Leonard Turnevicius profiles
If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. That age old proverb couldn’t have rung any truer for 23-year-old Hamilton born and bred clarinetist, Slavko Popovic.
After graduating in the spring of 2017 from Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music (which only admits exceptional young musicians on the sole basis of future artistic promise and provides them with full-tuition scholarships estimated to be worth $36,500 US for each year of enrolment) Popovic hung around the City of Brotherly Love picking up occasional sub work with the Pennsylvania Ballet, Opera Philadelphia, the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, the Harrisburg Symphony, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra for one week, and this past May in Ottawa’s National Arts Centre Orchestra.
But occasional freelancing won’t put butter on bread, let alone enough bread on a plate. So, Popovic applied for every orchestral clarinet chair opening across North America that he could afford to travel to. And by his count that was 13 auditions: Windsor, Kansas City, St. Louis, Nova Scotia, and Hamilton, to name a handful.
“I made it to the last four, but they gave a trial to others,” said Popovic recently from Hamilton born and bred clarinetist Slavko Popovic, is the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra’s new principal clarinet.
his parents’ Westdale home about his audition with the Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra.
But when one door closes, another opens.
Popovic also applied to the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra’s international audition for principal clarinet after having been one of 15 to compete for that chair in the live Canadian audition held in Jack Singer Concert Hall last November.
“They didn’t hire anybody,” said Popovic about the CPO’s Canadian auditions. “They usually don’t in Canada.”
It must be said that orchestras reserve the right to continue to hold auditions if, say, the voting procedure failed to select a winning candidate, or that perhaps no candidate was deemed qualified.
“For the Canadian audition, it was all behind the screen,” said Popovic of the practice that began in the 1970s in St. Louis and Boston whereby candidates would play behind a screen in order to conceal their identity from what in any case should be an impartial audition committee. “They didn’t listen to all the rounds. They just cut people off. I guess they just wanted to get through the process faster.”
Popovic was, however, selected for the CPO’s live international audition in June where things ran a bit differently.
“The international audition, they took that much more seriously,” said Popovic who was one of 45 candidates, most of whom were from the U.S. “There were four rounds instead of just one. The first round was behind the screen, the next three rounds were not. From what I heard, the music director (Norwegian conductor Rune Bergmann) likes to see the applicants play rather than just listen to them.”
The international audition was spread over two days. In the first round, the 8 to 9 member audition committee asked Popovic to play the opening page of Mozart’s “Clarinet Concerto,” plus excerpts of the “Scherzo” from Mendelssohn’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf.”
He was the only Canadian among the 16 chosen for the second round, one of six who made the third round, and one of three finalists in the fourth round. In that final round, he was asked to sight read excerpts from Tchaikovsky’s “Fifth Symphony” and Brahms’s “Second Piano Concerto” playing alongside the CPO’s assistant principal clarinet.
“I’d listened to these works before, so I wasn’t completely sight reading, but I’d never performed them,” said Popovic.
After the audition, Popovic heard a knock on his dressing room door. It was the orchestra’s personnel manager who said, “The committee would like to hire you.”
Those seven words were enough to send Popovic to seventh heaven.
As the CPO’s new principal clarinet, Popovic will be one of approximately 66 full-time musicians playing a 40-week season comprised of 80 or so concerts and special events. The CPO’s base salary for the 2017-2018 season was $50,672, though their vacancy ad for the principal bassoon chair for 2018-2019 listed a salary of $64,860.40 plus benefits. CPO musicians also regularly organize their own chamber concerts and some of them are hired to teach at Mount Royal University Conservatory.
“That’s going to be an interesting adjustment to make,” said Popovic, who’s already moved his stuff to Calgary and will be flying there shortly. “So much of the repertoire I’ve never played before. I’m just looking forward to soaking it all up.” Read Leonard Turnevicius’s reports from a few of Europe’s classical music festivals at www.thespec.com. leonardturnevicius@gmail.com