I grew up hearing my father practice the solo viola part of the Mozart Sinfonia Concertante. Back in the days when he was the principal violist of the Boston Symphony, the programming of viola concertos was extremely rare. Actually concerto performances by any of the principal players besides the concertmaster were few and far between. My father never performed the Bartok, the Walton, or the Hindemith with the Boston Symphony, but he did, as I recall, play the Bartok with a regional orchestra, and he performed the Hindemith at Tanglewood with the Berkshire Music Center orchestra. He also played concertos from time to time with the Boston Pops, and played a couple of concertos using the viola d'amore.
But he did perform the Mozart with the Boston Symphony.
I remember the circumstances of the performance he talks about in this interview, and I remember him talking about the scordatura solo viola part, which involves tuning the instrument up half a step and playing the piece as if it were written in D major. But I believe he was interested in learning it using scordatura around that time, but opted to go with what he had spent decades practicing because of the short notice.
You can hear him play a (very) short bit from the second movement here.
Our local university orchestra is having a performance of the piece in March. The violin professor, who comes from Korea, will be performing it with a violist friend from Korea. The viola part in the orchestra is divided into two parts, and I have been coming to rehearsals to play the (vital and very interesting) second viola part.
The first rehearsal I went to was difficult for me. There were too many (sad and beautiful) memories of my father involved, particularly because of the absence of the solo viola. I thought I could "take it," but I was wrong. The piece haunts my dreams. Literally.
So, to steel myself I have decided to learn the solo viola part. And I have been learning it in what I consider the original (the way I remember him practicing it), not in the scordatura.
Practicing it has been interesting and wonderful. The fingerings seem, somehow, to suggest themselves. And I love the second position options and the way half-step shifts add to the expressive gestures in the music.
I have told the violin professor that if he ever wants to read through the two solo parts together, I would be game. I think it might help "innoculate" me against at least a few bouts of tears. We will see. The important thing is connecting with the music itself, and doing so using the instrument and the bow that my father used when he first learned the piece.
Showing posts with label Burton Fine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Burton Fine. Show all posts
Thursday, February 13, 2025
Thursday, November 21, 2024
The Unknown Burton
I remember reading The Unknown Brahms by Robert Haven Schauffler shortly before Thanksgiving in 1979. It was in the Juilliard library, and I read it in one sitting. I remember the date and place because it was a very eventful couple of weeks (known to people who knew me then and there, but which I will not talk about here).
I realize that there are things that I would like to make known about my father, Burton Fine, that would otherwise never be known.
I'll begin with his musical adventures while in Chicago studying chemistry at IIT. As an avid chamber music player, he was well known in the Chicago musical community. At some point before 1952 he met Dieter Kober, who wanted to start a chamber orchestra. Dieter asked my father to be concertmaster, and my father agreed to play on the condition that Dieter study conducting. Some time later (maybe it was months, maybe it was years), Dieter gave my father a call to tell him that he had gone to Europe to study conducting. My father kept his part of the bargain and was the founding concertmaster of the Chicago Chamber Orchestra.
My mother, who Dieter knew from Chicago Musical College, played flute in the orchestra. Dieter thought that they would make a nice couple (they had met at Tanglewood in 1950), so he insisted on picking up each of them and driving them to rehearsals. According to my mother's sister Jeanne, they spent a lot of time in the back seat.
It was a surprise to me to learn that my father had a reading knowledge of Russian. German was the language that chemists around the world needed to understand before the beginning of the space race with the Soviet Union. Then it was Russian that chemists needed to be able to understand. I found out, during a conversation I had with my father about learning Russian in order to read writings by Catherine the Great, that one of the things my father did in the (pre)NASA lab in Cleveland was translate from Russian.
My father played a lot of chamber music when he was in Cleveland (my mother too). It was the Unitarian Church, which performed Bach Cantatas where he got his first real professional break. The story goes that Jerome Rosen, a violinist who later became a colleague in the Boston Symphony, had trouble getting up on Sunday mornings, so my father was called to take his place. The conductor was Robert Shaw. I believe that the first piece he played with Shaw was Bach Cantata 78, which happens to be the first Bach Cantata I learned (because the flute and tenor aria was the first one in the book I had of Bach Cantata arias). It is still my favorite.
I will probably add to this post in the future. Memory is like a funnel. There is only so much that can make it through the aperture at a given time.
But for why not link to the Internet Archive entry for one of his papers? Here's "Stability limits and burning velocities for some laminar and turbulent propane and hydrogen flames at reduced pressure". There's no way I can even wrap my head around the abstract:
I realize that there are things that I would like to make known about my father, Burton Fine, that would otherwise never be known.
I'll begin with his musical adventures while in Chicago studying chemistry at IIT. As an avid chamber music player, he was well known in the Chicago musical community. At some point before 1952 he met Dieter Kober, who wanted to start a chamber orchestra. Dieter asked my father to be concertmaster, and my father agreed to play on the condition that Dieter study conducting. Some time later (maybe it was months, maybe it was years), Dieter gave my father a call to tell him that he had gone to Europe to study conducting. My father kept his part of the bargain and was the founding concertmaster of the Chicago Chamber Orchestra.
