Christina McEwan
FABLED violinist Shlomo Mintz, in Cape Town to give his only Cape Town performance, with the Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra, has been named inaugural soloist-in-residence of the Queensland Symphony Orchestra in Australia, an appointment he takes up next year.
His trip to Cape Town is a welcome return after 16 busy years. He will perform the glorious Mendelssohn Violin Concerto on Thursday at Artscape Opera. The gala concert is part of the orchestra’s centenary celebrations.
The Moscow-born violinist and conductor, one of the all-time concert greats, last visited South Africa in June 1968, when he performed in recital for the Cape Town Concert Series. Since then, his concerto and chamber music career has continued to enchant worldwide, and his conducting career has taken on a life of its own.
He has also opened an on-line academy where students can download lessons. This is the embodiment of a dream, since his vision was to mentor the children of the next generation.
Mintz is a living legend, for his career has spanned several decades from his orchestral debut at the age of 11 in 1968. When Itzhak Perlman fell ill, Zubin Mehta called him to play Paganini’s 1st Violin Concerto with the Israel Philharmonic.
In Israel from the age of 2, he studied there with the renowned teacher Ilona Feher before becoming a protégé of Isaac Stern. When Mintz was 16, he made his Carnegie Hall debut with the Pittsburgh Symphony and joined another legend who has turned out many of the last generation’s top violinists, Dorothy DeLay, at the Juilliard School of Music of New York.
Not for nothing did the Milwaukee Sentinel call his playing, “The most ravishingly beautiful playing we mortals can hope to hear.”
At the age of 18, Shlomo Mintz added the role of conductor. Since then, he has conducted acclaimed orchestras worldwide, including the Rotterdam Philharmonic and Israeli Philharmonic.
The reason? “Dorothy DeLay said I should know what other instruments are being played while I play my concertos.”
Since he already played the piano and the viola, he decided to concentrate on the full range. Working with a conductor’s score helps with understanding of this complex accompaniment. That it helped is clear, since he has run parallel careers successfully ever since.
He has been principal guest conductor of both the Zagreb Philharmonic and Limburg Symphony Orchestra in Maastricht and is currently the artistic director of Crans Montana Music Festival and master class in Switzerland, which take place annually in August. Mintz has also been music adviser to the Israel Chamber Orchestra.
While with Maastricht, he played Paganini’s 1st Violin Concerto using “Il Cannone” – the famous violin of Niccòlo Paganini himself – in a televised broadcast. His own violin, a Guarneri del Gesù, dates back to 1700.
Mintz has been on many juries for revered international competitions such as the International Henryk Wieniawski Competition for the Violin in Poland and the Sion Valais-International Violin Competition in Switzerland. Today, he heads the Munetsugu Angel Violin Competition in Nagoya, Japan, and the Buenos Aires violin competition, both of which take place again next year. He also plays chamber music in a trio with Itmar Golan (piano) and Matt Haimowitz (cello).
He is a recording artist of note with many award-winning CDs. Prestigious music prizes include the Premio Accademia Musicale Chigiana, the Diapason D’Or, the Grand Prix du Disque, the Gramophone Award and the Edison Award.
Among his recordings are the Mendelssohn and Bruch and the Prokofiev concertos, with both the Chicago Symphony and Abbado.
These were followed by Vivaldi Four Seasons, the Silbelius and Dvorák concertos with the Berlin Philharmonic and CDs of sonatas by Franck, Debussy and Ravel.
Several of his CDs will be on sale in the foyer of Artscape.
Shlomo Mintz also has another passion: he is involved in “Violins of Hope”, a project in which 24 violins of owners who lost their lives in ghettos and concentration camps during World War II were restored by Amnon Weinstein and are used again at occasions such as a concert in Jerusalem to mark 60 years of the state of Israel.
After the Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra concert, Mintz heads off to Durban to play with the KZN Philharmonic and then to Korea and South America.
The Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Theodore Kuchar, will also play the Verdi overture La Forza del Destino and the Tchaikovsky Symphony No 6, Pathetique.
l The concert begins at 8pm. Tickets for the Mintz gala are R420, R380 and R280. See www.cpo.org.za for more information.