Gypsy on the fiddle? It's all academic for this conductor

When Jaap van Zweden was a child in the early 1960s, he and his sister used to sit, enthralled, in the living room of their small home in the Netherlands listening to one of Europe's most famous gypsy bands in rehearsal.

'Our father was a pianist,' says van Zweden, who will be the guest conductor of the Hong Kong Philharmonic this and next weekend. 'He used to perform with Pali Lakatos and his Gypsy Orchestra regularly.'

Lakatos later became the uncle of Roby Lakatos, perhaps the best-known gypsy violinist in the world. And the violin music he played on those rehearsal afternoons affected his young listeners. 'My father always asked me what instrument I would like to play,' says van Zweden. 'And I always said I wanted to play the violin. My sister wanted to do the same, when she was small.'

His sister later became a painter, but van Zweden stayed with music, and soon began to show talent. At the age of 16, he won a competition that changed his life. The Oskar Back Competition offered a first prize of a scholarship to the Juilliard Academy in New York. 'Nothing was the same for me again'.

Within three years of joining the academy, van Zweden became the youngest concertmaster to be appointed to a major orchestra: the Netherlands' Concertgebouw. However, the triumph was mixed with sadness.

'It happened when the leader of the Concertgebouw had an accident and injured his arm,' van Zweden says. 'I knew him very well: he was my teacher.' His teacher was unable ever to play the violin again, but was gracious enough to say he was glad his place had been filled by his promising young pupil.

Van Zweden stayed with the orchestra for 16 years, pursuing a successful soloist career at the same time and playing with top conductors such as Leonard Bernstein, Bernard Haitink and Georg Solti. 'And then everything changed again,' he says. It happened when he was performing with Bernstein in Berlin. 'He asked me to conduct something, because he wanted to go to the back of the hall and listen to what it sounded like. And I said I wasn't prepared well enough to do it, and he looked at me and said, 'You should be prepared. You should conduct'.'