O.C. MUSIC / CHRIS PASLES : McDuffie’s Flubs Played Key Part in Later Success

Few artists are up to admitting their failures, but candor seems to be part of violinist Robert McDuffie’s Georgia upbringing. The 34-year-old doesn’t hesitate to discuss bombing in a prestigious music competition or getting chewed out by a well-known conductor.

Of course, McDuffie hasn’t bombed in a long time, and conductors don’t chew him out any more.

But things were different in 1981 when he reached the finals of the prestigious Naumberg Competition in New York. He was playing the Tchaikovsky Concerto. Things had gone swimmingly in the preliminaries the night before, and then disaster struck.

“The first note was good and the last note was good,” he said last week in a phone interview before an appearance with the Long Beach Symphony. “I don’t know what happened in between.

“It was great, looking back on it,” he added. “It did teach me how to practice. If I had won, I wouldn’t be talking to you today. I wasn’t ready to go out to start performing at that time on a major level.”

But he did go on to the majors. He has appeared with the Chicago and Pittsburgh symphonies, the Philadelphia Orchestra and the St. Paul and Los Angeles chamber orchestras, among others. He has recorded with the St. Louis Symphony under Leonard Slatkin, and toured twice with Yehudi Menuhin, first in Europe and then in the U.S.

Musical America gave him a cover story in 1990.

This year, he has played in the Southland several times, including a recital at the Irvine Barclay Theatre in January. On Saturday, he will play the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto with the Prague Chamber Orchestra at the Orange County Performing Arts Center. The concert is sponsored, as was his Irvine recital, by the Philharmonic Society. (On Sept. 28, he plays at the Arlington Theatre in Santa Barbara and on Sept. 30 at Ambassador Auditorium in Pasadena.)

Although McDuffie and Menuhin had played chamber music together, their first collaboration as soloist and conductor in 1987 didn’t get off to a smooth start. The vehicle was the Mendelssohn Concerto, and as they began rehearsing with Netherlands Chamber Orchestra, Menuhin began “stomping his foot” and showing other signs of impatience.

“Then he called a break after first movement--and you know there is no break after the first movement!” McDuffie said. “He said, ‘OK, let’s go upstairs . . . .’ Then he lit into me.”

The issues had to do with tempo and “maybe a couple of old-school suggestions--which I loved--about more vibrato, more yearning,” McDuffie said. “It was a strange moment, needless to say. I was probably pretty nervous at the first rehearsal. But that was mainly at the beginning. Both of us were staking out turf, basically feeling each other out musically. Since then, we’ve played together maybe 40 times.”

McDuffie grew up in Macon, Ga., where his mother is organist at the First Presbyterian Church. “She was the musical force in the family,” the violinist said. It was she who decided he would play violin rather than follow her into the world of keyboards.

“Like all young people, I hated to practice,” he said. “But I enjoyed the applause at the Rotary Club. Looking back on it, it was a struggle, especially when peer pressure is pretty heavy. And I was on the basketball team at school; combining that with your own studies was not easy to do. But my parents were able to make sure that we could do it all.”

He studied violin with Henrik Schwarzenberger, a Hungarian refugee who “somehow had wound up teaching in the public school system. Why Macon--I still don’t know. He taught me for 10 years. He taught me to play like a Gypsy.”

When he was 16, he moved to New York and eventually came to study with the renowned pedagogue Dorothy DeLay at the Juilliard School in New York. His fellow violin classmates included Nigel Kennedy, Cho-Liang Lin, Shlomo Mintz, and Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg.

Quite a class! And their seemingly instantaneous ascent into the limelight prompted him to enter the Naumberg Competition. “I felt I was over the hill at the age of 22,” he said. “I felt I had to enter the competition.”

Although he didn’t win, he did sign on with Columbia Artists, and he credits Gregg Gleasner, his manager there at that time, for building his career though a “conscientious plan of doing small tours and gradually playing with bigger orchestras and bigger-name conductors. I’m deeply grateful for that.”

“You hear horror stories of how managers sometimes take advantage of young performers, throw them out into the concert world and take their commissions,” he said. “You don’t hear from these artists after four or five years.”

McDuffie and his wife, Camille, a literary publicist, live in New York with their 2-year-old daughter, Eliza. “She’s an Eliza Jane, “ McDuffie stressed. “My wife and I are both from the South and we felt an Eliza Jane was needed in New York.”

Touring keeps them apart, but “we used to have a rule that 10 days would be the most we’d be apart,” he said. “We’re not exactly keeping to it during this tour, but we’re trying. She’s extremely supportive of what I do, and I’m extremely supportive of what she does. We both love our child. I think it’s a great marriage. I just wish we were together more.”

Robert McDuffie will be soloist with the Prague Chamber Orchestra in the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto on Saturday at 8 p.m. at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Also on the program: the Overture to Beethoven’s “The Creatures of Prometheus,” Schubert’s Symphony No. 5 and Isa Krejci’s “Viva Rossini.”$11 to $32. (714) 553-2422.