Juliana Gondek is to frequent flyer miles as Steve Lavin is to
frequent flying objects. Gondek, a UCLA professor of voice and
opera studies since 1997, traveled extensively during her touring
days as a top-flight singer.
She has sung in legendary concert halls like Geneva’s
Grand Theater, Venice’s Teatro La Fenice, and Sapporo’s
Kitara Concert Hall. Her voice has been heard at the Edinburgh
Festival, Antibe’s Bel Canto Festival, and Lincoln
Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival. She has been a major part of
the Metropolitan Opera, Netherlands Opera, Scottish Opera, and the
San Francisco, Houston, and New York City Operas.
For her next performance, the well-traveled Gondek will stay
close to home for the Music Department’s monthly faculty
showcase series, chambermusic@ucla, today at 8 p.m. at Schoenberg
Hall.
“(The concert) is a way the music school can provide
outreach into the greater Los Angeles community to showcase our
outstanding faculty,” Gondek said. “It also gives the
faculty an opportunity to work with one another in ways that we
wouldn’t ordinarily be allowed to just in the course of our
daily work at UCLA. We (rarely) get to make music
together.”
Though no one in her family was a musician, Gondek sang plenty
of Broadway, jazz and rock during junior high and high school. The
Pasadena native then enrolled at USC as a violin major, but later
switched to voice during her sophomore year.
“I actually taught my first voice lesson two weeks after I
took my first voice lesson,” Gondek said. “A friend of
mine asked me for voice lessons. I laughed and said
“˜I’ve only had two lessons … what do I know?’
His response was “˜That’s two more lessons than I
have.’ I thought that was a logical proposition, and I
started teaching him. I just kind of blindly began, not knowing
what I was doing. Soon I realized that I had a knack of passing on
what I was learning to someone else.”
Gondek eventually parlayed that knack for teaching into a real
profession. While working toward her master’s degree in voice
during 1975, Gondek became the first voice instructor at the USC
Community School of Performing Arts (now the Colburn School of
Performing Arts). Her studio went from four students to 30 during
her four-year stint. Gondek then moved on to teaching privately,
but her performer side beckoned.
“I always wanted to be a performer,” Gondek said.
“That has always been my primary career path, but I learned
rather early on that I had an affinity for teaching ““ I was
good at it and I enjoyed it. I knew that teaching would always play
a role in some respect in my career activities.”
By winning major national and international competitions, Gondek
found she possessed star quality. She would begin a 17-year
balancing act where she juggled touring on an international level
and offering voice lessons to students in the United States as well
as Europe and China.
Gondek is especially honored to have worked with the two leading
candidates for the title of “greatest living
conductor,” Leonard Bernstein and Herbert von Karajan.
“(Bernstein) was one of those people who if he walked into
a far corner of a crowded room, even if you couldn’t see he
had entered, the entire room would suddenly fall silent,”
Gondek said. “You can just tell you were now in the presence
of genius.”
During the early years of her touring career, Gondek was
primarily based across the Atlantic, but she returned to the United
States due to marriage and motherhood. Eventually, institutional
teaching re-entered her life in the form of UCLA.
Though she has not retired from performing, Gondek now considers
teaching an equal priority instead of the secondary one it was
throughout most of her career.
“Performing and teaching are two aspects of the same
activity, which is giving myself and my God-given talents out to
others for their enjoyment and edification,” Gondek said.
“When I perform for people, I try to use my gifts to create a
moving, emotional experience for my listeners. When I teach, my job
is to turn around and put those same talents into my students in
order to develop the beauty in their voices and help them
understand how to express themselves on a greater emotional
level.”
Gondek performs with fellow renowned faculty members in
Schoenberg Hall today at 8 p.m. Tickets are $10, $7 for students
and seniors.