Israeli who loves teaching helps lead Milwaukee orchestra

He’s an Israeli who misses home and family, with a love of music and teaching that has brought him to Wisconsin.

Yaniv Dinur, who started as the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra’s new assistant conductor in November, has gotten used to living in America after eight years here.

“Americans are very polite,” he noted in an interview. “Sometimes I’m afraid if I say something they won’t understand my sense of humor but so far they’ve been laughing.”

Dinur is coming to the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra from his previous post at American University in Washington, D.C., where he will continue as conductor for the school orchestra through May. Until then, he expects lots of plane flights between Washington, D.C. and Milwaukee.

Dinur loves teaching students at American University and his Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra position will offer him a chance to continue as an educator. He will be conducting the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra during performances for schools, with talk-backs. He will also hold pre-concert talks for subscription concerts and will fill in for the lead conductor as needed.

Dinur visits Israel every few months and he usually conducts in Israel once a year, each time with a different orchestra.

“I go to the old city and I eat humus in Jerusalem. I go to Tel Aviv,” he said.  “I see my family.”

“I love going to Israel, although it’s a strange feeling now because I’ve been in the states for a while. When I go back I sometimes feel like a tourist in my own country.”

“Being Jewish is a part of me, definitely part of me,” he said. “I’m not religious or anything. I certainly feel that there is so much history that I can relate to being part of.”

Leading a recent Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra practice, he asked players for more of a “cry” in “Pictures at an Exhibition” by Modest Mussorgsky, like in klezmer music. The piece is not Jewish, but it’s what he felt was needed.

Yet his approach is that he and the players are conduits between the composer and the audience. “My job as a conductor is to try to figure out what the composer meant and convey to the orchestra so they convey to the audience,” he said.

“But of course this is limited,” he noted, since the composers are often no longer alive. You have to be kind of like a historian, he said, reading about a composer’s life and what happened to influence the music.

“Then it becomes personal,” he said. “No conductor will conduct the same piece the same.”

“My aspiration, my goal is to make music at the highest possible level. That’s what I want to do and that’s what makes me happy. At the same time I love to teach.”