Symphonies & Scorpions: A Return Engagement
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A BACKSTORY on TWO CONTINENTS
A Return Engagement
[image error]“Lynn,” I discreetly said at the end of the BSO’s 2013 Tanglewood season, “I heard through the grapevine that the BSO’s going to China and Japan next year.”
Lynn Larsen has been the personnel manager of the Boston Symphony since 1987. A native Utahan, he had previously been a horn player in the Utah Symphony. Ironically, the year after he arrived in Boston I departed to become associate concertmaster in Utah. A cultural exchange of sorts. Swapping stories of contrasts between the bluest of the blue states and the reddest of the red established an immediate bond. With Utah’s distinct Mormon culture in mind, Lynn has dubbed me “Brother Elias.”
The Utah Symphony contract allows its musicians to take unpaid leave during its summer concert season, and in 1996 Lynn began hiring me to perform during the BSO’s Tanglewood summer festival whenever he needed a substitute for the violin section. It is my good fortune that the BSO has an impressively large herd of violinists. Given the occasional illnesses, retirements, sabbaticals, unpaid leaves, and—with the remarkable ascendance of female musicians—pregnancies, my pilgrimage to the Mecca of music festivals became an annual event.
So, when I asked Lynn about the Asia tour in his backstage office at the Tanglewood Shed, the BSO’s semi-outdoor summer concert facility that seats 5,000 music lovers, he knew exactly where I was coming from. And as I had retired from the Utah Symphony in 2011, he also knew my schedule was as flexible as a yogi’s knees.
“You want to go?” he asked, knowing the answer.
“Love to.”
There were many reasons I hoped to be hired for this tour. For starters, playing great music with a great orchestra conducted by the great maestro, Lorin Maazel, were three pretty great ones. It would also be a way for me to reconnect with BSO colleagues, some of whom have been friends for almost forty years. Add to that my chronic wanderlust, and I was drooling over Lynn’s desk.
When I was a mere whip of a lad, I had the great good fortune enough to have been concertmaster of the Long Island Youth Orchestra. The LIYO’s conductor, Martin Dreiwitz, was a Juilliard-trained musician, but a travel agent by profession. Every summer for four decades Martin took his student orchestra on an overseas concert tour. I was on the first few of those. Most often we stayed with families or in hostels; occasionally in a hotel. By the time I joined the BSO I was a seasoned veteran, having performed in Puerto Rico, St. Thomas, England, Denmark, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, and Samoa. I had become a touring junkie.
Japan is the country I’ve visited most often. After the LIYO tour in 1976 I concertized there regularly with the BSO and as first violinist of the Abramyan String Quartet. In 1987, while on sabbatical leave from the BSO, I spent four months teaching at the Musashino Ongaku Daigaku (Music Academy), one of the most prestigious conservatories in Tokyo. I have dear friends in Japan whom I hadn’t seen for more than ten years, making the prospect of visiting again especially savory.
But perhaps the most intriguing reason for wanting to go on the 2014 trip is to return to China.
While my feelings about Japan are utterly positive, those involving China are more complicated. Only a decade after the BSO’s initial door-opening tour, the world witnessed that door brutally slammed shut in Tiananmen Square. Despite impressive successes of their economic revolution, the price paid for it in suppression of political dissent and in environmental devastation compels one to consider whether change necessarily means progress. I have qualms about contributing my skills to a country ruled with such a heavy fist, and viewing the transformations of the past thirty-five years through the Beijing smog only dampens my enthusiasm further.
Still.
“If you want to go on the tour,” Lynn replied, “You’ll have to come to Boston in April to play the last two weeks of the season, because that’s when we’re doing the tour rep.”
“I can manage that,” I said.
The tour repertoire was pretty standard stuff. I’d performed it innumerable times over the decades and could have joined the orchestra directly in China literally without missing a beat, but I didn’t argue the point. There were good reasons for Lynn’s proviso: It ensured my familiarity not only with the music but also with the conductor. It enabled Lynn, as personnel manager, to maintain the same seating arrangement on tour as in Boston by being able to hire the same personnel throughout. It was musically appropriate (i.e. there should be a full string section for big symphonies like the Berlioz, Mahler, and Tchaikovsky that comprised the hot ticket items on the tour). Finally, had I, as a freelancer, been granted a special reprieve from those two weeks, it would not have put me in the best of steads with the other musicians, especially the freelance musicians. Besides, Boston audiences deserved a complete orchestra, too.
