A Profile of Artistic Director Robert McDuffie
From duets with Berlusconi and Apicella to the creation of a conservatory open to talents from around the world. His friendship with REM drummer Mike Mills and the Emmy they won together. Tears, basketball, the concert that changed his life at 14, his love affair with Rome and the founding of the only Chamber Festival in the city. And finally, that violin, his nearly 300-year-old “Guarneri del Gesù.” This is McDuffie – the great Maestro tells his story.
“That time Prime Minister Berlusconi became my best friend… for 48 hours,” jokes Maestro Robert McDuffie, just days before the curtain rises on his Festival. Indeed, the Rome Chamber Music Festival for him “is like a 22-year-old child, born from my love for this city, forever in my heart.”
Since that distant 2003, the year of McDuffie’s artistic residency at the American Academy in Rome, many adventures, dreams, disappointments and successes have followed. “The most bizarre? Getting special calls from the Prime Minister who kept telling me for two days: ‘McDuffie, you have to go on TV, on the Maurizio Costanzo Show, you have to raise your popularity, got it?’ So I went. What else could I do? The Prime Minister himself was asking! Once I even played with Apicella for an international delegation, and the President sang.”
But McDuffie’s greatest satisfaction comes from transforming the Rome Chamber Music Festival into an incubator for young talents from around the globe, who, alongside established artists, present a unique musical program. Since its first edition at the Oratorio del Gonfalone, the Festival has been a one-of-a-kind event, reinventing itself every year by reviving rarely performed works. Like in this edition, where with Vox Medicea, the renowned Renaissance music choir directed by Mark Spyropoulos, the sacred music performance will include, among others, rare and forgotten pieces brought back to light after nearly half a millennium, thanks to research by the Sacred Music Programme of the Mascarade Opera Foundation.
“A double return for me,” says McDuffie, who fell in love with the Eternal City from the first day of his 2003 residency at the American Academy on the Gianicolo hill. “The Festival returns to the Auditorium della Conciliazione, the hall where I first performed in Rome in 1994, and we will debut with Tartini’s ‘Devil’s Trill,’ the piece that changed my life when I heard it at 14, performed by the great Itzhak Perlman. At the time, I had been playing violin for eight years and played basketball. One night, my parents forced me to go to that concert instead of a game. I cried with rage. But the moment Perlman started playing, I realized music and the violin would forever be part of my life. Without Tartini and Perlman, I might have become a famous basketball player!” jokes the Artistic Director, looking back.
Sacred and profane, classical and rock: this is how one could describe the Maestro who, in addition to performing as a soloist with the world’s most prestigious orchestras across five continents, has shared the stage with eclectic musicians like REM bassist Mike Mills and Rolling Stones pianist Chuck Leavell. For “A Night of Georgia Music” in 2003, he won an Emmy Award with Mills, Leavell, the rock band and the McDuffie Center for Strings ensemble. In fact, McDuffie also managed to found a conservatory in his hometown of Macon, Georgia.
“To my students – 27 young people on scholarships for a four-year conservatory at Mercer University – I teach that playing is crucial, but they must also know how to do business, be entrepreneurs, start projects from funding, accounting, and budgets. Today, these skills are essential for a young musician who wants to live off their art. The students from around the world who come to my conservatory will, at least once during their studies, come to perform in Rome at the Festival: I offer them a unique experience, a chance to connect with internationally renowned masters and young artists from every culture and tradition.”
“Why Rome as the home of the Festival?” McDuffie reflects. “I don’t know—vibrations, connection, beauty: it was love at first sight. The three places that live in my dreams when I close my eyes? Piazza Navona at two in the morning, when I’m alone and the only sound is the gushing water from the monumental fountains; the Capitoline Hill—and the memory of my mother, a superb organist—who, standing before Michelangelo’s masterpiece, simply asked: ‘But I don’t see many Catholics around’…; and I want to include the Trastevere district, because I still don’t know it well, and so it continues to spark my imagination.”
The instrument that has accompanied his performances for 30 years is just as extraordinary: a 1735 Guarneri del Gesù, known as the “Ladenburg,” worth several million euros. “To buy it, I brought together a group of 16 philanthropists who each own a share, including my lifelong friend Mike (Mills, REM bassist, Ed.). In 2028, I will stop playing it—I’ll be 70—and it’s right that my companion of many adventures passes into the hands of a new artist.”
Future projects? “A residency in October 2025 at Tokyo’s Suntory and Sumida Triphony Halls with iconic composer and conductor Joe Hisaishi, performing ‘The American Four Seasons’ by Glass, and the performance of Philip Glass’s Violin Concerto No. 1 in honor of his 90th birthday at the Philharmonie de Paris, the Auditorium in Milan in 2026, and at Carnegie Hall in January 2027.”
