Sonoma Valley’s hot ticket Monday night was Nigel Armstrong’s violin recital to benefit the Sonoma Valley Classical Music Society at the innovatively designed home of June and Herb Sabel.
KSVY 91.3 Sonoma host Wally Breitman introduced Armstrong, a product of Leta Davis’s well-known violin classes, and he is undoubtedly the finest musician to grow up in Sonoma.
Sixty guests sat in two wings of the Sabels’ first floor and focused on an almost altar-like background, transfixed by Armstrong’s engrossing performance.
Dressed in gray slacks and a long-sleeved dark blue shirt that covered his itchy poison ivy, Armstrong exerted as much physical energy as a basketball player, wiping his brow occasionally with his shirt cuff or chin cloth, and soaking through the back of his shirt as he played for nearly an hour.
Guests applauded and bravoed quietly to Armstrong’s interpretations of works by Eugène Ysaÿe, Johann Sebastian Bach, Jean Martinon, and Fritz Kreisler.
Broadway Catering & Events passed Aram rolls with julienned vegetables, mini tartlets with brie cheese and crostini with fig-olive tapenade and blue cheese as guests arrived. Dinner followed Armstrong’s recital on the Sabels’ expansive shaded patio, and included a buffet of roasted pork loin with sherry raisin vinaigrette, roasted potatoes, grilled asparagus with feta cheese, and mixed greens with oranges, endive and orange vinaigrette. Grilled pound cake with fresh strawberries and orange whipped cream followed.
Armstrong and his friends dined on a totally vegan meal, also prepared by Broadway Catering, and wines were donated by Cellar Collections of Napa.
Wondering how Nigel Armstrong got this way?
Armstrong’s mother, Kristen, played the violin at home when she was pregnant with Nigel, so he has always heard violin music. From age three Armstrong remembers hearing students playing violins across the street at Leta Davis’ Suzuki classes and concerts on Saturdays. At the ripe old age of four, Armstrong asked his parents if he could start violin classes, and was told it was too early, he was too young, and it wouldn’t be good. So he waited until he was five and a half, and like many of us, went to his first lesson crying big tears for mommy.
Playing violin with other students, Armstrong kept being paired with another student, would pass that student in accomplishment, move on to another, and finally ran out of students in Davis’ local classes.
Armstrong continued to work with Davis until he was ten, moved on to study with Daniel Kobialka, and then with Zaven Melikian, retired faculty member from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.
Meanwhile, back in Sonoma, Armstrong studied in public school-directed home schooling and independent study since what should have been fourth grade, which he skipped. While a supposed tenth grader, he took twelfth grade math, eleventh grade chemistry, English, world history, and P.E., with credits given for violin.
At Sonoma’s 2003 community concert benefiting tsunami relief, ten bands played, but the applause thundered when Armstrong walked out on stage to improvise accompaniment to guitar-plucking Michael Castle’s “Ghost Highway.”
Always having felt socially like “the other kid,” Nigel Armstrong debuted with the Berkeley Symphony as its inaugural Young Artist Award winner, studied for a couple of years at prestigious Walnut Hill School near Boston, returns soon to the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara for a second summer, and then enters the four-year Colburn School for the Arts in Los Angeles, formerly connected to U.S.C. and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. And he’s seventeen.
