago, Mercer opened the Robert McDuffie Center for Strings.
Meanwhile, he has been preparing for a tour featuring the international premiere of “Concerto for Violin No. 2, The American Four Seasons,” composed by internationally acclaimed composer Philip Glass specifically for McDuffie.
The Glass piece has been in the works for seven years, McDuffie says, and was completed this past fall. The Glass work features the “seductive minimalist music that he’s famous for,” McDuffie says. Glass’ music often has a repetitive thematic drive, with intended spaces for the listener’s imagination to fill in melodic blanks.
In this piece, Glass composed four movements, each one representing a season, though he does not share which movement is which season in the titles. Listeners can make that judgment themselves.
When a composer creates a work with a specific musician in mind, there is an element of collaboration, McDuffie says, but the work remains the composer’s piece. For example, Glass sent McDuffie the work. McDuffie learned it then returned to Glass with questions.
“There was very little we changed,” he says, and these changes dealt primarily with issues of balance between the soloist and the orchestra.
McDuffie has played the Glass work in Toronto. The tour, which will also include Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons,” will open later this year in London.
Meanwhile, McDuffie has been re-acquainting himself with the daunting Tchaikovsky concerto for the Valdosta concert. The Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto is considered one of the most technically difficult pieces ever composed for the instrument. Originally, some even called it impossible to perform.
McDuffie concedes, the Tchaikovsky concerto is “a challenging piece, but I’ve been playing it so long, I have a great time with it.”
To prepare for these many shows, as well as handle the entrepreneurial aspects of his performances, McDuffie must multi-task and keep everything balanced within his schedule. He mentions having rehearsed the Vivaldi in the morning prior to his phone conversation with The Times. He will rehearse the Tchaikovsky following the interview.
“I have to walk straight into one thing from the other,” he says. “You have to become a master of pacing and time management.”
While he may juggle several tasks in some situations, he keeps his concentration strictly on the music during rehearsals.
“There is no multi-tasking while practicing,” he says. He turns off his phones, the television, and the world becomes the pace of the music, not the tick-tock demands of a dayplanner.
Music becomes the vehicle that takes him to see old friends like Howard Hsu, to places like Rome, to meet great composers such as Philip Glass, and to realms of the soul far removed from the traffic of New York or the ringing of the phone or the world teeming with discordant voices on television.
SHOWTIME
Valdosta Symphony Orchestra presents “Native Son,” featuring international superstar violinist and Macon native Robert McDuffie joining the VSO to perform Tchaikovsky’s passionate Violin Concerto. “Mozart’s quicksilver Overture to the ‘Marriage of Figaro’ is sometimes referred to as the ‘egg-timer’ overture — once the overture is done, so is your egg.” Also scheduled: Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony.
When: 8 p.m. Saturday.
Where: Whitehead Auditorium, VSU Fine Arts Building, corner of Oak and Brookwood.
Ticket: $20.
Reservations, more information: Call VSU College of the Arts Outreach, (229) 333-2150; or visit www.valdostasymphony.org
