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...

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...

Jorja & Margaret

To put a bow on this week of blog tributes to our soon-to-depart concertmaster, I wanted to post an essay I originally wrote for Showcase, our in-house program book. For one reason or another, I never submitted the piece for publication (the focus of the issue I was writing for changed, as I recall, and I wrote something else instead,) but since it directly concerns a side of Jorja that our audiences never get to see, I didn't want to let it go unread forever. Here it is...

My grandmother, Margaret Terry Trowbridge, was 82 when I moved to Minneapolis in February 2000. A native Minnesotan and lifelong fan of the Minnesota Orchestra, she could not have been more proud for one of her grandchildren to be joining the ranks at Orchestra Hall.

But in one of those cruel twists that life throws at us when we least expect it, she never got the chance to watch me play as a member of the ensemble she had loved for so many years. In the same week that I had been auditioning for my position in the orchestra in November 1999, my mother and her siblings had confirmed what they had suspected for some time: my grandmother was entering the middle stages of Alzheimer’s, a baffling, infuriating disease that would eventually rob her of her ability to communicate, to identify her surroundings, and even to recognize the people she loved most.

With our family scattered across the country, the decision was quickly made to move her to a care facility out East, where my mother would be nearby to visit regularly and attend to her increasing needs. It was a painful transition for my grandmother. Even before the disease tightened its grip, she had a hard time remembering where she was, and more than once in those first months she spent in southeastern Pennsylvania, she angrily confronted my mother for not having yet taken her to hear me play with the Minnesota Orchestra, unaware that we were now more than 1200 miles apart.

And yet, music continued to be her sustenance, even as her own mind betrayed her. My mother brought her a steady supply of the music she loved best, and listened as she reminisced about the many concerts she’d heard. But these stories weren’t about trips to Orchestra Hall. They were about the smiling, gracious violinist who had dropped in regularly to play for the residents of her retirement community in Minnesota and talk to them about music and life and whatever else they wanted. These were stories about Jorja Fleezanis.

I honestly don’t know how often our concertmaster made the trek to that retirement community in Eden Prairie in those years before I joined the orchestra. But I know how much those visits from Jorja meant to a woman who, while never a musician herself, had made certain that I hauled out my pint-sized violin at every family gathering I attended as a child. I know that, even as her condition worsened and she became less sure of the world around her, my grandmother remembered Jorja’s visits with vivid clarity. (She even began to embellish them: a couple of years after the move, my mother overheard her proudly telling another resident of her Pennsylvania home that she had just recently been a violin student of the great Jorja Fleezanis, and what do you think about that? Being a Pennsylvanian, the other resident had no idea who my grandmother was talking about, but that didn't diminish her pride and enthusiasm in the slightest.)

We all know the effect that music can have on us as people, but we rarely consider the profound impact that a single musician can make. Jorja is just one among many musicians to make a point of reaching out to the wider community, but her generosity of spirit, her willingness not only to perform but to listen, to connect herself to the people around her, will always stay with me.

My grandmother passed away quietly on March 16, 2006. I don’t know how many members of our family she could have recognized in those final hours. But I know for a fact that she would never have forgotten the gift of music given to her by the woman who has stood at the front of our stage for the last 20 years.

Exit Interview, Part 4

In the final part of my talk with Jorja, we spend some time discussing the serious matter of one of the most frequently gossiped-about aspects of our concertmaster's public persona. Also, we find out what musician in the Minnesota Orchestra most influenced her over the years, what piece she's looking forward to never having to play again, and what conductor she desperately wishes she could have had the chance to work with.



If you'd prefer to download our conversation and listen to it on your iPod, just right-click (CTRL-click on a Mac) here and save the file to your computer...

One slight correction to the audio in this part: a few days after we spoke, Jorja came to me backstage and asked whether one of my questions had been what orchestral piece she would most miss playing. That was one of my questions, to which she had, to my surprise, answered with two choral works. As it turns out, she thought I had asked exclusively about choral works. Taking into account the entire orchestral repertoire, she now says that her answer would be Debussy's Iberia...

Tomorrow, we'll wrap up Jorja Week here on the blog with a personal reflection from my family's past, and we'll be back to our usual snarky tones and wide-ranging topics next week. Hope you enjoyed the interview, and if you want to lift any of the audio for use on your own site, please do. We'd appreciate a link back to the ItC site, but there are no other restrictions, so distribute as you wish...

Exit Interview, Part 3

Our audiences have known for years not to expect the expected from our concertmaster, and as my conversation with Jorja continues, I ask her when and how she decided to focus her solo and chamber music opportunities on repertoire that most people have never heard before. Jorja also talks about her love of long-forgotten early-20th-century music, and makes a plea for musicians and orchestras to stop limiting ourselves in the pursuit of great music.



