Maestro
As a boy, Nicholas Zumbro '50 didn't walk a mile to school each day. He walked a mile and a quarter to school in Murfreesboro.
As a boy, Nicholas Zumbro '50 didn't walk a mile to school each day. He walked a mile and a quarter to school in Murfreesboro.
In another case, he arrived by train in Salzburg to find the manager racing up and down the platform shouting that he was a day late, and had only time for a shower before facing an unfamiliar piano and a large audience in the Mozarteum. Pianos are as different as people, but this one turned out to be world class.
His list of highlights is much longer: “the wonderful reviews from London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Athens etc. from my first European tour, lliving in Paris for three years in a studio I had won at La Cite des Arts, the premiere of my opera Kassandra in Greek in Athens, recording with the London Royal Philharmonic, the chance to speak the languages I had learned at Peabody-Vanderbilt. Overall, I have been very lucky,”
This year he is reissuing two of his CD”s, The Complete Goyescas and Falla Pieces and the Ives “Concord” and Samuel Barber Sonatas. You can order them from nicholaszumbro.com starting May, 2012.
Zumbro made several visits to USN in recent years. He generously played at Reunion and gave USN musicians the benefit of a master class, which they found extremely enjoyable. He also let them in on the secret of a successful career in music: “Determination, talent, brains---but especially determination.”
Back
“The adults worked in the town, but our life was in the country, close to nature, before the great changes in rural Tennessee. My grandmother, a fantastic gardener, grew a sample of almost every flower, vegetable and bush known to man and a large orchard of flowering fruit trees.” Even so he always had an eye out for the larger world. For at time “I thought I might be some sort of scientist, an astronomer, maybe — the moon rose huge in the country fields — but a few disastrous experiments with my chemistry set changed my mind.”
Nicholas found his true calling in music. He had a passion and ear for it and from an early age pursued the piano. Back then he “improvised for hours, but professional training was not possible.” Despite that obstacle, he has gone on to numerous awards: Juilliard Scholarships, a Debussy Prize, a Bach Society Fellowship, and French Government Grants. During his performing career he has played in China, throughout Europe, the USA, Korea, Russia, and Mexico.
Besides the difficulty finding a professional teacher, a further, much more serious obstacle occurred when “Tuberculosis put me to bed for a whole year at age nine and stopped piano lessons for three more years, resumed only after moving to Nashville and entering PDS as an eighth grader.”
There, in addition to music, he discovered “discussions and arguments about politics and world history in Dr. Holden's classes, the whole range of English with Miss MacMullan, geometry with Mrs. Lundberg, French with Madame Shane and musical encouragement from Ms. Boecklheide, who said, ‘Nick, it’s not what you are now, but what you will be in the future.’ ”
As with most everyone, there have been a few downs as well as numerous ups in Nicholas's career. “I don't know any artists who haven't had low points, some worse than others. The key is being resilient enough to bounce back. Even Rachmaninoff was clinically depressed after the failure of his First Symphony, and only recovered under the hypnosis treatments of Dr. Dahl in Berlin, but he came back with his Second Concerto, probably the most performed concerto in the world. ”
He worked hard to graduate a year early because his illness had left him “a year behind and I was impatient to get on with my training.”
In the years after his time at PDS, Nicholas studied at Juilliard with the likes of Mme. Rosina Lhevinne, in Paris with Boulanger, with Julius Herford and Nicholas Slominsky. In addition to his work as a performer and composer, Nicholas made an impressive career as an artist-teacher of such students as John Aylward, composer, who won the $15,000 National Arts and Letters Soc. Award, Toros Can the young Turkish piano virtuoso, David Yeagley, gifted composer and Tianshu Wang stellar Chinese pianist. He is now Emeritus Professor at the University of Arizona and has taught on the faculties at Juilliard, Indiana University, the University of Hawaii, and in Greece and England.
As with most everyone, there have been a few downs as well as numerous ups in Nicholas's career. “I don't know any artists who haven't had low points, some worse than others. The key is being resilient enough to bounce back. Even Rachmaninoff was clinically depressed after the failure of his First Symphony, and only recovered under the hypnosis treatments of Dr. Dahl in Berlin, but he came back with his Second Concerto, probably the most performed concerto in the world. ”
One particularly difficult experience was “having to play the Rachmaninoff Third concerto with the Nashville Symphony with a bad case of tendonitis It went off very well — judging from the recording by WSM — but ‘lacked abandon’ according to a local critic. During the lengthy performance, I didn't know whether my hands would be permanently damaged. ”
His list of highlights is much longer: “the wonderful reviews from London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Athens etc. from my first European tour, lliving in Paris for three years in a studio I had won at La Cite des Arts, the premiere of my opera Kassandra in Greek in Athens, recording with the London Royal Philharmonic, the chance to speak the languages I had learned at Peabody-Vanderbilt. Overall, I have been very lucky,”
This year he is reissuing two of his CD”s, The Complete Goyescas and Falla Pieces and the Ives “Concord” and Samuel Barber Sonatas. You can order them from nicholaszumbro.com starting May, 2012.
Zumbro made several visits to USN in recent years. He generously played at Reunion and gave USN musicians the benefit of a master class, which they found extremely enjoyable. He also let them in on the secret of a successful career in music: “Determination, talent, brains---but especially determination.”
