This is a picture of my life-long friend Daniel Morganstern with June DeForest, his wife and chamber music partner. June, who spent her last years dealing with the effects of Parkinson's Disease, died this past October. She was a remarkable person, and I thought I would share Danny's beautiful tribute to her and their life together here. I also put a few links in, because I can.
A Late Bloomer
During her twenties, my wife June always claimed that success would come to her later because she was a late bloomer. She also explained that, before any great event happens, there are always harbingers (leaves and twigs that float up), and this is the way it happened.
In 1974, right after the end of the Lyric opera season, June decided to go back to the Manhattan School of Music and finish up her master’s degree, which she had abandoned in 1963 when she wisely decided to go on tour with the American Ballet Theater. Among other things, she included the Ives Second Violin Sonata on her program, along with the Kodaly Duo. Also included were Tartini’s Variations on a Theme by Corelli and the Brahms D Minor Sonata. I thought she played beautifully, and so did my entire family, but most of all, her teacher, Raphael Bronstein (who had been an assistant to Leopold Auer) who said, “At last, I have a master’s students who really is a master.”
Was it prescience, or just a lucky break, that right after that 1974 master’s recital, we gave a series of three concerts at the Cultural Center in New York? The first two were comprised of Brahms Trios, two Bach Unaccompanied Cello Suites, and the Kodaly Duo. At the third concert, we did an all Ives concert consisting of his Piano Trio, Second Violin Sonata, and a few solo piano pieces.
We were rewarded with an invitation from the National Gallery of Art to participate in the hundredth anniversary series of Ives’ birth, for which June was rewarded with a review in the Washington Post, which said her performances were first-rate. This one performance put us on the map as a legitimately important ensemble. At that time, there were only a small number of managers for chamber ensembles like what was to become the American Chamber Trio. June pointed out, after many attempts and rejections to get concerts, that while there were many artists, there were only a few managers. As we found out, every presenter had a better artist or a cheaper artist, and there was no way of convincing them otherwise.
June took a novel attitude towards the whole situation, saying, “Why shouldn’t WE be a manager and deal with presenters on an equal basis?” And so, with the help of the Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts, the American Chamber Concerts was incorporated. Then, in the persona of Helen Winter, June managed to convince all kinds of people to take us seriously when we played in New York and engage us for concerts all over the country. In the second of our series at Carnegie Recital Hall, June got a wonderful review in The New York Times for the Kodaly Duo: it was acclaimed as, "distinguished by technical polish and keen musical understanding" in The New York Times.
One day, June decided that to be a real violinist, she needed to get a real violin. Maybe not a Stradivarius or a del Gesu, but something of exceptional quality with a pedigree and papers to prove it. The first thing she did was to get the most expensive Jaegar violin case, covered in leather and cushioned in velvet for whatever was the top price at that time. Within three months, on a tour to San Francisco, either June found her violin or her violin found her at the shop of Frank Passa. It was love at first sight, and she played that violin for her entire career.
Another example of June’s prescience was when she decided that she wanted to be a teacher. Before any sign of her getting a job appeared, she took off both the Lyric Opera season and the American Ballet Theater season and started looking in The College Music Society for openings, and she started preparing for auditions. I kept bothering her, “WHY do you want a $15,000 a year job in the middle of Iowa, or worse, Kansas, when you can make so much more money playing at the opera or at the Met with the ballet?” She actually did go down to Florida and auditioned for one of those $15,000 a year jobs, which she didn’t get, but she was prepared. In her fingers, she had the Mendelssohn concerto, the Bach E Major Partita, and the big violin solo from Strauss’ Ein Heldenleben. She also prepared a tape of performances we gave on WFMT of the Tchaikovsky trio and the Kodaly Duo. At the last minute, an important job opened up at the College of Wooster in Ohio for a distinguished visiting professor of music. Needless to say, she got it by acclamation, and this became the foundation for a long and successful teaching career.
June’s engaging personality made her many friends. The conductor for all our initial Wagner operas was Ferdinand Leitner, a very famous and well-established authority on the music of Wagner and Strauss. One Christmas, June bought him a beautiful necktie with an inscription on the tie saying that read, “This tie was especially made for Ferdinand Leitner.” Then, she asked him whether he would be willing to her listen to the solo from Ein Heldenleben since he was a friend of Strauss and could give her the word of God. Well, she listened, and she learned, and in doing so elevated the level of her violin playing of that solo considerably.
A similar story was how she went up to David Nadien, legendary concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic, after a performance of the Chausson Poeme at ABT where he was the soloist and said, “I really need to improve my playing. Would you teach me?” He said, “Sure, as long as you’re willing to pay the rate I get per hour in the studios.” June always said that Nadien taught her how to think on the violin, and he did it by giving her one concerto after the other with his fingerings. The repertoire he assigned her were always real violin pieces, starting with the Vitali Chaconne and La Folia, and going onto the violin concertos of Viotti, Spohr, and onto the biggies: Mendelssohn, Wieniawski, etc., all the way through to the Barber concerto. June made many friends supplying other violinists with his fingerings and bowings for these major concertos.
