When and where was your first concert with the MCO?
Paris, France - Leonore with Mark Minkowski in 2005.  Met a lot of people there. Married one of them.

What is the most difficult aspect of your job?
Locationlessness can be wearying. The travel we do is extremely interesting, and, as orchestral tours go, rather comfortable. But as tours drag on, there are many times when one wakes up imagining how nice it would be to have stronger roots, or at least a stronger idea of where the bathroom is.

What is the best thing about being a musician?
The best thing about being a musician is the music. That's not exaggeration or some sort of mystical, tricky tautology. This music stuff is continuously mysterious and nutritious, and in the MCO we get to play along with some of the most celebratory and exploratory musicians who ever gave music their time - I guess I'm referring to the composers, especially. But also the orchestra itself, like any good band, has an unusually alert group of fantastic musicians listening closely, and there's nothing quite like the feel of when it really takes off. There are always things to think about, reach toward, and to hear collectively as we build sound out into the air.  That part of being a musician is plenty nice.

How do you spend your free time?
Lately I've been spending quite a bit of time doing computer programming. I spent a few years doing that professionally, and now do it privately - more or less recreationally - building music visualization/theory stuff for the iPhone. It feels like a long-term project, and it's very portable.

Which are your Desert Island Discs?
- Beatles - Hard Day's Night.  I always loved this disc, from the first chord.
- Prokofiev - Peter and the Wolf, with Peter Ustinov and the Philharmonia Orchestra. I used to listen to it endlessly when I was small, and I suppose it would connect nicely with all the hunting and trapping I'd have to be doing, being on a desert island and all.
- Bach - Keyboard Partitas.  I'd need something that was endlessly interesting, full of permutations. Maybe on piano, with Glenn Gould. I think any set of instrumental suites - violin, keyboard, cello, violin/keyboard, etc. would do wonders for shipwrecked ears. But the keyboard ones would be probably the most compact and rewarding.
- Miles Davis - Kind of Blue.  I'd need something blue, surely. Or maybe Bill Evans' Explorations. Maybe both of those. The focus is so intense, so tone-oriented.
- Mozart - String Quintets with Arthur Grumiaux, et al. I've found that these recordings have an astonishingly sharp bead on changes of mood in Mozart's music. It happens so quickly, with so little effort but so much consequence. 
I don't know if you're supposed to really think about being on a desert island while considering this question, but ... if I were actually on a desert island ... well ... it's a pretty weird scenario.

BIOGRAPHY
DTimothy Summers is co-director of the Charlottesville Chamber Music Festival, which he also co-founded in 2000, and is second violinist of the celebrated Orpheus String Quartet. He is also a member of the first violin section of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra since 2009, and has performed on violin, viola, and occasionally mandolin with the orchestra at venues across the world.

As a chamber musician, Tim has recently appeared in concert at the Wiener Festwochen (performing the Lyric Suite for its festival of Alban Berg), the Schumann Festival in Düsseldorf (for Schumann’s 200th anniversary), at the Berliner Philharmonie, at Schloss Elmau in Germany, and at Ferrara Musica in Italy. Tim has also served as second concertmaster of the Aarhus Symfoni in Denmark and second principal second of the Danish Radio Orchestra in Copenhagen, and has performed at chamber music festivals across the United States and Europe, including those in Taos, Tanglewood, Banff, Sarasota, Richmond, Staunton, and Token Creek, Wisconsin. Timothy Summers was for several years a participant in the Emmanuel Music Bach Cantata cycle in Boston, led by the late Craig Smith.

He has also taught violin and chamber music at the Liceo in Barcelona, the Muskiene in San Sebastian, the Curs Internacional de Musica in Cervera, the Savonlinna Music Academy in Finland, and the Britten-Pears Institute in Aldeburgh, England.

Tim Summers spent the 2005-2006 year as artist-in-residence at the Danish Institute of Electroacoustic Music in Århus, funded by a grant from the Fulbright Commission, and has worked for several years on improvisation and computer programming projects with improvisation artist Steven Nachmanovitch. He has also worked as a teacher and developer of educational mathematics software at the University of Virginia’s Center for Technology and Teacher Education, and has recently developed Pocket Harmony and TonalDrone, two music reference and learning tools for the iPhone. 

Tim Summers holds an A.B. from Harvard University in English and American Literature and an M.M. in Violin Performance from the Juilliard School. He was a student of Ronald Copes and Robert Mann at the Juilliard School, Mark Rush at the University of Virginia, James Buswell at New England Conservatory, and Robert Levin at Harvard University.

Click here to read Tim's Tour Diary entry (04.04.2011)
Click here to read Tim's Tour Diary entry (07.02.2009)

TIM'S PERFORMANCES WITH MAHLER CHAMBER SOLOISTS