Guest cellist Julian Schwarz to play with Springfield Symphony Orchestra

Schwarz joins the SSO on Saturday for Tchaikovsky’s “Variations on a Rococo Theme.”

Cellist Julian Schwarz, who joins the Springfield Symphony Orchestra Saturday for Tchaikovsky’s “Variations on a Rococo Theme,” dates his love of music back to childhood.

He began playing the cello at age 7 and made his orchestral debut four years later, playing the Saint-Saens Concerto No. 1 with the Seattle Symphony. Schwarz recently celebrated his 21st birthday and he has already toured with the Moscow State Radio Symphony, appeared on the NPR radio’s “From the Top,” and recorded on the Naxos label.

Speaking by telephone from New York, where he studies at the Juilliard School with Joel Krosnick, Schwarz gave some insights into his singular musical development.

His family is at the heart of his musical devotion.

“My father (Seattle Symphony conductor Gerard Schwarz) is the musician that I am always trying to be in some ways,” said Schwarz, adding “We have a wonderful musical and personal relationship.”

His maternal grandmother, Shirley Greitzer, taught piano at Juilliard. Grandfather Sol Greitzer was a noted viola soloist. Mother Jody Schwarz is a former flutist.

“When I was young, I heard every concert (my father) conducted – there were four per week,” Schwarz recalled. “I absorbed so much. I would ask questions, look at the scores, and once my dad picked up on my enthusiasm for it all, he began to educate me and give me all the tools I needed to become a musician.”

Having artists of the stature of Mstislav Rostropovich as dinner guests didn’t hurt.

“I had just recently picked up the cello when he came to the house and I played for him,” Schwarz said. “I didn’t know the magnitude of what I was doing, but I played a little bit of a contradance and afterwards he said, ‘Don’t practice so much. I still have a few good years left.’”

Rostropovich, Piatigorsky and Lynn Harrell, with whom he would study in his teens, were among Schwarz’s early cello influences, but his first teacher was David Tonkonogui, a member of the Seattle Symphony. Schwarz remembered Tonkonogui’s way of teaching as one that “put the love of music before everything else.”

Tonkonogui passed away when Schwarz was 12, and Schwarz performed and recorded an elegy entitled “In Memoriam,” composed by his father for solo cello and string orchestra, and dedicated to Tonkonogui.

At age 16, Schwarz won the Northwest Sinfonietta Youth Concerto Competition, and performed a Haydn cello concerto with the orchestra and music director Christophe Chagnard.

“We had coffee together, and in the course of conversation, he learned that I had conducted a short piece, so I had some experience on the podium. He was trying to establish the position of assistant conductor with a community orchestra (the Lake Union Civic Orchestra) that he led, and he thought of me.”

“I was young and free enough to play in the orchestra as well,” Schwarz said, “and it was an eye-opening experience – one of the most thoughtful things anyone could have done for me at that point. He trusted me to conduct one piece at the end of my first season and one at the end of my second.”

When Schwarz toured with the Moscow State Radio Symphony, his solo piece was the Tchaikovsky “Rococo Variations,” which he will play in Springfield. Since the work was written by one of Russia’s most famous composers, and he was playing it with a Russian orchestra, under a Russian conductor, Schwarz said, “I assumed they would guide me to the way they played it, that they might be stubborn with tempos or interpretation.”

As it turned out, Schwarz played it entirely his way for the first couple of performances. Then, “...as the weeks went on, the conductor would open up to me and say, ‘Why don’t you try this?’ and I would like his suggestion and keep it in the performance.”

The piece took a very interesting turn when an older violist in orchestra approached Schwarz and expressed, through a translator, his sentimental attachment to a particular spot in the score and his suggestion that the young cellist do more expressively with that small moment.”

“I took his advice,” Schwarz said, “and at the end of the concert he kissed me and thanked me.” That moment remains etched in Schwarz’s interpretation of the piece to this day.

Possessing a winning combination of youthful curiosity and vigor and artistic depth and maturity beyond his years, Schwarz is on a trajectory to distinction. Springfield audiences are fortunate to witness the blossoming of a brilliant career.

There are more young musicians on deck for Saturday’s concert than Schwarz, at the Springfield Symphony Youth Orchestra takes the stage at 6:30 p.m. in place of Classical Conversations, to play Tchaikovsky’s “Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture” under the direction of Jonathan Lam.

Maestro Kevin Rhodes and the SSO round out the concert with Wagner’s gorgeous “Siegfried Idyll,” and Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, called by Wagner “the apotheosis of the dance.”