Twenty-Two, With the Mendelssohn
What I remember about the night of my U.S. debut, and the review that came three days later.
I was twenty-two the night I made my U.S. debut as a soloist with an orchestra, and I had been in the country about two years.
I grew up in Sarajevo, in a family that has made musicians for more than two hundred years. I started the violin at three. I studied in Liège, at the Royal Conservatory of Music, and in 1998 I came to the United States — a refugee who had fled a war with little more than the clothes on his back and his violin, routed through New York to a host family in Minnesota, with English still catching up with me.
On Saturday, October 7, 2000, I walked onto the stage of the Smith Center at Ohlone College in Fremont, California, to play the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto with the Fremont Symphony Orchestra. David Sloss conducted. The second half of the program was Mahler.
A debut works like this: you prepare for months, and then the piece you have played hundreds of times has to happen once, in public, at tempo, with sixty people breathing behind you. What I remember from those minutes is not the nerves. I felt alive, full of life. I was making music with the full heart.
Three days later, San Francisco Classical Voice published its review. The headline called it an “Outstanding U.S. Debut.” The reviewer, Jerry Kuderna, wrote that he “was reminded of Fritz Kreisler, there was such natural elegance in Pavlovic’s playing.”
Kreisler. For a violinist, that is not a compliment you skim past. Kreisler’s sound was the one I had grown up hearing in my head — warmth before brilliance, a phrase that breathes. I have been reviewed since, kindly and otherwise, but that is the line I kept.
I did not know that night where the playing would take me. It took me to Carnegie Hall, three times as a soloist. It took me to fourteen years of performing regularly with the Houston Symphony, and to stages in Vienna, London, and Venice. Later it took me somewhere I did not expect: thirteen years building and running music schools in Houston, standing at the front desk instead of the front of the stage. Today I am building Arvo with two partners, making software for the schools I used to run.
But it started in Fremont, at twenty-two, with the Mendelssohn — and with a reviewer generous enough to hear Kreisler in a kid from Sarajevo who had barely arrived.