With Marc and Jodi

Thanks to Kevin Fryer’s series in Brisbane, Live at Mission Blue, the Bay Area has a gorgeous, small recital hall that is perfect for solo instruments.

The other night, as part of the complete Bach Cello Suites concerts there, I shared the stage with two great friends and musicians, Marc Teicholz and Jodi Levitz. I not only shared the stage, but shared the repertoire, inviting these guys, a guitarist and a violist to explore “our” own Bach Cello Suites. It turned out to be a really remarkable evening and as I listened to them after starting the concert with the first Suite, I felt like I was being offered a new lens through which to view music I know and love very much. It wasn’t just the different instruments that made a it such an interesting take on the Cello Suites, but it was the different personalities that infused the music with new life and energy. Just as in a performance of a Shakespeare play, where the audience member can always be reassured of a compelling and thought provoking experience in the company of one of the world’s great authors, so it is listening to these musical masterpieces. What becomes interesting in the play is how the actor deals with his/her own role in it and how he/she chooses to forge a relationship with the material. It is that relationship between actor and role that becomes an event all its own, influencing hugely the composition itself.

So it was in Brisbane watching Marc and Jodi in their relationship to Bach. Like great actors in a role, they each fully inhabited the pieces in a very personal way. I was so happy to be a part of this and hope we will have another chance soon to share these three very different, but wholly convincing interpretations of this familiar music.

Mostly, I think we all shared the feeling that playing solo Bach is one of the great joys of life, always changing, always challenging, never boring, and very illuminating. Who could ask for a better occupation?

Last week I went to a concert of friends and colleagues at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. It was under the auspices of Jean-Michel Fonteneau’s faculty recital. It was disorienting in the best sense. Some of the modern string faculty plus two modern alumni were playing a concert on….. yes… gut strings!

Some of you may not understand the significance of this event, but those of us who have been in the early music scene for the last twenty years or more, still remember the days that we were ridiculed as lesser players just trying to find a niche. Gut strings were considered inferior, gimmicky and were frowned upon in any standard chamber music setting. Noses would go up, and there were complaints of scratchiness or not enough volume as compared to the steel strings of the “normal” players. Playing on period instruments was just not cool.

Have things changed since then!

First Juilliard gets a Historic Performance department. This is very important because Juilliard, until very recently, was the center, the breeding ground for a standardized “modern” way of playing stringed instruments. The best students emerged from that school concerned with a sustained, spinning, brilliant sound that would penetrate a huge hall right to the back row. New York’s esthetic for nearly a half century was based on the sweet and constantly vibrating tones of Pearlman, Zukerman and Stern.

Now, however, there is a whole new generation that grew up hearing the numerous recordings and performances available on gut strings and it has entered the mainstream. Still, there are many modern players who won’t touch the stuff. Not so with Axel Strauss, Jean-Michel, Jodi Levitz, Pei-Ling Lin, and Joseph Maile who put gut strings on and performed Brahms and Mendelssohn Viola Quintets more beautifully than I have ever heard those pieces. The combination of a great group of musicians willing to take some risks and grappling with a new set of equipment resulted in music making that was imaginative, inspired, well voiced and had an enormous palette of sound colors that they exploited as a result of using the gut strings. Steel strings didn’t exist at the time this music was written, after all. Hats off to them for trying this in public and producing such a great performance on their first try!

For me, the concert represented a barrier broken between two musical worlds I have straddled for a long time, feeling somewhat apologetic to the one that I was involved with the other, and vice versa. It was like leading a double life. We are now just musicians together, experimenting with our equipment to get the best musical result. This is as it should be. OK, maybe I’m just a little jealous… It took me years to learn how to play on gut strings!  On the first try?  Not even one squeak!

I went to hear the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble last night in the Throckmorton Theater in Mill Valley. I play in this ensemble half the time, but this time around it was Leighton Fong playing cello. I was honestly not looking forward to hearing another performance of The Voice of the Whale by George Crumb. I’ve always found it to be over theatrical, even though I love his solo cello piece.

This time, however, for whatever reason — because of the way they played it most likely, I was riveted from beginning to end. Left Coast always lists the duration of the pieces, so if it is a piece you aren’t enjoying, you can always think to yourself, “Oh, well- at least I only have 7 more minutes to go.” The Crumb was listed as a daunting 27 minutes. I was a little doubtful, but as the renowned psychiatrist from UCSF, Sam Barondes who was sitting at my table said, “I was worried, but it flew by like that! (snapped his fingers).” I felt the same way. When Leighton came in with the long awaited cello melody toward the end, it was so moving, I was almost in tears.

The Throckmorton Theater was a great place for it with really good lighting. They are repeating the concert at the San Francisco Conservatory Monday night. Check out the full program on the web site. The whole thing was really great, including the two young composers pieces who were in attendance and spoke well about their pieces. Congratulations, Left Coast!