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“This place is like coming home for Peter.”
Nadine Oundjian
The Annex house looks like a dowager’s residence from the outside. You would expect Dickens’ character Miss Havisham to answer the door, not the dashing Peter Oundjian, music director of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra.
He resembles a younger Peter Rieger, the actor. A writer from the Boston Globe once described Oundjian as having “important hair.”
And here at his Annex house, a 4,000-square-foot, three-storey dwelling full of high ceilings and skylights, is a home that is unpretentious, bright, homey, cheery and welcoming — not at all formidable, as its rather gloomy exterior would imply.
“Make sure you get a shot of the cobwebs (over the light fixture),” Oundjian jokes, greeting his visitors at the entrance. “The house is part of a series of four built in 1986 — two pairs of houses semi-detached.”
There are four bedrooms, a living room, dining room, kitchen/sitting room and his office/den upstairs.
He’s lived there with wife Nadine and their two children for eight years. They are a musical family. Nadine, a teacher, plays flute. Their son Peter is a singer/songwriter/guitar player. Their daughter, Lara, is a singer who works in theatre and film. She started Music Theatre Montreal.
“This place is like coming home for Peter,” says Nadine, a native New Yorker. Oundjian was born in Toronto General Hospital in 1955. His family is of Armenian, English and French ancestry and they were in the carpet biz. They moved to England when Oundjian was 5 and he was raised in Surrey, B.C.
For Nadine, the house was purchased site unseen.
The TSO, when the couple first arrived in Toronto, had put them up at The Minto. During one of his walks, Oundjian happened upon this house while Nadine was back at their home in Connecticut.
“It looked cosy, small and manageable from the outside. In Connecticut, we have two acres and it is a Colonial home an hour from New York. We wanted a condo here. She said ‘definitely not a house’ when I took her to the airport,” he says.
“But it is so bright, optimistic and cheerful with the skylight.”
Nadine never physically saw the house when he bought it. He did, though, send her photos.
“We brought the kids up here as teens,” Oundjian explains. “It’s like a loft, an open house with lots of rooms to play.”
There is also a backyard area with an alleyway that’s 50 yards by eight yards. “It is fantastic to play ball and street hockey,” Oundjian says. “Peter and I are out constantly.”
Conductors are in good shape. All that gesticulating is great cardio.
“It is better than going to a gym,” he allows. “There are no fat conductors. Fifteen internationally known conductors are between 75 and 85. There should be conductor-cize in retirement homes. I want to create Conductor Hero. I’m going to make a fortune.”
The house and furnishings are collaborations between Oundjian and his wife.
“Between him and me, we covered the walls and floors,” Nadine says. “I replaced the original carpeting and did different colours on the walls. But the house was move-in-able.”
Oundjian’s Armenian background explains the multitude of rugs. An ancestral wall of Nadine’s family photos leads up to the third floor.
In the landing, there is also a 17th-century pedestal from Spain with an IKEA lamp on it. Their décor is eclectic and well-loved. The den/office in the second floor has a well-worn red couch and lived-in brown leather chair.
“We try to make use of hand-me-downs,” Oundjian says. “The overused red sofa is from my first apartment in New York. Chris Plummer has a smoking jacket the colour of that couch, a claret. My wife calls the brown leather chair the ‘ugly chair’ but it is comfy.”
His mother bought the music stand for Oundjian when he was 10. In pride of place: a baseball commemorating the first ball he threw out in 2011 for the Toronto Blue Jays. They are collectors who share a proclivity for things repurposed into furnishing and accessories.
“We like things that have meaning,” Nadine says. Like the parking-metre lamp: “You put money in it,” she says. “A penny gives you 12 minutes and for a nickel you get an hour.
“We don‘t want it to look like a fancy hotel,” she says. “This is not the Four Seasons. It shouldn’t look just right. Luckily we have the same taste.”
The desk was brought from England by Oundjian when he moved in 1975.
“I’m the youngest of five and each of us had a nice old English desk,” he says. “That’s probably the thing I have owned the longest. I do all my work here. I use the keyboard (on the desk), not the piano — the beautiful baby grand (in the living room downstairs) is on loan from Robert Lowry. It is too beautiful to plonk out scores. But a lot of great pianists have played here.”
Oundjian marked 10 years at the TSO this year. He was appointed music director of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra in 2003 at the age of 47, eight years after he began his conducting career.
He began studying violin at age 7. He attended the Royal College of Music in London and Julliard in New York, minoring in conducting. He was first violinist with the Tokyo String Quartet for 14 years, until repetitive strain injury forced him to curtail his violin career and concentrate on conducting.
Among his credits: From 1998 to 2003, he was artistic director of the Amsterdam Sinfonietta; he was principal guest conductor of the Colorado Symphony Orchestra for three years; in September 2006, he became principal guest conductor and artistic adviser of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. He is music director of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and is in his 32nd year teaching as an adjunct professor of violin at the Yale University School of Music.
And he will conduct the Mozart Coronation Mass at Roy Thomson Hall on January 15 and 16.
“All conductors are peripatetic,” he allows. “I spend eight weeks in Scotland and 10 weeks with the TSO. I conduct in different parts of the world: Houston, Helsinki and St. Louis, and am homeless three out of four months, 12 weeks in a row. Conductors go at least two or three weeks as guest conductor. I did 19 cities in 23 days when I was string violinist. I was 39 when I became conductor.”
He collaborated with his cousin, Eric Idle of Monty Python fame, in June 2007 during Toronto’s first Luminato Festival. He conducted the world premiere of the oratorio Not the Messiah (He’s a Very Naughty Boy) by Idle and John DuPrez, based on the Python movie Life of Brian.
“He said he wanted a way to be onstage together without ruining my career,” he laughs. “It was great fun. Growing up, Eric was the same age as my oldest brother. He was in his mid 20s and I was barely in high school.”
We move downstairs to the living room where there are horns on the mantelpiece, a gift to Oundjian from a student who hails from Tibet. The Oundjians’ favourite room is the living room — because of the light and the fireplace. It is cosy and bright, but so is the sitting room off the kitchen, which has two well-worn couches.
The kitchen island and counters are granite, as is the backsplash, which all have a peacock feather pattern. On the wall hangs a turquoise tapestry bag with four dinner forks serving as the handle. Nadine keeps plastic bags in it.
“I could take it to the symphony,” she cracks.
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