The life of a teacher can easily be one of mundanity: the same subjects every year taught to a new group of students who don’t understand them. But what if your classroom was a concert hall, your professor was one of the world’s premiere orchestral conductors and your textbooks were the masterpieces of western symphonic literature? This is the case for members of Northwestern University’s Symphony Orchestra, better known as NUSO.

Twenty years ago Victor Yampolsky gave his first concert as Northwestern’s Director of Orchestras conducting NUSO in a program featuring Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade” and a ballet piece by Igor Stravinsky; tomorrow night, he’ll do it again.

Why present the same program 20 years later? He certainly didn’t run out of pieces to perform, and the first performance was by no means a failure. For Yampolsky, life is a series of chances to improve. For him a home run that barely makes it over the fence isn’t good enough. He’s swinging for the moon.

“There is always discrepancy between what you see in print — what you see in the score of music — and what you hear,” Yampolsky said in his signature thick Russian accent. “There are always some things to be left for the next time.”

Yampolsky’s desire to constantly improve performance has taken him around the world, conducting 63 orchestras, from Halifax, Nova Scotia to Wellington, New Zealand, and at the age of 62 he shows no sign of slowing down. Robert Hasty, Assistant Director of Orchestras, said Yampolsky’s professional experience — as a conductor and as a violinist for the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra and the Boston Symphony Orchestra — makes him a huge asset to the school of music.

“He expects a professional standard from the first day, ” Hasty said of Yampolsky’s relationship with NUSO, which meets for rehearsal three times a week. “I think they respond.”

Yampolsky has a reputation not only for breathtaking performances, but for rehearsals made lively by his unique and brutally honest sense of humor.

“To me your sound is rugged, like unwashed lettuce,” he said one day in rehearsal. Other days it’s, “No more couch potato!” to the orchestra he knows could be more attentive; “I feel like I’m pushing a cow through the bushes,” to the orchestra that is not grasping the light character of a piece. Sometimes all it takes is some theoretical background: “This is absolutely crazy music. Crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy.”

Unlike most of the music performed by NUSO, both works on tomorrow’s program are programmatic: they both are musical depictions of stories. “The Fairy’s Kiss,” written by Stravinsky in 1928 and revised in 1950, is a ballet based on Hans Christian Anderson’s story, “The Ice Maiden”; “Scheherazade” is the Arabian tale of “1001 Nights.” Yampolsky said while abstract music has the ability to take one’s mind away, programmatic music can be more accessible to those less familiar with the musical traditions and can take one to another world.

“There are a lot of musical depictions of non-musical matters, like a picture of a sea and white sails, and picture of conflicts, sword fights,” Yampolsky said, referring to episodes of Scheherazade. “All of those in musical terms are easily recognizable and it’s easy to relate.”

The two primary characters in the four-movement suite are the Sultan who has vowed to marry a new woman every night and kill her in the morning — played by the brass section — and Scheherazade, his final wife who saves her own life by every night weaving an exotic-tale but refusing to finish it until the following night, played by the concertmaster.

Because the solos and cadenzas in the concertmaster part are both technically demanding and lyrically rich, it often are required on professional concertmaster auditions. Twenty years ago Robert Hanford played those solos. Though the current Lyric Opera concertmaster was a senior by the time Yampolsky joined the faculty, he says Yampolsky’s influence had a tremendous effect.

“I played the solos to ‘Scheherazade’ and he helped me look at them in a different way; I found that very useful,” Hanford said. “And also the times I played for him after that I found very useful for my future professional life.”

Twenty years at NU have not diminished Yampolsky’s commitment to quality performances, and he made sure NUSO’s current concertmaster, sophomore Jessica Hung, also played the solos just to his liking.

“He gave me coaching on them, which was helpful,” Hung said. “The first thing he said when I walked in was, ‘I don’t want to lecture you in front of the whole orchestra; this is the purpose of this coaching.'”

Yampolsky’s reputation as a perfectionist precedes him in the music school. A quarter spent in NUSO can mean fewer opportunities to play for woodwind and brass players because of rotation to give as many students the opportunity as possible, but it almost always means extra hours in the practice room to be prepared for the first rehearsal.

“Everybody does Yampolsky impressions,” Music junior Elliot Dushman said. The tuba player is playing for his second quarter in NUSO, and said for his first rehearsal with Yampolsky he was “kind of looking forward to being amused but also kind of horrified of making mistakes.”

“He knows the music really well,” Dushman said. “He really, really likes the music that he plays and that’s why he’s so passionate about playing everything exactly right.”

And with the Moscow Philharmonic and Boston Symphony on his resume as a violinist, the string players are expected to be equally prepared to perform.

“I really practiced for the first rehearsal with Yampolsky,” Hung said. “The next rehearsal he was like, ‘Do you still like your job?'”

Yampolsky shows no sign of tiring of his job, still flying all over the world as a guest conductor, privately teaching conducting students, directing NUSO on several programs a year and taking part in various other programs in the school of music. But he says he cannot yet foresee retiring from — or even slowing down in — his demanding position.

“I realize there will be a day when I will say, ‘This is probably it.’ But I do not picture that day right now,” Yampolsky said. “The only thing I have is more and more appetite for more concerts, for better performances, for opening up another great symphony or symphonic work and to embrace and guide more youngsters to the wonderful world of classical music.”4

Music junior Tristan Arnold is a PLAY writer and NUSO member. He can be reached at [email protected].

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