“OK, Brother Elias, I’ll put you on the list of subs who have ‘volunteered,’” Lynn said. “I’ll know for sure in the fall.”
I wasn’t surprised that such a list existed. The BSO is fortunate to have a battalion of fine freelancers at its disposal. One reason for their abundance is that there’s a lot of music going on in Boston. In addition to the BSO, just a few of the paying gigs include the venerable Handel-Haydn Society, the Boston Philharmonic, Emmanuel Music, A Far Cry (chamber orchestra), Boston Lyric Opera, Boston Ballet, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP), Collage New Music, and the Shubert Theater. Some musicians drive south to Providence, Plymouth, and Cape Cod, west to Newton and Waltham, or north to Cape Ann and Portland to play with orchestras in those communities. But the BSO is the freelancers’ plum. Even on a part-time basis, they can make a decent living from the BSO—which pays one of the highest salaries of any orchestra in the country—as part of their employment mix. To go on an international tour with the BSO means not only a couple of weeks of steady, well-paid work during the tour, but also a couple of weeks of rehearsals and performances in Boston in preparation for the tour. In addition, because of the high cost of living in tour cities where major orchestras like the BSO gravitate, there is also a substantial tour per diem above and beyond salary, and if one is thrifty the unused portion can be deposited in one’s bank account. (There was once a BSO musician, who shall remain nameless, who packed cans of tuna and a jar of peanut butter in his wardrobe trunk in order to pocket his per diem, putting “Europe on Five Dollars a Day” to shame.)
Since its inception in 1881, the Boston Symphony has considered touring a prerequisite for a world-class orchestra. Though it has always traveled extensively in the United States, its first European tour was not until after World War II, in 1952. For its second, in 1956, a tag team of Charles Munch and Pierre Monteux conducted twenty-nine concerts in thirty-five days. Orchestra members were given the option to travel to Europe by plane or ocean liner, in 1952 aboard the Ile de France and in 1956 aboard the Nieuw Amsterdam. For the 1956 tour, Pierre Monteux hopped onboard with the orchestra members and they even gave a small concert during the crossing. In 1960 there was a mind-numbing seven-week tour with thirty-six concerts in twenty-six cities from Taiwan to Japan to Australia to New Zealand.
Among the most grueling tours that I personally participated in was in the fall of 1981, which combined Japan and Europe. In twenty-four days, there were thirteen concerts in eight cities, including a nonstop flight from Tokyo to Paris covering more than 6,000 miles and several hundred time zones, more or less. That tour alone would have been exhausting enough, but just a few months earlier we also had a coast-to-coast domestic tour of sixteen concerts in nineteen days. Both of those tours celebrated the BSO’s centennial. By the time we returned from Europe the only thing the musicians were celebrating was its conclusion.
With Maestro Seiji Ozawa, the BSO’s flamboyant former music director from 1973 to 2002, the orchestra had an appealing international profile; especially, of course, in Japan. An annual overseas tour with the BSO was almost a given. If organized well—something the BSO is very good at—an international tour can turn the orchestra a tidy sum, covering not only the daunting expenses involved but also musician and staff salaries for the duration of the tour. In its 2013 annual report the BSO listed touring revenue of $2,239,000. That’s without a major Boston Symphony tour that year; the revenue was likely derived in large part from touring of its other illustrious brand, the Boston Pops. In 2014, total operating tour revenue, including the tour to China and Japan, was over $3.6 million.
After Ozawa departed in 2002 for Vienna, the BSO was without a music director until James Levine’s accession to the BSO throne in 2004. Not long thereafter, the orchestra began to suffer along with Levine through his all-too-frequent bouts of accidents and illness until he departed in 2011. During Levine’s reign there was only one Europe tour, in 2007. After another two-year music director search, Maestro Andris Nelsons was appointed in 2013. Conspiring with the ten-year hiatus between Ozawa and Nelsons, the cost of touring skyrocketed as the national economy tanked, making big tours a high stakes risk on orchestras’ increasingly fragile budgets.
The BSO weathered those economic storms better than most orchestras and was ready to hit the road again. Though the conductor on tour is typically the orchestra’s music director, Nelsons had not yet commenced his tenure, so the tour to China and Japan in May 2014 would be led by one of the BSO’s regular guest conductors, the internationally renowned Maestro Lorin Maazel. Former music director of the New York Philharmonic, Cleveland Orchestra, Pittsburgh Symphony, and Vienna Philharmonic, Maazel had credentials coming out of his podium and was a rock star in China and Japan, so all the tea leaves pointed to a propitious future.
