Violinist, Symphony To Play Idaho
SPOKANE SYMPHONY
Where: North Idaho College Boswell Auditorium.
When: Thursday, 8 p.m.
Tickets: $16 and $14, $8 and $7 for students, available at Gallery by the Lake and Burt’s Sound & Music in Coeur d’Alene, and by calling (208) 667-0547.
Corey Cerovsek began violin lessons when he was 6. By the time he was 10 he had made his orchestral debut as a soloist with the Calgary Philharmonic.
“Just for the record, I did have six years without the violin,” Cerovsek says.
The Canadian violinist is now 22, well-established in an international career that has taken him as far west as Australia and as far east as Tel Aviv.
Cerovsek will join the Spokane Symphony Thursday at North Idaho College’s Boswell Auditorium in a performance of Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto as a part of the Coeur d’Alene Performing Arts Alliance series. The concert also includes Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade” and “The Infernal Machine” by Christopher Rouse. Fabio Mechetti will conduct.
This program will be repeated Friday at the Opera House in Spokane.
Cerovsek (pronounced Chey-ROFsek) grew up in Vancouver, B.C.
“My father is a structural engineer,” Cerovsek says, “and though my mother took some singing lessons, she was not a professional musician. Having a musician in the family was a new thing for us.”
After studying with local teachers, Cerovsek was introduced to the renowned violinist and teacher Josef Gingold and became his student at Indiana University. At 12, Cerovsek was the youngest student ever to attend the university. Within 3 1/2 years, the violinist earned both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in music and mathematics.
In addition to his work with Gingold, Cerovsek has also attended master classes with Nathan Milstein in Switzerland and with Yehudi Menhuin in England. Cerovsek was featured in an award-winning CBC documentary “Master Class with Menhuin” and on the PBS special “Musical Encounters.”
Cerovsek is also a fine pianist, sometimes playing concertos on both instruments in the same concert. For his appearances in Coeur d’Alene and Spokane, he is limiting himself to the violin and to the well-known but not frequently performed concerto by Samuel Barber.
“The Barber is one of those pieces I love to play but which is not done very often,” Cerovsek says. “It’s a 20th-century concerto, all right, but it sounds like something left over from the romantic period - very tuneful, very easy to listen to and in the last movement the sparks begin to fly.”
Cerovsek’s concert Thursday marks the young violinist’s second engagement with the Spokane Symphony. He appeared on the symphony’s chamber orchestra series in Spokane in 1990, playing Mozart’s Concerto No. 4 under the baton of guest conductor JoAnn Faletta.