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Getting in Tune with Nurit Bar-Josef
A Talk with the 27-Year-Old National Symphony Concertmaster
 Listen to Neda Ulaby's report.
Sept. 15, 2002 -- Last year, Nurit Bar-Josef was hired at age 26 as concertmaster of the National Symphony Orchestra. While many agreed that she was a promising talent, some observers wondered if she had the chops necessary to guide a major American symphony.
As Neda Ulaby reports for Weekend Edition Sunday, Bar-Josef began playing the violin as a first-grader in a Boston public school. And while she wasn't a child prodigy, she showed early signs of being musically astute.
When she was a child, she not only knew the name of the concertmaster in the nearest symphony (Joseph Silverstein), but she admired his work, particularly on concertmaster solos such as "Swan Lake." (A concertmaster leads the first violins in an orchestra.)
"I loved, loved his sound," she says.
Further, "I knew it was a big job… you had to have some solo material. You have to have sort of a soloist approach. And you have to be like a soloist and be able to play like a soloist but it's not ultimately your job."
These days, Bar-Josef calls Joseph Silverstein "Joey." And as his counterpart at the National Symphony Orchestra, her reviews have generally been glowing.
"I think what (she) has done for the NSO is bring a real sweetness and intensity and focus that has really raised the bar for the symphony," says Tim Page, a classical music critic for The Washington Post.
As a teen, she was accepted into the Juilliard School's pre-college program. Her parents drove her to New York every weekend -- four hours each way. For college, the Curtis Institute of Music seemed like an obvious choice. But later, as a graduate student back at Juilliard, Bar-Josef struggled over what sort of musician she should be.
"I love chamber music like there's no tomorrow," she says. "But I thought, do I want to be in a quartet where I'm practically married to three other people, and we drive each other nuts?"
And she wasn't certain about her chances for a solo career. So in the midst of preparing for orchestra auditions, she spotted an ad for the assistant principal second of the Saint Louis Symphony.
But, she says, "Once I had the job in St. Louis, I kept eying the concertmaster and thinking, 'yeah, it'd be really great to sit in that chair. I mean, I like this chair, but that chair would be great'."
She got a little closer to that chair when the Boston Symphony Orchestra recruited her to be assistant concertmaster when she was only 24. And two years later, National Symphony Orchestra conductor Leonard Slatkin invited Bar-Josef for a weeklong audition for the concertmaster seat. She got it.
As concertmaster, Bar-Josef says she spent much of this summer marking up the 173 scores that the orchestra will play this season, ensuring that all of the bows go in the same direction. But most importantly, she is responsible for shaping the orchestra's sound, and to an extent, its vision.
While she's clearly relaxed into her role, Bar-Josef isn't yet completely at ease with her audience. "The only time I have to stand up in front of them," she says, "is when I tune the orchestra and that's about all I can take, quite frankly."
And that rules out a future in conducting -- at least for the time being. Right now, Bar-Josef is concentrating on her new job with a relatively new orchestra. The NSO is less venerable than the symphonies in Chicago, Boston and New York. "They've got more of a tradition," she says, "because they've been around for so much longer. And I think for me, the fun thing about having this job is that I sort of get to mold it into my own tradition -- sort of develop that NSO sound."
Other Resources
 The NSO's biographies of its musicians.
A feature on Bar-Josef from Symphony magazine.
The Juilliard School's Web site.
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