Born to be on stage
Tai Murray has dreamed of the life of a classical music soloist for as long as she can remember.
“When I was about 2 years old, I began asking my mother for a violin,” Murray says. She grew up in Chicago. “I don’t know why it happened; maybe I had seen one or heard a violin on a recording or something. Finally when I was 5, my mother bought me one.”
Murray has been playing ever since. Only 22, Murray already performs as a violin soloist with such orchestras as the Chicago Symphony and the St. Louis Symphony. She also plays chamber music in the summer at Vermont’s Marlboro Festival, and she is currently a member of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center Two.
On Friday, Murray will be guest soloist with the Spokane Symphony playing Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Violin Concerto. Conductor Eckart Preu has chosen Albert Roussel’s Suite No. 2 from the ballet “Bacchus et Ariane” and Claude Debussy’s “La Mer” as the orchestral works for the concert.
Murray spoke in a telephone interview from New York where she had just finished a rehearsal with four colleagues of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center Two – an apprentice program of young professionals coached by the society’s regular players.
“No one in my immediate family was playing an instrument,” she says, “but my uncle Randall Murray is a jazz trumpeter. Right from the beginning I decided I wanted to be a concert violinist. I love traveling, I love to meet new people, and I love all kinds of music which I listen to constantly. It’s turned out to be the perfect career for me.”
Murray’s first concert as soloist with orchestra when she was 8, performing a Vivaldi concerto with the Chicago Youth Symphony. A year later she played Mozart with the Chicago Symphony itself. At 15, already a student of Indiana University’s Franco Gulli, she won the Sphinx Competition – a Detroit-based contest designed to promote the concert careers of young black and Hispanic performers.
After receiving an artist diploma from Indiana University, Murray moved to New York to study with the Juilliard School’s Joel Smirnoff.
Among the younger group of concert violinists, Murray has established a reputation for being unafraid to take on works other than the blockbuster concertos – works that depart from the staples of the Tchaikovsky-Bruch-Mendelssohn core.
“To be a professional, sure you’ve got to be able to play the standard repertoire,” she says. “But in order to be a well-rounded musician, you have to know as much of the literature as possible, not just a few popular concertos. You learn more about those works if you continue to add to your repertoire base.”
So, later this season she will perform the Mendelssohn Concerto with the St. Louis Symphony and the Erie Philharmonic. But she will also play Bernstein’s Serenade with the Annapolis Symphony. Here in Spokane she is performing a concerto by a composer best known for movie scores. Korngold was a fabled prodigy in his native Vienna until Hitler overran Austria. The composer, who had already done some work in Hollywood studios, stayed in America, writing for films.
“Korngold wrote this concerto in 1945, the year the Second World War ended,” Murray observes. “I don’t know whether he consciously put any of his own feelings about the war into it, but it’s a piece with lots of emotion and a really spry piece, too. It’s just the kind of music you find in the scores he wrote for those swashbuckling adventures with Errol Flynn like ‘The Prince and Pauper.’ In fact he used melodies from some of those scores in the concerto.”
Murray’s performance Friday will mark the first concert this season in the orchestra’s Symphony YES! series – one of four Classics Concerts that give students the chance to have a backstage look at the orchestra and a meeting with the soloist. The program is designed for students ages 8 through 14, ages coincidentally close to some landmarks in Murray’s own career.