Strings Prodigy
Violinist Stefan Jackiw mixed concert tours and college life.
Musical debuts rarely create front-page news anymore. But when violinist Stefan Jackiw ’07 made his first appearance in London, playing the Mendelssohn Concerto with the Philharmonia Orchestra back in 2000, there he was, his picture on the front page of the Times. The review inside compared Jackiw to the legendary violin prodigy Yehudi Menuhin—inevitable, no doubt, because although Jackiw was only 14, he was already a seasoned professional.
Jackiw (jack-eev) appears headed toward the most prominent performing career of any Harvard string virtuoso since Yo-Yo Ma ’76, D.Mus. ’91. Already he is playing about 35 concerts a year with important orchestras and conductors across America and abroad.
Photograph by Julie Y. Zhou / Harvard Crimson
Stefan Jackiw performing a Saint-Saëns violin concerto with the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra in Sanders Theatre
Boston-based conductor Benjamin Zander, a regular guest with the Philharmonia, knew Jackiw from the New England Conservatory (NEC) Youth Philharmonic and took the young violinist to London. “The Philharmonia is not in the habit of presenting child prodigies and [its] administration was very wary of the idea when I presented it,” Zander said recently. “But after the one rehearsal, a woman who had been playing in the orchestra for 25 years came up to me and said this was the most beautiful Mendelssohn Concerto she had ever heard. In Stefan’s playing there is a burning honesty, an authenticity, that is very rare; his playing is natural and informed by directness and simplicity, yet at the same time it is noble and aristocratic.”
At 21, Jackiw still looks like a teenager. His appearance is striking—his father is of Central European origin, his mother Korean. His manner is friendly, candid, and unassuming, casual but also marked by a certain reserve. It is clear that an internal compass directs him, and that an internal gyroscope keeps him steady on the journey.
“I started playing the violin when I was four,’’ he said over a recent lunch in Harvard Square. “Family friends gave me a small instrument that their child had outgrown. I started with Suzuki lessons at the Longy School of Music here in Cambridge, and I simply kept at it. There was no watershed moment when I decided that I wanted to be a musician. Instead, it was a gradual thing. The better I got at playing the violin, the more interesting it all became.’’
Jackiw worked with Zenaida Gilels at NEC until he was 12, when he started studying with the great French violinist Michèle Auclair. Gilels gave Jackiw a secure technical foundation; Auclair “was picky and demanding,’’ Jackiw recalls, adding, “but that was what I needed then.’’ For the last few years, he has studied with Donald Weilerstein, former first violin of the Cleveland Quartet. “Mr. Weilerstein doesn’t listen to my études. Instead he understands what I want to express and we work on trying to make it clearer, more convincing, more personal.”
In high school, Jackiw played in the Youth Philharmonic under Zander’s direction and appeared as soloist with the orchestra on tour, but he didn’t covet the role of concertmaster. “That was his own decision,’’ Zander recalls. “He wanted to learn more about music and to meet other young musicians. They realized that something was going on here that was in another league, but didn’t resent him—they loved him for it. The minute he would finish rehearsing for one of his concertos he would immediately go and sit in his chair in the orchestra—for him, playing a Brahms Symphony was no different from playing a concerto.”
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