1.
After graduating from Juilliard in 1997, I moved to Berlin on a lark, escaping from the untenable pressure of finding work in a city that needed no more musicians. In 2001, two years into my studies with the great Boris Pergamenschikow, I found myself in my first orchestral job as principal cellist of the Deutsche Oper Berlin. I knew little about opera and less about life in a professional orchestra. I was not prepared for the mostly joyless, shoulder-to-the-grindstone attitude of my more experienced colleagues and didn’t yet know how to create and protect my own sphere of music-making and spontaneity.