You recently premiered a concerto by Shawn Okpebholo. Can you share with our readers some insights on preparing and performing a piece that has never been performed?
This was a great adventure. I particularly enjoy figuring out a new piece that hasn’t been performed before, though much of the process resembles how I prepare any piece of music that is new to me. I break it into smaller chunks and spend time playing it, trying things different ways, speeding it up and slowing it down, starting at the end and working backwards, reversing my bowing and seeing what that shows me, shaping things one way and then another. In short: treating it like a three-dimensional puzzle. Quite early in the process I played it, slowly and very imperfectly, for my high school violin teacher, who made some great suggestions, and at later times I played for two of my favorite violin mentors, each time gaining new ideas of things to try. All three of them are masters of efficient practicing, as well as terrific performers, so I came away with suggestions on practice techniques as well as encouragement to expand my stylistic approach further.
What else do you do during a given week besides your role at UChicago?
This past week was an especially rich one, so I’ll share a bit about my musical activities. On Saturday, February 28, I played the world premiere of Shawn Okpebholo’s new violin concerto, The Sky Between, which was commissioned by the University of Chicago for me to play with the University Symphony Orchestra. This was a career and life highlight for me! On Sunday afternoon I continued rehearsing Kurt Weill’s opera Der Silbersee as guest concertmaster for Chicago Opera Theater, a process which started the week before the concerto performance. Monday through Friday the following week I had one or two rehearsals every day at my full-time job in the Lyric Opera of Chicago Orchestra for Puccini’s Madama Butterfly and Gabriela Lena Frank’s El Ultimo Sueño de Frida y Diego, and in the evenings I was performing Kurt Weil’s Der Silbersee, attending the winter quarter chamber music concerts of my wonderful students at UChicago, and hosting the Pro Arte Quartet’s mini residency with the chamber music program there. They were in town to coach chamber groups and rehearse with the students for our March 29 side-by-side concert.
Dream meal in your dream setting?
One of the most satisfying meals I had last year was almost entirely due to the setting. In the summers I am the concertmaster of the AIMS Festival Orchestra in Graz, Austria, which is an American festival that takes place in Europe. Last summer, my husband and I went a week early and hiked an Alpine mountain called Dachstein from the town at the base up to the glacier, where we had booked two beds in the lodge. It’s hike-up only, no roads, and the views are truly awe-inspiring. Everyone gets the same food, and dinner is always some form of pasta. Tucking into a rich plate of pasta bolognese after hiking uphill all day through the streets of the town, then woods, then meadows, then above the tree line past snow and ice, ending with views of rock and glacier and the sunset, was incredible. Here’s a photo from a viewing platform along the way and sunrise at the lodge. I was too tired to remember to take a photo of the pasta!
What are you reading?
I just finished my annual re-read of Let Your Mind Run: A Memoir of Thinking My Way to Victory by Deena Kastor, who won the bronze medal in the Olympic marathon in 2004. It’s the perfect book for musicians, as well as runners, because it’s about self-talk and training and persistence over the long haul, as well as how you use your mind coming up to and during a race (concert/audition).
What do you do to create a healthy work life balance?
When I’m not at work I love to cook and bake, I enjoy going to the gym and running outside, and spring to fall I train as a runner with the Fleet Feet Racing Team, which is also where I met my husband. We have several groups of friends who meet up to try different restaurants, and we organize an 8-person annual “cat crawl” run where the group meets up to run from apartment to apartment of the participants, stopping at each to meet their cats. One of our cats likes to host visitors, the other lets them admire him from beyond arm’s reach.