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By Maxim Reider
“From my early childhood I collected LP’s of Izhak Perelman and Pinhas Zukerman and always said that I want to be Jewish, because I believed that this was exactly what I needed to play violin as beautiful as they did,” recollects violinist Latica Honda-Rosenberg in a phone interview from her Berlin home on the eve of her performance at Classicameri Festival in Eilat this weekend. “My mother stayed silent, but my father used to reply – you can be Jewish if you want, and I did not know what to think.”
Born into a musical family – her father was a Japanese singer, her cellist mother came from Croatia – she grew up in a tiny German town, where she always felt a stranger: “Because of the music, because of my black hair and of the shape of my eyes, because of the name, which nobody could pronounce properly - and kids made unpleasant comments about it.”
Only later, when Latica was eleven and learnt about the Holocaust at school, her mother revealed her that she was Jewish and not Croatian, and that her family had perished in Auschwitz, while she was hidden by their gentile servants. “Since then, I dreamed to come to Israel, to meet my mother’s surviving cousin, to see the country.”
She first came to Israel as a soloist with the Haifa Youth Orchestra. “This was for the first time in my life, that I was totally accepted by the kids of my age,” she recollects. Since then, she’s been coming to Israel on various musical occasions, lately – as a guest of the Jerusalem Chamber Music Festival, “which is the most important music event for me, and I participated in the educational program of the Jerusalem Music Center as a teacher.”
Playing violin from the age of four, at nine she became a student of Tibor Varga, “who was a violin daddy for me” and later studied with the legendary Russian teacher Zakhar Bron in Madrid. “As a teacher, Bron has incredible instincts. He worked with me tirelessly, giving, giving and giving. And when you see somebody working so hard, you too start working like mad,” she smiles.
In 1994 Honda-Rosenberg won one of the major music contests in her country – Deutsche Musikrat. “They really care about the winners – I got some 40 concert assignments and as a result I met many important musicians.” Approximately at that time she started rethinking her musical equipment, “asking myself if I should accept everything my teachers tell me or filter it, and even more than that – what is important for me in music. Learning violin demands strict discipline and suggests a lot of technical studies, and you can be easily carried away with it. But the bottom line is understanding the music, the culture. This was a long period of re-awakening and I struggled hard for it” Before that, everything was decided for her, yet the decision to participate in Tchaikovsky Music competition in 1998, of which she became the silver medal winner, was of her own. This success has paved her the way to international career – nowadays Latica Honda Rosenberg, who plays 1732 Domenico Montagnana violin, appears throughout the world as a soloist and chamber musician.
Teaching is her other passion. Lately, she has received professorship at the prestigious Berlin University of Arts and is regarded one of the city’s leading violin teachers – enough to say, that her former students from Freiburg come to study with her once a week, and several ours spent on the road do not stop them. “Teaching suggests a great responsibility – you need to grasp your student’s personality, to realize whether appreciation or criticism will work for him or for her better, and not to project yourself upon him.”
So what is important for her in her life?
"To be, despite all the temptations of life, faithful and honest to myself, to be able to share with the people around me the values I have received myself. No matter in what area, be it playing or teaching music, or in general living."
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