Features

Nigel Armstrong Debuts with Berkeley Symphony By KATHLEEN THOMPSON HILL

Special to the Planet
Friday January 21, 2005

Berkeley Symphony’s inaugural Young Artist Award recipient Nigel Armstrong, a 14-year-old violin prodigy from Sonoma with invisible braces on his teeth, will perform his first professional concert with the Berkeley Symphony on Wednesday at Zellerbach Hall. 

It is not coincidental that Season Concert No. 3 is also Associate Conductor George Thomson’s subscription debut as conductor with the Berkeley Symphony. 

Armstrong’s mother, Kristen, played the violin at home when she was pregnant with Nigel, so he has always heard violin music. From age 3 Armstrong remembers hearing students playing violins across the street at Leta Davis’s Suzuki classes and concerts on Saturdays. At the ripe old age of 4, Armstrong asked his parents if he could start violin classes, and was told it was too early, he was too young, and it wouldn’t be good. So he waited until he was five and a half, and like many of us, went to his first lesson crying big tears for mommy. 

Then unfamiliar with Suzuki methods of learning basics and techniques, Armstrong “expected to learn to play a new song every week.” Mastering holding the violin just right and working with other students were new concepts that seemed at the time to hold back this eager boy.  

Armstrong kept being paired with another student, would pass that student in accomplishment, move on to another, and finally ran out of students in Davis’s locally well-known classes. (Davis’s “Little Fiddlers” play “in concert” on bales of hay at the Glen Ellen Village Fair every year.) 

Armstrong continued to work with Davis until he was 10, moved on to study with Daniel Kobialka, and then with Zaven Melikian, retired faculty member from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.  

According to Armstrong, Melikian helped him “remodel technique, and taught me the fundamentals of professional violin playing,” taking him from “little-kid style to playing a major repertoire.” After six years, Armstrong found that he needed a different approach to his music and that he no longer felt inspired by Melikian. 

Since June, Armstrong has been studying with Li Lin of the San Francisco Conservatory’s preparatory department, which is open to students at the pre-university level. 

Meanwhile, back in Sonoma, Armstrong has been on public school-directed home schooling and independent study since fourth grade, which he skipped. Technically now a tenth grader, he takes twelfth-grade math, eleventh-grade chemistry, English, world history, and P.E., with credits given for violin. 

At last Sunday’s Sonoma Community Concert benefiting tsunami relief, 10 bands played, but the applause thundered when Armstrong walked out on stage to improvise accompaniment to gray-haired guitar-plucking Michael Castle’s Ghost Highway. Sonomans enjoy occasional appearances by Armstrong fiddling, playing country music, or jazz at local events. 

Always having felt socially like “the other kid,” Armstrong is beginning to look around and see there is more to life, and maturely contemplates his future, asking himself, “Why am I here? Is there more to life? What do I want to be?”  

But the thrill of performance and succeeding at learning a new bar keeps him extremely focused on his music. Armstrong is happiest, he said, “when I am performing, and making progress on the violin,” remaining amazed at “what I have done. I enjoy making music with others and learning from them, and discovering with them.” 

Armstrong met George Thomson when Thomson was Music Director at San Domenico in San Rafael and Armstrong studied there under Malikian. Thomson invited Armstrong to solo with students “touring” Berkeley schools to introduce elementary students to music as a language. 

Armstrong is auditioning soon to enter the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where at least one of his parents would move with him. His preferred next step appears to be going to an arts high school in Boston so he can study with renowned instructor Donald Weilerstein at the New England Conservatory of Music (and live in a dorm). 

Armstrong’s greatest thrills, he said, come from playing “any music—getting to respond to it, adapt to it, and let me become part of me. It enriches me.” 

On Wednesday, Armstrong will solo with Felix Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E Minor. The Berkeley Symphony Wednesday concert program includes Hector Villa-Lobos’s Bachianas Brasileiras No. 9, Charles Wuorinen’s Symphony Seven, and Carlos Chavez’s Symphony No. 2 (Sinfonia India). 

 

Tickets are $22-$49 or $10 for students. Show begins at 8 p.m. www.berkeleysymphony.org or call 841-2800 for more information and tickets.