The School of Music’s newest cello professor, Suren Bagratuni, is acclimating to East Lansing.
“I love it here,” Bagratuni said. “I’m an outdoors person, so it is perfect for me here.”
He said, however, that summertime heat and no air conditioning in his Music Building office didn’t sit well with him.
“It was so hot I had to move over there to the air conditioning,” he said, indicating the adjacent Music Practice Building.
All the same, a cello professor’s life isn’t simply sitting in rooms teaching students the finer aspects of the instrument.
In the last month, Bagratuni has been on two other continents performing, in addition to his debut at the Wharton Center last month.
“It’s not just teaching,” he said. “As a cello professor, I’m playing internationally all over the world.”
This gives him experiences with new compositions and new composers to bring back to his students.
Bagratuni was born in Armenia in what was then the Soviet Union. He moved to Moscow at 18 to study at the Moscow Conservatory. His cello playing brought him to the United States, where he was part of a trio of other former Moscow Conservatory musicians.
He moved on to teaching at the University of Illinois and came to MSU this summer.
MSU pursued him for a position.
“We were looking for a distinguished professor of cello,” said Jack Budrow, chairman of the string department. “Mr. Bagratuni has an international reputation as a performing cellist and teacher.”
Bagratuni said the quality of the School of Music’s program helped bring him here.
“I’m glad the orchestra program at this school is very advanced,” he said.
The music program fosters a great environment for its students, Bagratuni said, crediting that with the program’s excellence.
“I would say it’s much more open and supportive and that makes our students work better,” he said.
Bagratuni’s students said his status as a big performer is an asset, but his skills as a teacher are much more important.
“It’s not like I’m following him around seeing what it’s like to be a big performer,” music performance junior Patrick McNurlen said. “The bottom line is he knows what he’s doing.”
Bagratuni’s teaching techniques work, at least for McNurlen.
“I was getting hung up on a lot of technical problems,” McNurlen said. “He has a way of setting those things aside and putting them in perspective behind the making of music.”
Among the things Bagratuni wants to accomplish is bringing talented cellists and other musicians he knows to perform at MSU, an idea he put into practice at the University of Illinois.
This worked well before, for him and for his students, Bagratuni said.
“This is a way for students to hear these talented people, and I have a pleasing experience in that I sit (and perform) with talented musicians,” he said.
