Yaniv Dinur Returns for Tchaikovsky’s Fourth
David Lewellen
PUBLISHED
Tagged Under: 2024.25 Season, Classics, Conductor, Guest Artist
For eight years, Yaniv Dinur was the popular resident conductor of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, leading dozens of concerts every year and reaching audiences of all ages with his dry humor.
Later this month, he will return as a full-fledged guest conductor, leading the orchestra in a subscription program of music by Barber, Prokofiev, and Tchaikovsky.
But he won’t have to travel far. When he left the MSO’s payroll almost two years ago, he and his family stayed in town. “In case the orchestra needed me. I couldn’t abandon them,” he said with a grin. More seriously, he and his wife, Christina, liked the community they had built here. Ironically, he added, “We had been renting for eight years, and right then was when we bought our house.”
Although he now spends time on the road as a conductor or pianist, he said that leaving the MSO actually gave him more time with his family — his wife, Christina, and their daughters, ages 6 and 3. Being a resident conductor is “extremely demanding both in terms of time on the podium and the amount of repertoire to prepare,” he said. “I gained so much experience, and skills like conducting movies, but it took a toll.”
Dinur has been the music director of the New Bedford Symphony in Massachusetts since 2017, and as he began to get more guest engagements, the obligations of being the MSO’s second-in-command became too much. “You’ve got to be there all the time, ready to jump in and cover everything,” he said. “It was a wonderful time, but it was time to move on.”
He compares conducting a new orchestra to going on a first date. “You have to be yourself on the podium, and that’s not easy, because you’re so vulnerable and exposed,” he said. “But if you put on a show or a mask, the orchestra knows immediately.” And even if everyone is being honest, sometimes things just don’t mesh. He remembers that at a guest conducting engagement a few years ago, “I might have been too much for them. My sense of humor, they didn’t get. Which can happen.”
In every orchestra he leads, “I try to see what’s possible, and how far I can push — and then I push a little more,” he said. “But you also have to know when to let it go. Read the room. If they’re tired, leave it for the next rehearsal, or it’s going to get worse.”
He has conducted Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony, the anchor of the upcoming program, on tour with the MSO before, but not for a subscription week. “A lot of musicians hate the piece,” he said. “I run into them around town, and they’ll say, ‘I can’t wait for your week, but I hate Tchaik 4.’ In the same sentence. My job is to change their minds.”
That might be a tall order for a piece that musicians and audiences know so well. But, Dinur said, “I want them to have a new experience. It’s a very disturbing piece of music, and I want them to be rattled.”
The first half of the program will include Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto, performed with Dinur’s friend Alexander Korsantia. As a professional pianist himself, Dinur has complicated feelings about working with other piano soloists, but he calls Korstantia “a master and a monster of the piano.” He has a funny story about trying to sneak into Korstantia’s sold-out recital in Israel as a middle schooler and getting caught — but the soloist told the guard to let him in.
Dinur made his reputation in Milwaukee for talking to the audience before most performances. For his upcoming concert of standard repertoire, nothing particularly needs to be explained, but “I might just say ‘hi.’” In New Bedford, and as a guest with other orchestras, a brief hello “breaks the ice a little bit, even if the music doesn’t require it.”
