TSO’s Teng Li found her voice in the viola
The reasons why violists have become the butt of musical jokes have disappeared into the mists of time. And yet, the jokes persist.
So let us make it clear at the outset that Teng Li is no joke. She happens to be one of the finest musicians in the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and one of Peter Oundjian’s luckiest recruits since becoming its music director.
A star pupil of Michael Tree’s at the prestigious Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, she didn’t intend to become an orchestral player. She didn’t even intend to become a violist.
“I was born in China, in Nanjing, and my parents were musical,” she remembers. “My father sang in a Beijing opera company until he was kicked out during the Cultural Revolution and sent to work in a coal mine.”
Being similarly musical, the coal miner’s daughter was given a violin at the tender age of 2 and began to be physically able to play it about three years later.
Her parents’ commitment did not end there.
When she progressed beyond the scope of local teachers, her father drove her on his bicycle to the railway station every Saturday at 1 a.m. and travelled with her through the night to Shanghai, standing up all the way to make sure she didn’t fall off the luggage as she tried to get a few hours’ sleep before her earlymorning lesson.
Subsequently accepted into the Central Conservatory in Beijing, where she became a fellow student with future piano superstar Lang Lang, she was still playing the violin until, at an important audition, a respected professor who also taught viola complained that he was always given the worst viola students. “Give me the best,” he reportedly announced. “I want her.”
And so, obediently, Teng Li became a viola student at the Central Conservatory until her ever-supportive parents decided that in order to reach her full potential, she would have to go on to study abroad. Flying to Philadelphia, she auditioned at the Curtis Institute.
“The viola changed my life,” she insists. “I discovered it was my instrument, suiting my personality. The sound is warm and supportive rather than shiny like that of the violin.”
“At the audition I played (Ernest Bloch’s) Schelomo, screwed up in the middle and composed my way to the end,” she laughs.
It worked. And so did her subsequent teacher-pupil relationship with the noted violist Michael Tree, whom she now regards as family.
“At my first lesson he said, ‘I have no worries about your playing, but you have to also be the best human being you can.’
“He didn’t want me to do so many competitions but, even though I was on full scholarship, I had to do them. I had no money of my own.”
Then came an unexpected call from Oundjian, inviting her to audition for principal violist of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra.
Until then her career plan had been to become a soloist and chamber music player but she accepted the invitation, was invited to return and wound up playing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony under Oundjian’s direction.
“It was such powerful music, I thought, ‘Wow, so this is why these people want to play in a symphony orchestra!’ I knew then that I wanted to play with Peter.”
And so, beginning with the 200405 season, the orchestra hired its youngest player, a 21-year-old former violinist from Nanjing.
It was to celebrate a decade with the orchestra that she recently decided to make a CD, teaming up with one of her Curtis coaches, pianist Meng-Chieh Liu, in a challenging program surrounding the year 1939, including Paul Hindemith’s famous Sonata 1939.
The two musicians can also be heard in recital next Saturday evening at the Fairview Library Theatre as well as in a free noon-hour recital two days earlier at the University of Toronto’s Walter Hall.
“I have a great class at the university and everyone in my section in the orchestra has a big personality,” she enthuses. “We even have viola parties. I invited them all to my wedding.
“I love my life as a violist, playing recitals and with my trio as well as in the orchestra. I’m lucky. I found my voice.”