Sound shoots out like aurora rays

Canadian violinist Karen Gomyo will play her beloved Strad. Photo / Gabrielle Revere

Tonight, the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra marks the last appearance of conductor Pietari Inkinen as music director and the Auckland debut of violinist Karen Gomyo.

The Canadian soloist plays Beethoven and is pleased to be working again with Inkinen (their two previous pairings saw them taking Shostakovich to Colorado and Prokofiev to Oregon).

Gomyo is just a few years younger than the 35-year-old Finn. "I find the increasing number of younger conductors working today is wonderful from my perspective," she says. "Since we're so close in age, Pietari and I can really talk to one another and discuss the music in a friendly way. Communication is very important to me."

Gomyo's background is singular. Her "friendliest and most innocent memories" come from her nine years in Montreal before she moved to New York at the age of 11 to study at Juilliard.

The combination of a French Canadian father and a Japanese mother has meant she "learned all about discipline and other important qualities, so much part of the Japanese tradition of raising a child".

Studies with the legendary Dorothy DeLay at Juilliard were inspirational. DeLay, already in her mid-70s, organised for the young girl to join her. "While we certainly tackled the techniques of violin playing, she was also very much a teacher of life lessons," Gomyo laughs. "She had majored in child psychology and had this incredible ability to scan you from head to toe, and know who you are."

A career was assured when, at just 15, Gomyo was taken on by the prestigious Young Concert Artists of New York. "If you can land on their roster, you get the perfect introduction to a life on the stage," she explains.

Gomyo's website has a number of fine videos including first-rate Shostakovich and Beethoven concertos with the Danish Radio Symphony under Kirill Karabits and Andrew Manze. Less expected are some lively clips of her playing tango, both in ensemble and solo. She tells me how her first introduction to the great Astor Piazzolla came from her mother passing on some CDs.

"Ten years later, I was playing in a New York chamber music festival and one of the concerts was an all-tango programme," she remembers. "I was so excited I didn't bother to see who else was playing. And who should turn up, 10 minutes late, but Pablo Ziegler, Piazzolla's own pianist."

Ziegler is there on Gomyo's video samplings and all the clips feature the 1703 Aurora Stradivarius violin that Gomyo has been using for the last 13 years. "I fell in love with it immediately. It has become the perfect concert hall instrument with a personality that really opens up and shines in a large space when the acoustics are beautiful. The sound starts to shoot out like aurora rays."

Tonight, an Auckland audience will experience Gomyo's Strad in a work she describes as a pinnacle of the violin repertoire, "even if it's a bit of a musical marathon".

"There's so much chamber music in the Beethoven Concerto. And none of the virtuosic violin solos you find in Tchaikovsky. A lot of the time I am accompanying and the orchestral instruments play such an important part, exchanging melodies with me."

When it is time for the cadenzas, Gomyo reveals that tonight's were written by the American, Nathan Milstein (1903-1992), one of her four favourite violinists, along with Oistrakh, Grumiaux and Menuhin.

"I adore Milstein's creativity," she points out. "I have several recordings of him playing this concerto and they're all different; he was always looking for something new. Tonight I'm playing his cadenzas as a personal homage."