MUSIC : Violinist Builds Career to Crescendo

As did most kids, violinist Robert McDuffie hated to practice. “But I enjoyed the applause I got at the (local Georgia) Rotary Club,” he says. These days, McDuffie, 34, is getting a lot of applause, and not just at Rotary clubs.

He has been soloist with the Chicago and Pittsburgh symphonies, the Philadelphia Orchestra and the St. Paul and Los Angeles chamber orchestras. He has recorded with the St. Louis Symphony under Leonard Slatkin and toured the United States with Yehudi Menuhin and the Warsaw Sinfonia. This year, he has appeared locally several times, including in 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 in Costa Mesa in a concert sponsored, as was his Irvine recital, by the Philharmonic Society.

McDuffie grew up in Macon, Ga., where he learned to play the violin from Henrik Schwarzenberger, a Hungarian refugee who somehow had wound up teaching in the public school system. “He taught me to play like a gypsy,” McDuffie has quipped.

Later, he went to study with the renowned pedagogue Dorothy DeLay at the Juilliard School in New York, where his fellow violin classmates included Shlomo Mintz, Cho-Liang Lin and Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg.

Quite a class! And their rapid ascent into the limelight compared with his slower rise to prominence--he bombed, he says, at the prestigious 1981 Naumberg Competition--made him feel “I was over the hill at 22,” he says.

“But I wasn’t ready to go out to start performing at that time on a major level,” he adds.

McDuffie credits Gregg Gleasner, his manager then at Columbia Artists, for a “conscientious” plan of “doing small tours and gradually playing with bigger orchestras and bigger-name conductors” for building his career. “I’m deeply grateful for that.”

McDuffie and his wife, Camille, a literary publicist, live in New York with their 2-year-old daughter, Eliza. “We used to have a rule that 10 days would be the most we’d be apart,” McDuffie says. “We’re not exactly keeping to that now, but we’re trying. She is 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.”

Who: Violinist Robert McDuffie with the Prague Chamber Orchestra.

When: Saturday, Sept. 26, at 8 p.m.

Where: Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa.

Whereabouts: San Diego (405) Freeway to Bristol Street exit. North to Town Center Drive. (Center is one block east of South Coast Plaza.)

Wherewithal: $11 to $32.

Where to Call: (714) 553-2422.