JAVS Spring 2006

FRESH FACES: THE MULTICULTURAL AND MULTIFACETED -

MILAN MILISAVLJEVIC

of musical li fe, including lessons with j an1es Dunham (with whom he later studied in Houston), o rchestra playing, cham ber music, freela ncing (his quintet had a contract to play in fro nt of a bakery, among ocher money making gigs) and solo playing, as winner of the Aspen Lower Strings Concerto Comperi rion. Bur it was his girlfriend at the time wan ting him co ger a job that led him ro audition, successfu ll y, {·o r the renowned Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra

Serbia was pa rt of the fo rmer Yugoslavia. Tt was his late father's desire that his son study the violin and Milan found himself wanting to touch people w ith music the way he was moved by his paren ts' LPs of Henryk Szeryng. Because of the civil war in the 1990s that affected the Balkans, M ilan emi grated to Canada, joining two brothers and an uncle in Mon treal. T here he no t only converted his citizenship, but his choice of instrument from vio lin to viola due to the persuasion of his cham ber music coach and later, viola

How else to describe someone born in Belgrade, Serbia and Montenegro, who now roots for the Canadian O lympic hockey team, was seduced by the gorgeous surroundings of Aspen into spending five summers there, spent win ters in both icy Montreal and humid Houston going to school, won an o rchestra job in Amsterdam befo re ever having been there, and who now calls New York home? If his path resembles th e trajectory of a ball on pool table, it has certainly landed Mi lan in, as he calls it, the "Ferrari" of o rchestras, the Metropoli tan Opera Orchestra, as Assistant Principal Viola.

in the Netherlands. And though Mi lan agrees that European and American orchestra l playing have their differences (he says rhat lush sound and individual liberty are not sacrificed for the sake of tech nical brill iance in Europe), he became convinced of the rru th spoken by a former teacher of his, Atar Arad, when he said "play like an artist and you will win any job." lt was perhaps the same sense of freedom and risk-taking that brought him to Amsterdam in the first place, as well as a certain root lessness borne of his own life cir cumstan ces that led him to reject the o ld world traditions of Europe fo r the melting pot of New Yo rk

teacher, Jutta Puchhammer Sedillot. At the Aspen Music

Festival during his many summers there, he valued exploring all fa cets

To begin at the beginning, thirty years ago when Milan was born ,

OLUME 22

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