“When I first started conducting it felt unnatural to have my back to the audience. When you talk to somebody you don’t turn around with your back to them, do you? But there is a tremendous amount that is communicated from the back—you have to learn to speak with it,” says the dark-haired musician.
Pinchas Zukerman faced the audience as a soloist and turned his back to it as a conductor. Either way, it’s all communication to him.
He appears to have learned to speak with his back, since he is as prolific a conductor as he is a concert soloist. On Nov. 2, at 7:30 p.m., when he plays at the Arlington Theater, he’ll take up the bows—one for the violin, one for the viola—and leave his conducting baton behind.
Right now the gregarious Zukerman is in the thick of a 10-month-long concert tour. Having lived the rigors of life as an international concert soloist for nearly half of his 38 years, he must occasionally experience a drop in his characteristic joie de vivre, right? After all, he frequently performs a concert a night for 12 to 14 days in a row.
“Curiously enough, I used to feel that way,” he said. “Like, ‘here goes another concert season.’ But that was before I learned to pace myself.
“Now I take time off. I refresh myself, spend time with the family and try to practice. The body has to be able to be spontaneous, to be fresh.”
The Israeli-born, New York City-bred artist believes in keeping his life balanced. “I’m interested in everything, in life. Because every little thing you encounter comes out in the music.
“And I’m a thinking and living musician from the minute I wake up in the morning to the minute I go to sleep. Sometimes in my sleep, too.”
The ability to switch from bow to baton with ease contributes to his musical equilibrium, increasing the depth and breadth of his knowledge, he said.
Zukerman’s is an almost proverbial story of a young prodigy whose career launches when he steps in for the star of the show who can’t go on. Only in this cause the star was his mentor, the estimable violinist Isaac Stern, who actually came down with a prolonged illness. The outcome: The young string player filled in for the master for a series of concert dates and racked up critical acclaim wherever he went.
It was not long after that that Zukerman first became interested in conducting. He took note of the technique of some of the conductors under whom he played, including Zubin Mehta and Daniel Barenboim. He asked them question. And he took a few courses in conducting.
Then in 1970, three years after replacing Stern, Zukerman, at 22, took the podium and the baton himself. Since then he has alternated his role as violin-viola soloist with that of conductor. He holds a permanent position as musical director of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra.
“The big difference between playing and conducting is that when you conduct you’re not making the immediate sound,” Zukerman explained. “Even though the sound is interwoven through your body, going from the orchestra to the audience. It looks very simple but, believe me, it’s not.
“For me, even as a player, music is vertical, not horizontal,” he said. “Even though I’m a horizontal player in the sense that I play one line—the melody. But the harmony, the chord, is what gives music its impulse, its tension and relaxation. And the chord is vertical, not horizontal.”
Does a seasoned performer such as Zukerman ever get stage fright?
“Every time,” he laughed.
Has it ever showed?
“Hopefully not.”
Zukerman’s nickname, “Pinky,” hardly seems to describe a world-esteemed classical concert artist. But it does tell you he isn’t exactly a prima dona, though he’s appeared with every major symphony orchestra in the world.
For superlatives, his reviews have exhausted the vocabularies of erudite music critics. But he also appears in down-home venues, playing and trading quips with the likes of talk-show types.
“These superstar terms and all this nonsense that you hear—that’s perceived from the outside,” he said. “I really have no connection with that whatsoever. I’m just communicating a message through a written word, called music,” Zukerman said.
Santa Barbara News-Press
