Vadim Gluzman

August 15, 2011.  Boyce Lancaster interviews the violinist Vadim Gluzman.  They sat down while Vadim was visiting Columbus, OH to play Mendelsshon’s Concerto in d minor for Violin and Strings with ProMusica (Mendelsshon was 13 when he composed this piece).  An Israeli violinist, Vadim was born in Russia and currently resides in Chicago (he teaches at the Roosevelt University).  Boyce and Vadim talked about Alfred Schnittke, Felix Mendelsshon’s, and the young composer Lera Auerbach.  We can offer you two samples of Vadim’s art.  Here's his performance of Brahms’s Violin Concerto with the Symphony Orchestra of Saarbrücken Radio, Günther Herbig conduction and here – an excerpt from Lera Auerbach’s Double Concerto, which he plays with his wife, the pianist Angela Yoffe, and the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra, Andrei Boreyko conduction.  You can listen to the interview here, and below is Boyce’s introduction to his conversation with Vadim.

Vadim Gluzman: Music’s Fearless Champion

I recently read an interview Vadim Gluzman did with Laurie Niles for violinist.com in he told the story of how he came to play the violin.  Gluzman was six years old when he took examinations for entrance into a specialized school for musically gifted children in what was then the Soviet Union.  At one point, members of the panel examined his hands, which Gluzman said he thought was to make sure his fingernails were clean.  The following day, Vadim saw his name on a list of those accepted for study.  Next to his name, it said “Скрипка,” (roughly pronounced “Skripka”) which means violin.  Gluzman said he had a fit, because he and his father, Michael, had designs on him studying piano, which his father had described to him as the king of instruments, rather than the violin, which his father described as the queen.

Thirty years later, Gluzman concedes that, indeed, his hands are perfectly suited for the violin, though he still marvels at how they knew by examining the hands of a six-year-old boy that he was born to play the violin.

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