In Person: NY Philharmonic Assistant Conductor Daniel Boico

By Maya Pritsker
10 Nov 2009

Daniel Boico, the New York Philharmonic’s new 39-year-old Assistant Conductor, did not plan to become a musician. As a child he was surrounded by classical music and musicians and studied piano. This was natural, since his mother was a pianist, and Daniel often attended performances by his father, a Moscow-trained violinist in the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra.

However, classical music was not young Daniel’s “thing,” he now admits. This became especially apparent when he left Israel with his family. First, there were four years in Paris (when his father was the concertmaster of the Orchestre de Paris), where he studied at the Israeli School and added French to his He- brew and Russian. Then the family moved to Milwaukee, the base of the Fine Arts Quartet, at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, with which his father has played since 1983. “What a culture shock!” Mr. Boico recalls. “In my new surroundings I wanted to listen to rock, pop, rap — not classical music.”

In high school, however, he sang in the chorus and discovered the pleasure of making music. “I loved that sound, loved to be part of it. Besides, music was easy for me,” he re- members. In college he studied voice, but, he says, “When I walked by practice rooms and heard the sounds of different instruments played by students, it gave me such joy. But I was also envious: I wanted to play like them. Then I heard a rehearsal of our student orchestra — it was Shostakovich’s Fifth — and the harmony of the orchestral sound was unbelievable. I immediately wanted to try to make music with the orchestra. I did and I loved it!”

He began to take conducting lessons from Viktor Yampolsky. Then, when his father went on tour to Russia (visiting his homeland for the fi rst time in 25 years), Daniel came along and met Ilya Musin, the legendary teacher of Valery Gergiev and Yuri Temirkanov. A few months later the young conductor entered Musin’s class at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. “It was the most important step I’ve made in my life,” Mr. Boico says. “Musin’s approach to sound — as a living physical body that can be lifted, dropped, expanded, thrown away, which you transfer into gestures — is very important for developing a natural way of conducting. While teaching, he always gave us examples from everyday life; he taught us to depend on organic, realistic, practical things. The result is that an orchestra will understand you easily.

“The studies were very intense,” Mr. Boico continues. “The conservatory had an orchestra for us to work with, and in that city we were immersed in music, culture, and beauty all the time. We had free passes everywhere and took full advantage of them,” he recalls with a smile. “The hardest thing was to decide where to go at night: to the Mariinsky Theatre or to the Great Philharmonic Hall, or perhaps some other musical event.”

complete article here.