If you'd prefer to download our conversation and listen to it on your iPod, just right-click (CTRL-click on a Mac) here and save the file to your computer...

Exit Interview, Part 2

As my conversation with Jorja Fleezanis continues, we get into the issue of how an orchestra's sound and personality change over time. Jorja also talks about how unhappy she was in her first orchestral job (in a very prominent American orchestra,) and how that dissatisfaction led her away from the orchestral world, and then back in, with a determination to pursue a leadership role in other orchestras.



If you'd prefer to download our conversation and listen to it on your iPod, just right-click (CTRL-click on a Mac) here and save the file to your computer...

Exit Interview: Jorja Fleezanis (Part 1 of 4)

It seems like a long time since our esteemed concertmaster announced, back in September, that she'd be leaving us at the end of this season after twenty years in the first chair. Jorja and her husband, musicologist and author Michael Steinberg (who appeared in a couple of our early Inside the Classics shows,) are headed to Indiana University, where Jorja will take up a new position teaching orchestral violin to the next generation of great young musicians.

Meanwhile, we've already held auditions for a new concertmaster, and whittled our options down to two deeply impressive finalists who our audiences will get to see in action for several weeks each next season before the final decision is made. But Jorja won't be easily forgotten by those of us in the orchestra, and the connection she's made over the years with the wider Twin Cities community has been a deep and powerful one. She's a unique figure, musically and personally, and she's always reminded me of that one really special, out-there teacher we all had in high school, the one who you wind up telling people about for the rest of your life.

As soon as Jorja made her big announcement, I knew that I wanted to sit down with her and spend some time talking about her life in music, and the legacy she'll leave behind here in Minneapolis. Last week, she invited me up to her riverfront condo and agreed to answer anything I asked of her. We talked for nearly an hour, and I'll be posting our conversation in four parts between now and Thursday. To start things off, I asked whether she'd had time to consider the gravity of this being her very last week as the leader of the Minnesota Orchestra...



If you'd prefer to download our conversation and listen to it on your iPod, just right-click (CTRL-click on a Mac) here and save the file to your computer...

Postscript: For those who can't get enough Jorja, she'll be Kerri Miller's guest on MPR's Midmorning program on Tuesday. You can listen live on your local MPR News station Tuesday at 10am, or through the MPR live stream... After the program airs, MPR will post the archived audio on this page.

Ask A Concertmaster

Our concerts this week are being billed as "A Fleezanis Farewell," not because our esteemed concertmaster is leaving us just yet, but because this will be the last week that she solos with us before her move to Indiana this summer. (Of course, she could well return as a guest soloist in the future, but you know what I mean.) I've been looking forward to this week, not only because our audiences are always big and enthusiastic when Jorja solos, but because conductor Gilbert Varga is one of my all-time favorite batons to work under.

I'm assuming Jorja will be hugely busy this week, but it seemed an opportune time for me to begin thinking about sitting down with her for the exit interview I promised way back when she announced her retirement. My hope is to talk with her sometime in the next week or two, after which I'll have audio as well as written excerpts up on the blog as soon as I can. And I already know a lot of what I want to ask her, but I'm interested to hear what you all want to know about our remarkable leader for the last 20 years. So if you would, please post any questions you'd like me to ask Jorja in the comments, and I'll try to work as many as I can into the conversation...

Going Out On Top

As many readers of the ItC blog have no doubt heard by now, the Minnesota Orchestra's concertmaster of 20 years, Jorja Fleezanis, announced at this morning's rehearsal that she will be leaving the orchestra next June, and devoting the remainder of her professional life to teaching at Indiana University's prestigious school of music.

As the saying goes, her announcement was a shock, but not a total surprise. While I hadn't heard so much as a rumor that she might be thinking about leaving us, I know that she's always been passionate about teaching, and I've heard her say in the past that at some point before she retired, she hoped to be able to devote herself to it full time. That she chooses this moment to bow out of her orchestral career on her own terms seems wholly in keeping with the individual she has always been.

Jorja is a legendary figure, both in Minnesota and the wider music world, one of the rare musicians who is as effortlessly eloquent with her words as she is with her instrument. And while she can sometimes look stern and icy from the audience, with her shock of white hair (with occasional black or even purple streaked through it) and her fierce concentration during performance, those of us lucky enough to know her always think first of her easy smile, her genuine warmth and generosity with every one of her colleagues, and her boundless enthusiasm for the job.

We've got nearly a whole year to say goodbye to her, and I'm sure the ovation she'll receive when she walks out to begin this week's season opening concerts will be topped only by the one she'll receive at the other end next June. And of course, I'll be sure to make some time to sit down with her for an exit interview to be posted here on the ItC site at some point during the year. But for now, feel free to use the comments section below to say anything you'd like about Jorja's remarkable 20-year tenure in Minnesota. I'll be sure to pass your thoughts and memories along...