Marylou.

This has already been a year of far too many final goodbyes, and this week, news came of another awful loss for the music world. One of my first violin teachers, and one of the very small circle of people who I credit with setting me on the firm and irrevocable path to becoming a musician, passed away quietly at her home in Boston this week. Marylou Speaker Churchill was the principal second violin of the Boston Symphony Orchestra for 23 years (she played in the BSO for 30 years all told,) and that's quite something. But it's nothing compared to the legacy she left behind as the kind of teacher who truly changes lives every single day.

I was 9 years old - just one year into my time as the youngest and least advanced student in Marylou's studio - when she invited me to spend an entire week with her at Tanglewood, the idyllic summer home of the BSO. Tanglewood is the Shangri-La of classical music, a near-perfect campus of rolling lawns and concert halls, tucked away in the gorgeous Berkshire hills of Western Massachusetts. Music lovers from all over New England flock to Tanglewood every summer, and the best chamber musicians and soloists in the world consider Tanglewood an essential stop on their itineraries. When you attend a concert there, and lie back on the lawn outside the main shed, with the grass tickling your scalp and the sound of a Beethoven slow movement in your ears, you never want it to end.

And that summer when I was nine - pulling into the musicians-only parking lot every morning in the passenger seat of my teacher's ancient VW Beetle convertible; attending closed rehearsals in which real live Professional Musicians slogged their way through symphonies they'd played a hundred times, and made fun of the guest conductor behind his back; and playing Frisbee on the lawn with the BSO's new young concertmaster, Malcolm Lowe - I knew exactly what I wanted to do for a living.

Beyond possessing the simple generosity of spirit that could lead a teacher to present a hyperactive 9-year-old with such a gift, Marylou was the kind of teacher who demanded (and got) 100% effort from her students. Less than a year after I began taking lessons with her, she realized that I tended to practice hard for a day or two after each lesson, then get lazy and arrive at the next week's lesson dramatically underprepared. A lot of teachers just throw up their hands at that kind of student. Marylou's response was to offer to teach me twice a week, so that I never went more than three days without a lesson.

When my family moved away from Boston in 1986, I was devastated to be losing Marylou, and I suspect that the wonderful teacher who succeeded her as my primary mentor in Pennsylvania would tell you that my sulking over the move didn't make his job any easier. I saw her once more about a year later, when she happened to be in Philadelphia for a concert and gave me a lesson in her hotel room for old time's sake, and then, incredibly, I didn't see her for nearly 20 years. I kept tabs on her career, of course, and was overjoyed when I heard that she and her husband, Mark (who is one of the legends of Boston's incredible youth music scene) had decided to adopt twin girls back in the mid-1990s.

Those girls are now 12 years old, and in one of the not-quite-coincidences that makes the music world such a wonderful place to live, they have been attending the summer music camp I teach at for three years now. They're incredible kids, full of energy, talent, and kindness, and this past summer, thanks to them, I had the chance to come full circle in my relationship with Marylou.

As it happened, I was coaching one of the girls in a string quartet that I knew from the beginning had the potential to deliver a knockout performance that would stand in each of their memories. And on the night of the concert, I found myself (by total coincidence, I swear) sitting right next to proud mother Marylou, on the fringes of the packed concert barn. We exchanged pleasantries, as we had every recent summer, and I told her what a pleasure her daughter was to work with, just as I would to nearly any parent. And then, the group walked out to play the first movement of Dvorak's American quartet.

I'd love to say that the main thing I remember about their performance is how good it was. (And it was very, very good.) But the truth is that the image seared into my memory is of Marylou's daughter, Julia. She strode to her place before picking up her violin, and made a point of finding her mother in the crowd, and smiling broadly at her. She did the same thing again as soon as the performance ended and the crowd erupted in cheers. Marylou matched her, grin for grin.

As the applause finally died down, I turned to my old teacher, and said, "You know, I don't think I've ever seen that happen. Dozens of kids walk out to play concerts in this barn every summer, and they all make a concerted effort to look anywhere but at their parents." Marylou nodded, and smiled ever so slightly, and then said, "Children do these wonderful things. And they never have any idea just how much these little things mean to us."

If you ask me, that's a pretty good summation of what great teachers do, as well.

Remembering Michael

The Minnesota Orchestra lost a great friend this weekend. But that seems entirely inadequate: the whole music world lost a great friend this weekend. Michael Steinberg may have belonged to my orchestra by way of marriage and geographic proximity, but he was a man whose quiet passion and boundless intellect touched the lives of an almost unimaginable number of people.

I was lucky enough to get to know Michael fairly well in the decade that I've lived in Minnesota, and even had the good fortune to share a concert stage with him on a few occasions. (He appeared in two of our early Inside the Classics shows as our "pop-up musicologist," expounding on Copland's evolving sound and Tchaikovsky's homosexuality from a first-tier box overlooking the stage.) There are few writers as comfortable and skilled at speaking their words as they are at writing them, but Michael's talks were true events, casually delivered but so full of detail and wit that you'd swear he must have spent weeks putting them together.

One of my fondest memories of Michael comes from my early years in the orchestra, when I was playing regularly in a pretty good string quartet with some friends. We'd decided to tackle Britten's fiendishly difficult second quartet, and while we were making good headway on the technical side of things, we began to feel that we could use some guidance from musicians who really understood the piece inside and out. Among those we called to ask for a coaching session was Jorja, who is as well known for her chamber music performances as for her solo and orchestral work.

Jorja was out of town for the month, Michael told us on the phone, and wouldn't be back until after our performance of the Britten. However, he continued, if it wasn't too presumptuous of him, he himself happened to be a big fan of Britten's 2nd, and while he couldn't offer much in the way of technical expertise on quartet playing, he would love the chance to sit and listen to us rehearse, and offer some general advice if we thought it would be helpful.

