I hardly had a choice of not becoming a musician," explains Dmitry Sitkovetsky. On his father's side, he's a third generation professional musician, on his mother's a fourth. His father, Julian, was a violinist, not a well-known figure, but certainly highly regarded - for instance, you can find his work on a Supraphon CD called Giants Of The Violin, along with David Oistrakh and Leonid Kogan. His mother is the pianist Betia Davidovitch, who shared first prize in the 1949 Chopin competition.
Dmitry was just three-and-a-half when his father died, so it was very much the family's wish that he would continue the line. "I went to the Central Music School in Moscow when I was not quite seven, where I had absolutely the best pedagogues. As I later found out, that was the best musical system in the world at that time ... or at any time this century, really, because there's nothing similar that exists in Russia now, let alone anywhere else.
"The Central Music School - and there were similar schools throughout the country - combined all the requirements of the primary/secondary, junior and high school in 11 years of studies. And that was all before you entered the Moscow Conservatory. From the very first year you had to be exceptionally gifted as a musician. So, parallel with all the subjects you would have gone through in a normal school, you had the most intense musical training. I believe there are more winners of international competitions and famous musicians came out of that school than anywhere in the world." His point is reinforced by the fact that four of the six finalists in the recent Leeds Piano Competition were Russian-trained.
The level in Moscow, he says, was exceptionally high, the competition extreme. "If you didn't do so well in musical subjects, or in general ones, you were out. There were exams every six months. It was the most professional training, in the best way possible, Communist propaganda notwithstanding. From a purely musical point of view I couldn't have asked for a better place to grow up as a musician."
It wasn't just the training, however, that was special. "The most important thing was that I grew in the atmosphere of an extraordinary attitude towards music. Music was not considered a job that you were training for. It was more than a profession. It was really a way of life, and we were ordained to be professional musicians, eventually, if we deserved it. And so, it was very much like a religion and required sacrifices, sufferings, missing out a normal childhood and all that."
He got something of a shock in 1977 when, as a result of what he calls an international pact (American grain for Russian Jews) and a year and a half of elaborate scheming, he managed to emigrate to the US, where, at New York's Juilliard School, he continued the studies he had not stayed to complete in Moscow. "When I came to ear training they threw me out of the class in one day. They said: `Don't show up because you will spoil the whole class'. They were doing the stuff I used to do 10 years before.
"However, the level of information available, music libraries, access to any recordings or music or concerts, was tremendous. But it was left mostly for the student himself or herself, to take advantage of it. You weren't forced to do it, you weren't obligated to do it.
"The big discovery for me was the discovery of chamber music, because in Russia it wasn't developed very much in the years when I was there." He visited chamber music festivals, initially as a listener, and, after graduation, as a performer. "It was very important for me to be drawn to that side of music. Being so concentrated on making a name for yourself, making a career, band establishing your own persona, one could have ignored that.
"It was very lucky that I didn't. I probably wouldn't be sitting here if I hadn't been drawn at that time towards it. Because that led in itself, parallel to the solo violin career, to becoming the artistic director of a music festival (at Korsholm) in Finland already in 1983, to writing my first transcript ion (for string trio) of Bach's Goldberg Variations in 1984, and then founding the chamber orchestra (New European Strings Chamber Orchestra) in 1990, and, with that, beginning to conduct."
Conducting was something he had always been interested in, but, with the mixed success of other instrumentalists in mind, something he felt wary of. "I realised early on that that was a different profession, a different talent, and one could be extremely gifted in one and moderately gifted in the other. Of course, there was only one way to find out, to try it.
"You asked me if I `studied' conducting. I still study. And I hope to study and take lessons as long as I have a chance.
"One could talk about the requirements of being a good conductor for hours and hours. It's the most mysterious profession in our field, because conductors' make a tremendous difference to the orchestra, and yet they don't, produce any sound, physically. That discrepancy in itself makes for some very mystical reasons why ... you know there's a famous story that Furtwangler once came in for five minutes during the rehearsal of another conductor who hadn't seen him but the orchestra did . . and for five minutes they played like they would play for Furtwangler. Then he left. The conductor never realised who was there, though he realised how well they played for those five minutes. He asked, `What happened? For five minutes you played just the way I wanted'. And he couldn't get them to play that way again.
I reminded Sitkovetsky of the often-repeated contention that orchestras can reach a conclusion about a conductor over the distance of the walk to the podium for the first rehearsal. "Absolutely. As a violinist I usually give master classes once a year. I could tell you about the way a student is going to play before he or she plays the first note. It's something in the body language, something in the type. One carries a persona, an aura about oneself.
Before you give an upbeat, or before you play the first note, they've almost formed an opinion about you. With instrumentalists, they usually wait to hear the tone. But it's absolutely true. They watch you as you walk on stage."
His first experience of the Ulster Orchestra came through a BBC recording for Radio 3. The BBC's senior music producer in Belfast, David Byers, recalls that "The rapport between Dmitry and the strings in his arrangement of the Dohnanyi Serenade was special, magical. It was intense music-making, you felt there was something very special taking place." Sitkovetsky himself recalls standing in at short notice for an Ulster Orchestra concert which included the Tchaikovsky Serenade for Strings. He talks about it as a sort of watershed in his conducting career, an experience which convinced him that the challenges of a principal conductorship with a symphony orchestra were ones he was now ready to undertake.
"What I was able to do, and how they responded to my ideas in two and a half days, that was remarkable. I could hear certain things in their playing of the Tchaikovsky that was maybe the most pleasing and most satisfying and the most encouraging thing of all, I felt, maybe there's a future for the orchestra and me with the orchestra. If maybe I can have that kind of impact, maybe it's worth trying out.
I interviewed him the evening before his first rehearsal in his new position, in which he was expecting to be sized up all over again. "The next time I will give them an upbeat will be tomorrow. It will be a very nerve-wracking thing. Anticipation is rather high, so one hopes one doesn't let them down.
