New York - 3rd Year

My goal for this year was to move closer toward my dream job to become a concertmaster. I decided to take as many orchestral positions at school as possible. Right at the begging of the year I was assigned to sit as a principal of second violin section for the opening concert of our season. Again I had the privilege to work with English conductor Nicholas McGegan whom I met during the summer in Santa Barbara and really enjoyed the time working on the program by Britten, Ibert and Elgar. Next to this first cycle I decided to take part in our LAB orchestra where I rotate with three concertmasters on the first chair. LAB happens every Friday and the purpose of this orchestra is that student conductors get to conduct real orchestra and can gain lot of experience. But it is not just for the conductors to gain, we musicians get paid and also have chance to study and play many orchestra pieces. This program is led by Alan Gilbert, the music director of New York Philharmonic and once in a while he invites celebrity conductors to come and teach his students in the form of master class. In October we had two sessions with the legendary conductor Bernard Haitink and this past week our session was led by Mathias Pintscher whom I also met in Santa Barbara. At the end of the semester we will perform a concert in Alice Tully Hall, I was very lucky with the rotation order and will sit as a concertmaster.

During the past two weeks I was in another orchestral cycle, this time as a concertmaster. We were preparing program mainly made of 20th century American music, pieces by John Adams, Charles Ives and piano concerto by Samuel Barber and then Dance of seven veils from the opera Salome by Richard Strauss. We had a great performance in Alice Tully Hall where our conductor Jeffery Milarsky was awarded very prestigious Ditson conductor’s award by the Columbia University.

For this semester I have selected classes Music History of the Romantic period, Music theory and literature of 19th century and French language. Originally I was supposed to take French at Columbia University but very sadly I had to abandon that idea because of my busy schedule so I ended up taking it at Juilliard. Both music theory and music history deal with the development of music from late Beethoven to Strauss. In last couple days I have started working on my final papers and compositions.

So far it has been successful and fun semester but I am looking forward to take few days of during the Thanksgiving break.