Carlos Piantini was a Dominican violinist and conductor. He played fifteen years in the New York Philharmonic, conducted orchestras from Vienna to Jerusalem, and led the Dominican National Symphony for a decade, which makes him the Dominican musician who went furthest inside the European concert tradition.

The child violinist

He was born in Santo Domingo in 1927 and made his debut as a violinist at ten, young enough that the press of the day gave him nicknames for it. He studied first with Josefita Heredia and Guillermo Jiménez, and then with the Austrian violinist Willy Kleinberg and the Czech Emil Friedman.

The National Symphony

He was fourteen when the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional was founded, and he was one of its founding members — an orchestra assembled by Julio Alberto Hernández and the generation that built the country’s musical institutions. Piantini would come back to it four decades later, from the other side of the podium.

Mexico and New York

He lived in Mexico between 1944 and 1946, working on violin technique with Joseph Smilovits and Henryk Szeryng and studying harmony with Manuel M. Ponce. He then spent fifteen years as a violinist in the New York Philharmonic under Leonard Bernstein, which is an unusual sentence to be able to write about a Dominican musician of his generation.

When he decided to conduct rather than play, he went to Vienna and studied orchestral conducting with Hans Swarowsky, whose students account for a large part of how orchestras were conducted in the second half of the century.

The podium

He conducted the Philharmonic of Maracaibo in Venezuela and appeared as a guest with the New York Philharmonic, the Vienna Symphony, the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, the Jerusalem Symphony and the Orchestra Internazionale d’Italia. He also served as director of the Teatro Nacional in Santo Domingo and taught orchestral studies at Florida International University.

Laureate conductor

He was music director of the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional from 1984 to 1994, and on leaving the post was named its laureate conductor. The Casandra Awards named him best classical artist abroad twice, in 1989 and in 1992, and he held the Order of Andrés Bello of Venezuela along with the Dominican Order of Christopher Columbus and the Order of Merit of Duarte, Sánchez and Mella. He died in 2010.