CLASSICAL MUSIC : Right Notes, Right People Enhance Violinist’s Career

About three years ago, during the first months of the San Diego Symphony’s return after the canceled 1986-87 season, violinist Robert McDuffie enlivened an otherwise desultory Symphony Hall concert.

That evening, McDuffie’s stellar fiddling revived the tired strains of Max Bruch’s G Minor Violin Concerto. This Sunday at 7 p.m. in Sherwood Auditorium, the young American violinist will give San Diegans a fuller sampling of his art when he plays a solo recital for the La Jolla Chamber Music Society.

At age 32, McDuffie’s career is now in full flight. An extensive cover article in the January, 1990, Musical America magazine smartly paraded his feats of performance and recording. His career, however, was not launched by winning some flashy competition.

“When I was 22 years old, I thought I was over the hill,” McDuffie said from his New York home. “I entered the Naumburg Competition, and when I got to the finals, I butchered the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto. That was a good thing because it taught me I wasn’t ready for a major career at that time.”

After that temporary defeat, McDuffie went back to the practice room, where he says he learned patience as well as new repertory. The next year, Columbia Artists Management signed him to their extensive roster of violinists. His professional growth since then has been an artful combination of playing the right notes and knowing the right people.

“My relationship with (violinist) Yehudi Menuhin has helped a lot. He has been generous in taking me touring through Europe and the U.S. with a couple of different orchestras.”

Over the 1989 concert season, McDuffie toured 20 cities in North America with the Warsaw Sinfonia under Menuhin’s direction. The previous season he toured with the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra on a European tour.

“Menuhin and I had the same manager in New York,” McDuffie said, “and one day he asked me to go play for Menuhin. He liked it, and the following year, which was 1984 I believe, we played chamber music together at Carnegie Hall.”

McDuffie’s circle is not restricted to musicians. When he and his wife, Camille, were married in Atlanta in 1986, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun presided at the wedding ceremony.

“I met Justice Blackmun some 10 years ago in Washington at a gathering where I played a few numbers after dinner. He is a great music lover, and he accepted my invitation to hear me play a Library of Congress concert the next week. He and his wife have been very good to us. I even played for his daughter’s wedding.”

Last year, when the Supreme Court dedicated a new grand piano with a concert, McDuffie was one of the performers on the program, which was broadcast nationally. Blackmun was responsible for organizing the concert, but he is not the only justice with musical inclinations. Justice Anthony Scalia is also a pianist.

On McDuffie’s La Jolla program he will give the second performance of “Elegy,” a work recently written for him by the young U.S. composer Peter Lieberson. In recent years, McDuffie has become a vocal advocate for music by U.S. composers.

“This interest in American music really started when I learned the Samuel Barber Violin Concerto at Juilliard and played it with the student orchestra there. After I learned it, (composer) David Diamond took me over to Barber’s apartment to play it through, even though Barber was dying of cancer at the time. That night performing at Barber’s apartment was a special time for me. This turned out to be the last time he was out socially--we all went out for Japanese food afterward. He was planning to come to hear me play it with the orchestra, but he died before the performance.”

McDuffie’s well-received first recording for Angel records, William Schuman’s Violin Cncerto, was released earlier this year. Like Barber, Schuman represents that school of U.S. composers that thrived in the decades after World War II. If McDuffie has his druthers for his next recording, the repertory will include Barber’s Violin Concerto, Bela Bartok’s two Romanian Rhapsodies and six Fritz Kreisler encore favorites.

In the meantime, McDuffie fans can hear the Bartok works in their chamber music version at his Sherwood Auditorium recital Sunday.

Watts out. Because of continued problems with a pinched nerve, pianist Andre Watts has canceled his three appearances Oct. 5-7 with the San Diego Symphony. He had already canceled his engagements for the month of September. In his place, Cuban-born pianist Horacio Gutierrez will do the season-opening honors and perform the scheduled “Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini” by Rachmaninoff. Music director Yoav Talmi will conduct.

Coming this week. New York pianist Robert Siemers will play J. S. Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” in recital at Point Loma Nazarene College’s Brown Chapel on Friday at 8 p.m. In a benefit program Saturday for the Point Loma-based National Vision Research Institute, noted Del Mar guitarist Pepe Romero will perform works by Milan, Diabelli and von Weber. On this concert at San Diego’s First Unitarian Church, he will be assisted by his daughter Angelina Romero on the piano in an arrangement of Beethoven’s Variations on a Theme from Mozart’s “The Magic Flute.”