We thought it would be quite helpful, and showed up in due course at Jorja and Michael's elegant home in Edina with a fine bottle of scotch to present as payment for Michael's services. For nearly two hours, Michael listened to us hack away at the Britten, offering gentle suggestions and occasional stories of approaches he had heard other quartets take to the piece. What was striking was how easily this writer could slip between the very distinct languages of those who listen to music and those who perform it, and how effortlessly he could connect the larger ideas behind Britten's composition to, say, the specific bowstroke we might want to use to bring those ideas to life.

A few weeks later, Michael showed up to hear us perform the piece in front of a sparse crowd at a downtown Minneapolis church. The performance went better than we could have hoped, and it was, for me, one of those moments in life that musicians live for, when you don't care how many people have heard you play or how much you're getting paid to do it - you're just thrilled to be playing. Michael smiled warmly at us from the pews as we finished, but didn't come backstage after the concert.

When we arrived back to our violinists' house for a post-concert drink, however, we found a message from Michael already waiting on the answering machine. In his usual mellifluous (if maybe just ever so slightly tipsy) tones, he said, "I just wanted to thank you for that wonderful performance of one of my favorite pieces." He went on to say something about elegance mixed with youthful energy, then paused and said, "In fact, the only thing I can think of right now that could give me as much pleasure as your performance is this scotch that you were kind enough to present me with. I don't know whether you've sampled it yourselves, but the feeling of it is as if the Virgin Mary were sliding down your throat wearing velvet pantaloons. So good night, and thank you again."

We must have played that message back a dozen times. The Virgin Mary? Velvet pantaloons? Brilliant. The man even knew the perfect words for describing whiskey.

And that really is what made Michael such a powerful personality, and such a pleasure to be around in any situation. He was a quiet man, but when he spoke, or wrote, the words flowed from him in such effortless fashion that you almost didn't notice how profound they were. When Michael taught you something, it didn't feel like a lesson. It felt like an awakening of the mind, a new way of looking at the world that would never have occurred to you without his insight. As Mark Swed of the Los Angeles Times put it, "Reading Michael, your ears -- and your heart -- grow large. "

We'll miss him terribly, of course, but I'm taking comfort in the knowledge that he went out entirely on his own terms, alert and engaged with the world to the very last. It would have been impossible to imagine him any other way.

Postscript: I wanted to give Michael himself the last word, so here he is from his box seat at Orchestra Hall, talking with me about Aaron Copland during the first season of Inside the Classics...

Couldn't resist

I've been avoiding commentary on Michael Jackson's death (because, given the coverage on all the major media outlets, what could there possibly be to add??), but I had to share this with you:







(Organist Robert Ridgell plays a Jacksonian postlude last Sunday at Trinity Wall Street)


The (modal!) fugal treatment of "ABC" is particularly stunning. And make sure to watch through the collegial Book of Common Prayer-thumping at the end!

Landings, endings

Just had a great week off at home (I'm finding scheduled time off to be a real necessity these days - gotta maintain that equilibrium in life!). Thus the absence of blogging on my end last week - I've been enjoying (as I'm sure you have) Sam's great series on outgoing concertmaster Jorja Fleezanis.

I feel fortunate to have worked with Jorja over my three seasons with the Minnesota Orchestra, and luckier still to have known her not simply as a musician but as the force of nature that she is. The amount of focus and the intensity of her musical intent is always palpable, and her devotion to maintaining that very visceral connection to sound transcended her personal feeling about what she was performing (once, after a rehearsal for a tricky mid-century Soviet piece that was obviously new to the orchestra, she dryly commented, "Well, that's not without its merits.")

Those who only saw her in performance missed the most distinctive part of her wardrobe - Jorja has a great collection of quirky, colorful shoes, which I remarked on often - it's all a part of her very individual style.

But what I admire most about Jorja is her ability to parse a conflict, musical or otherwise, find a workable solution, and instate it with directness and a minimum of fuss - she saved the drama for the music itself. It's a rare clear-headedness, the hallmark of a great leader - and a great lady - along with her lively humor and generosity of spirit. She will be missed.

But Jorja is not the only departure; we are also bidding a very fond farewell to hornist David Kamminga. Rank-and-file members of orchestras tend not to get splashy spreads in the local paper when they retire, but if anyone deserved one, it's Dave, who, at 42 years or service, has one of the longest tenures with the MO (perhaps the longest? I've got to do my research...) that I know of. He's also one of the many Minnesota Orchestra couples - his wife Marcia Peck is a longtime member or our cello section (unabashedly adoring - and adorable - picture below):



Dave's musicianship, steadfast enthusiasm and gentle spirit will be missed, but one of the things we will miss most about him is known only by the lucky few who have been on a Minnesota Orchestra Tour: every time the Orchestra is on a flight together, upon landing Dave chants a fragment of the second theme of the last movement of Tchaikowsky's 4th Symphony, to which everyone responds, "Hey!". My understanding is that it's a kind of Russian prayer of gratitude for the safe landing (although it just sounds like "labidabida dostoyeva" to me...). It's a funny tradition, and one that I'm sure caused distress to the passengers around us (not to mention the flight attendants who might have thought we were about to stage a hijacking).

So, here it is, my tribute to Dave - "the chant" from 5 of the 6 flights we took as an orchestra on this spring's European Tour (the last one was on our flight from Amsterdam to the Twin Cities - someone asks "Where is it?", principal horn Mike Gast points to the back of the Airbus 330, and then you can hear it, faintly, above the din):





Dave has passed the torch to violinist Michael Sutton - Mike, you've got some very big shoes to fill...