{"id":3100,"date":"2025-06-17T12:57:00","date_gmt":"2025-06-17T12:57:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/romechamberfestival.org\/a-profile-of-artistic-director-robert-mcduffie\/"},"modified":"2025-06-17T13:02:33","modified_gmt":"2025-06-17T13:02:33","slug":"a-profile-of-artistic-director-robert-mcduffie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/romechamberfestival.org\/en\/a-profile-of-artistic-director-robert-mcduffie\/","title":{"rendered":"A Profile of Artistic Director Robert McDuffie"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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 \u201cGuarneri del Ges\u00f9.\u201d This is McDuffie \u2013 the great Maestro tells his story. <\/em><\/p>\n\n

\u201cThat time Prime Minister Berlusconi became my best friend… for 48 hours,\u201d jokes Maestro Robert McDuffie, just days before the curtain rises on his Festival. Indeed, the Rome Chamber Music Festival for him<\/em> \u201cis like a 22-year-old child, born from my love for this city, forever in my heart.\u201d <\/p>\n\n

Since that distant 2003, the year of McDuffie\u2019s artistic residency at the American Academy in Rome, many adventures, dreams, disappointments and successes have followed. \u201cThe most bizarre? Getting special calls from the Prime Minister who kept telling me for two days: \u2018McDuffie, you have to go on TV, on the Maurizio Costanzo Show, you have to raise your popularity, got it?\u2019 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.\u201d <\/p>\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n

\u201cA double return for me,\u201d 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. \u201cThe Festival returns to the Auditorium della Conciliazione, the hall where I first performed in Rome in 1994, and we will debut with Tartini\u2019s \u2018Devil\u2019s Trill,\u2019 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!\u201d jokes the Artistic Director, looking back. <\/p>\n\n

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\u2019s 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 \u201cA Night of Georgia Music\u201d 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. <\/p>\n\n

\u201cTo my students \u2013 27 young people on scholarships for a four-year conservatory at Mercer University \u2013 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.\u201d <\/p>\n\n

\u201cWhy Rome as the home of the Festival?\u201d McDuffie reflects. \u201cI don\u2019t know\u2014vibrations, 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\u2019m alone and the only sound is the gushing water from the monumental fountains; the Capitoline Hill\u2014and the memory of my mother, a superb organist\u2014who, standing before Michelangelo\u2019s masterpiece, simply asked: \u2018But I don\u2019t see many Catholics around\u2019…; and I want to include the Trastevere district, because I still don\u2019t know it well, and so it continues to spark my imagination.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

The instrument that has accompanied his performances for 30 years is just as extraordinary: a 1735 Guarneri del Ges\u00f9, known as the \u201cLadenburg,\u201d worth several million euros. \u201cTo buy it, I brought together a group of 16 philanthropists who each own a share, including my lifelong friend Mike (Mills, REM bassist, Ed.<\/em>). In 2028, I will stop playing it\u2014I\u2019ll be 70\u2014and it\u2019s right that my companion of many adventures passes into the hands of a new artist.\u201d <\/p>\n\n

Future projects? \u201cA residency in October 2025 at Tokyo\u2019s Suntory and Sumida Triphony Halls with iconic composer and conductor Joe Hisaishi, performing \u2018The American Four Seasons\u2019 by Glass, and the performance of Philip Glass\u2019s 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.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":892,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"give_campaign_id":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/romechamberfestival.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/romechamberfestival.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/romechamberfestival.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/romechamberfestival.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/romechamberfestival.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3100"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/romechamberfestival.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3100\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/romechamberfestival.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/892"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/romechamberfestival.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/romechamberfestival.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/romechamberfestival.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}