When and where was your first concert with the MCO? Don Giovanni during the summer of 1998 in Aix-en-Provence.
What’s the best thing about playing with the MCO? The escape from routine.
What is your most memorable moment with the orchestra? There are so many, I always swear that I’ll finally write them down!
What do you need to feel at home whilst on tour? Not much: especially with the fixed residencies, the MCO is like a second home for me. I feel that sometimes really clearly on the day of arrival.
What is the best thing about being a musician? Doing such an incredible number of different things, but somehow never having the feeling that I’m working.
BIOGRAPHY May Kunstovny, born in Vienna, started with the violin at age 5. She began her studies at the Musikhochschule Karlsruhe with Nachum Erlich, continued at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin with Mi-Kyung Lee, where she took her bachelor exam, and finished with a master degree in Amsterdam at the Conservatory with Lex Korff de Gidts and Alexander Kerr. To complete her studies she added lessons with Thomas Brandis in Berlin and with Lucy van Dael in Amsterdam.
Apart from the German National Youth Orchestra, her orchestral experience started when she joined the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra in 1996. She participated in tours with Claudio Abbado, Bernard Haitink and Pierre Boulez before becoming one of the founding members of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra in 1998.
In addition to the MCO, she plays occasionally in the Orchestre Revolutionnaire Romantique, the English Baroque Soloists and the Orchestre des Champs-Elysées.
In her adopted home of Oslo, May plays regularly with the Oslo Philharmonic and the Norwegian Radio Orchestra, and she is a member of the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra.