June could walk into a room of strangers and walk out in ten minutes with five friends, while I would be hiding in a corner someplace so I didn’t need to deal with anybody I didn’t know. At the 50th reunion of my high school class, June came out with a man named Mark Starr who had been studying conducting with somebody famous in Italy. I went to school with Mark Starr for at least three years and never met him or had any indication that he had any relation to serious music-making. In ten minutes, June had brought him over to me, where he told me he was related to both John Corigliano, concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic at the time we were in high school, and to John Corgliano Jr., famous composer of the Ghosts of Versailles and other light classics of the 20th century.
It occurred to me in three years I had no idea that Mark Starr existed, and in ten minutes June brought him over to make serious conversation about conducting, composing, and creating a career.
When Bill Ryden, Editorial Director of International Music, came to Chicago for the Midwest Band Convention, we took him out to lunch at the Russian Teatime. Then, June asked very casually (knowing he was a composer) whether he wrote any piano trios. Three days later, three trios arrived, and we began a long and fruitful relationship that encompassed sixteen of his rags that we recorded, six that we played in Carnegie Hall in New York, three that were published by Ludwig Music, and which we played to great enthusiasm all over the country for the next many years.
John Lane was the Director of Entertainment on the Epirotiki cruise line, and June convinced him to hire us for what ended up being five cruises. Our obligation to Epirotiki was one 45-minute concert per week, and with Epirotiki, we cruised the Mediterranean and Black Seas, from Venice to Odessa and back through the Greek Islands, from Buenos Aries to Rio de Janeiro, from Los Angeles to Vancouver, and various others up to Alaska.
Both Bill Ryden and John Lane came to all our New York concerts, bringing many friends with them. Two incidents that stand out in my mind that characterize June as a friend have to do with her friendship with Julia Markham.
At one point, Julia was beside herself with an apartment cluttered beyond belief, and it was driving her insane. June picked up the phone, called United Airlines and made a reservation, and was with Julia the very next day. She stayed a week to help Julia get everything in order. When Julia died of cancer, June was there to be with her in her last moments. If June was your friend, you had a friend.
One day, at the Metropolitan Opera House, violinist Joe Shorr, former concertmaster of the New York City Opera and the Denver Symphony, knocked the corner off his Guarnerius off. He looked and looked but couldn’t find the corner. June stayed for an hour after the rehearsal and looked for it until she found it and it returned it to Joe.
The biggest commitment June made was to her mother who, at 85, could no longer take care of herself. June moved us from New York to Chicago, against my vehement objections, so that we could have a place big enough for each of our needs. Isobel stayed with us for ten years and took great pride in June’s being a professor at a university.
One of the things that June took the most seriously was teaching the violin. She had no ambitions to go into competition with Almita Vamos or Dorothy DeLay, so her ambitions were not about the aggrandizement of her reputation, but entirely for the students. It didn’t matter to June whether her various students had talent or brains, but she was willing to go the extra mile to get a very sub-standard talent good enough to pass her exam to get her degree. On the other hand, if she did have somebody with talent and could bring them up to a respectable level, she would enter them into the Music Teachers National Association Competition, pay the entrance fee, drive them to the competition, and pay for the pianist.
Five of them represented the state of Indiana, which definitely upgraded their resumes, either going to college or to graduate school. She went out of her way to make friends with important violin teachers in big universities so she could place her students, and they were happy to have her sending students to them who were well-trained and knew what was required. Since June felt that David Nadien had taught her how to think on the violin, she oriented all her teaching to a think-on-the-violin model. Early on, she noticed that the students that came to her were stuck in first position, so she put them into third position, uncomfortable as it must have been, right away. She always had two stands in her studio so that she could see what her students were playing and how and demonstrate how to make it better.
The next item on her agenda had to do with phrasing. She had her special red pencil with which she would insert commas so that phrases did not become run on sentences. June insisted that her students play her pieces in context with the piano or a slowed down tape or CD where she insisted they be able to go from one end to the other without stopping and work towards that end endlessly. She had studied all the pieces that she taught, and was in a position to demonstrate how various passages could be executed. In her book Practice for Performance, published by Mel Bay, most of these insights are elaborated upon, and is available.
In spite of the fact that June was a very good teacher, she found out that there was a terrific Russian teacher who specialized in the education of middle school aged children who taught at the Meadowmount School of Music. I vehemently objected, saying, “Itzhak Perlman and Pinchas Zukerman go to Meadowmount, definitely not June’s students.” Fortunately for June, the director of the Meadowmount School of Music was Eric Larsen, our very long-term friend and colleague, who said, very simply, “Why not your little kid rather than someone else’s little kid?”
The Russian teacher's name was Tatiana Vorobieva, and she came to Meadowmount every summer to be with her son, Dmitri Vorobiev. June’s students came back with beautiful bow arms and wonderful, balanced left hands. AND, every summer, the DeForest Morganstern Trust Fund sent a check to Meadowmount so that all June’s students got scholarships. Over time, it definitely paid off for the students.
Another aspect of June’s endless generosity was her connection with the violin shop A 440. Very often, A 440 would get violins made in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. They were very good and relatively cheap. June was always on the lookout for these Hungarian Strads and either sold them or gave them to her students. It was just one other way that she made life better for anybody who came in contact with her.
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