While waiting for Lynn’s verdict whether I’d made the cut, I considered how it had been possible for the present-day Boston Symphony, demographically unrecognizable from the Koussevitsky era (1924-49), to have maintained its world-class status while so much else in the world had changed, especially in the thirty-five years since the 1979 China tour. If you went backwards in time thirty-five years before 1979 you would find yourself at D-Day; Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang Party would rule China with an iron fist for four more years before being ousted by Mao’s communist revolution. The changes since 1979 have been equally transformative and dramatic. Former enemies Japan and Germany are now America’s closest allies and China is a capitalist powerhouse.
Maybe the changes in my own life since 1979 haven’t been as earthshaking, but the maxim applies that if you swat a mosquito you change the history of the world, though perhaps in my case a much more modest tremor. When I left Boston for Salt Lake in 1988 many of my BSO colleagues were baffled by my departure, and not without good reason. Utah of all places! Don’t they drive buggies and wear black in Utah? (For the record, the answer is no to both questions. Mormons are totally unrelated to the Amish. But on the other hand, in 2001 the state legislature did resolve to make Jell-O the official snack food of Utah.)
The Boston Symphony is undoubtedly one of the world’s great orchestras, it pays very well indeed, and in these uncertain times for symphony orchestras it is a bulwark of financial stability. In 1988, the Utah Symphony, while a fine orchestra, had the lowest salary of any fulltime orchestra, and (wouldn’t you know it) the musicians went on strike the day I arrived in Salt Lake City.
Yet I had my reasons, not the least of which was that deep-seated wanderlust. More pragmatically, I had the opportunity to be the associate concertmaster of a major orchestra. (Associate concertmaster is the guy who sits next to the first chair violinist—the concertmaster—and occasionally spells him when he decides to vacation in Bermuda.) This added degree of responsibility and public exposure resulted in a cornucopia of fringe benefits I hadn’t predicted. Though I had done my share of private teaching in Boston and had my studio door occasionally graced by the presence of a talented student, in Salt Lake I had the cream of the crop knocking it off its hinges. Within a year I was an esteemed faculty member of the University of Utah music department, now the School of Music. I was sought after to perform on various chamber music series. I started composing and had my music performed by major orchestras. And, like many ambitious young musicians, I got the conducting bug—Ah! The power! —and became the music director of Salt Lake’s popular Vivaldi by Candlelight chamber orchestra series. Maybe I was destined to be that mosquito swatter.
The biggest unexpected twist in the road of my career, however, began to take shape in 1997 when I was in Italy with my family on a sabbatical leave from the Utah Symphony. By that time, I had taught in a slew of countries around the world and decided I wanted to write a book about the universal challenges violin students have in learning to play such a difficult instrument. The book would deal not only with technical concerns, like “keep your thumb relaxed, damnit!” but also with related issues, like how to find the right violin to buy, how to prepare for auditions, how to be a good sight-reader, etc. The stuff they don’t teach you in school. But I also knew that when I was a student I would have keeled over in boredom in five minutes if that book was on my reading list, so I decided to wrap a bit of a mystery about a stolen Stradivarius around it. Poco a poco over a period of ten years, what started out as a violin method morphed into a full-fledged, traditional whodunit called Devil’s Trill, which became the first of six in a series of mysteries that take place in the dark corners of the classical music world.
And now, in 2014, would I come full circle, once again playing second violin in the Boston Symphony on a concert tour to China and Japan? My perspective has changed considerably, and so too have the orchestra and the world, but some questions remain the same: Why do orchestras tour? Is the old axiom that music is the international language still true? Was it ever? What does touring mean for international relations, if anything? Did the historic first BSO tour to China in 1979 have any lasting impact? Given that China is now going gangbusters building concert halls and founding orchestras, is the Boston Symphony carrying symphonic coal to a musical Newcastle?
As one of the few holdovers from the historic ’79 tour, I thought what a unique opportunity to seek answers to those questions. The music, the tour, the societal changes, and to be able to chronicle it all! I can’t say I sat by the phone, but my pump was admittedly primed.
On November 6, 2013, I received a three-word email from Lynn: “You are on.”
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