“This website is a source for information on me and my musical activities as well as a forum for discussing wider things related to music. I hope you enjoy yourselves – and don't forget to look for Easter Eggs.”
A Little Bit About Me
I was born on June 2nd, 1981, in Toronto, Canada. I share my birthday with Sir Edward Elgar, whose violin concerto is among my favourites, and the Marquis de Sade, whose works, I confess, I've never read.
My parents are both violinists and violin teachers. We're something of an ethnic hodge-podge. My paternal grandparents were of Armenian extraction, my maternal grandmother was Japanese, and my maternal grandfather some kind of Russo-German mixture. My father's musical lineage includes training by Sergei Khouzieff, a pupil of Auer's, and by Carlo Van Neste, a pupil of Ysayë's. My mother studied with Hideo Saito in Japan and Arthur Grumiaux in Belgium. My parents met at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Brussels.
Between 1965 and 1977, before immigrating to Canada, they were concertmaster and co-concertmaster of the National Iranian Radio and Television orchestra. This group's main activity was touring – they played extensively in Europe and the former Soviet Union, at venues like the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam and the Salle Gaveau in Paris. Their specialties were the baroque, neoclassical, and contemporary repertoire, and they regularly introduced composers like Ligeti and Xenakis to audiences who had had no previous exposure to their works.
I myself was taught by my parents and by Dorothy DeLay in New York. I was thirteen when I started with DeLay and continued to work with her until a couple of years before her death. Between these three teachers, I like to think that I had exposure to a nice contrast of influences, the American on DeLay's side, and a wide variety of others on my parents' side. I also learned a lot from a teenage obsession with the piano. I own a T-shirt with Alfred Brendel's picture on it.
My education has been a bit unconventional. I never went to a conservatory, and received all of my musical training – performance, chamber music, theory, etc. – through private tuition. I did, however, go through a lot of “regular” school. I went to an ordinary high school, did a bachelor's degree at a large university (University of Toronto), where I studied philosophy and historiography (the theory of historical writing), and did some graduate work in philosophy, at the same institution.
My life at the moment consists of traveling here and there and playing the violin. I like to say that I'm a “seasonal migrant worker” – it has a kind of Grapes of Wrath ring to it. I'm very fond of being in different places (I tend to get a bit restless when I'm not on the move) though I'm not very fond of flying. I play on an 1861 Jean Baptiste Vuillaume, which was once owned by Ysayë, and a Eugene Sartory bow from 1910 (I think).
I currently live in Malmö, Sweden and Weimar, Germany with my husband, Stefan Solyom.
My personal interests include talking, reading, writing, and neuroscience. Historically I've been an avid and somewhat indiscriminate reader. My literary tastes don't really follow any clear pattern: right now I'm rather fixated on memoirs, a while back it was case studies on neurological aberrations. But I enjoy writing most of all – after playing the violin, it's my favourite activity. What I hope to do on this site is merge the two, and to write a lot about music and playing. Along the way, I'll throw in some thoughts about something I've read or factoids about the brain or whatever else strikes my fancy at the moment. I will try my best to keep it interesting!