My mother, who Dieter knew from Chicago Musical College, played flute in the orchestra. Dieter thought that they would make a nice couple (they had met at Tanglewood in 1950), so he insisted on picking up each of them and driving them to rehearsals. According to my mother's sister Jeanne, they spent a lot of time in the back seat.
It was a surprise to me to learn that my father had a reading knowledge of Russian. German was the language that chemists around the world needed to understand before the beginning of the space race with the Soviet Union. Then it was Russian that chemists needed to be able to understand. I found out, during a conversation I had with my father about learning Russian in order to read writings by Catherine the Great, that one of the things my father did in the (pre)NASA lab in Cleveland was translate from Russian.
My father played a lot of chamber music when he was in Cleveland (my mother too). It was the Unitarian Church, which performed Bach Cantatas where he got his first real professional break. The story goes that Jerome Rosen, a violinist who later became a colleague in the Boston Symphony, had trouble getting up on Sunday mornings, so my father was called to take his place. The conductor was Robert Shaw. I believe that the first piece he played with Shaw was Bach Cantata 78, which happens to be the first Bach Cantata I learned (because the flute and tenor aria was the first one in the book I had of Bach Cantata arias). It is still my favorite.
I will probably add to this post in the future. Memory is like a funnel. There is only so much that can make it through the aperture at a given time.
But for why not link to the Internet Archive entry for one of his papers? Here's "Stability limits and burning velocities for some laminar and turbulent propane and hydrogen flames at reduced pressure". There's no way I can even wrap my head around the abstract:
The effect of reduced pressure on blowoff, flashback, and burning velocities of propane-oxygen-nitrogen burner flames was studied (oxygen fraction of oxidant, 0.5). The pressure exponent of burning velocity, 0.22, was nearly the same as for hydrogen-air flames; stability loops showed the same blowoff and flashback characteristics as were previously observed for hydrogen-air flames. In particular, for both systems, quenching distances determined as a function of pressure from the points of intersection of flashback and blowoff portions of stability loops were considerably higher than those obtained previously by a stopped-flow method.
Sunday, November 17, 2024
Bruch Four Pieces, Opus 84
Here is a recording from a concert broadcast on the radio my father played with clarinetist Harold Wright and pianist Gil Kalish in 1974. It sensational chamber music playing.
You can listen here.
You can listen here.
Saturday, November 16, 2024
My Father
I would say that the Burton Fine (August 7, 1930 - November 15, 2024) I grew up knowing was a person of tremendous intelligence and tremendous integrity who expressed himself musically in the most elegant ways. He also had beautiful handwriting. It was fluid, unique, and elegant--unlike any handwriting I had or have ever seen.
My father was a puzzle to me when I was a child. He wasn’t at all like other fathers. I don’t remember him ever hugging me or ever telling me that he loved me. I do remember him singing “I want to hold your hand” when we would cross the street. He sang snippets of pieces of music occasionally, and made parody patter songs, which he sometimes sang for us at dinner, but otherwise I don’t remember him singing. But I do remember him practicing.
The greatest memories of my childhood were hearing him practice in the basement. What I remember most are solo Bach (Cello Suites and Sonatas and Partitas), Reger, Brahms (G major Violin Sonata on Viola), Franck (Violin Sonata), and Paganini Caprices. When he practiced he expressed love very freely. Love for the musical line (in any piece of music) is as real as any love from (or to) a human being to me. My mother, who met my father in 1950, married him in the early 1950s, and divorced him in the 1970s, expressed her love through her painting. She always did art, but became serious about it when she could no longer play the flute. My father didn’t think much of her artwork.
I know very little about either of my parents. Both were puzzles. Their first child, my brother Marshall, was not neurotypical. He, like my father, had a tremendous intellect, but neither of our parents, like most new parents in the 1950s, understood much about parenting. They did bring Marshall to Dr. Spock in Cleveland (my father’s first job was at the Cleveland-based government agency that was to become NASA), but anything regarding the autism spectrum, where Marshall self-identified as an adult, was unknown in the 1950s.
I came out neurotypical in 1959, and my younger brother Richard, born in 1961, came out really gifted in math and things related to the world of computers, where he has been working since he graduated from college. Marshall and I were compelled as teenagers and as adults to express ourselves musically by playing and writing music. Richard is happy as a choral singer and as an avid listener. Joshua, my half brother, who grew up in the 1980s is, like Marshall, not neurotypical, and he benefited (eventually) from an environment of understanding about the autism spectrum that has allowed him to thrive as a choral singer and as a responsibly employed person.
When Marshall, Richard, and I were children, our father did all the driving in the family. He did all the shopping and all the outings. Perhaps it was to take us off our mother’s hands for a while. I remember being almost five and going in a rowboat on Jamaica Pond in West Roxbury. It was shortly after my father joined the Boston Symphony as a violinist. The story goes that he saw an ad in International Musician one day, took the next day off to practice, flew to Boston, and won the audition. My mother didn’t think he would get the job, but she reluctantly left Cleveland when he did.
I didn’t know until much later that my father didn’t know how to swim when he took us boating. I do remember wearing (and enjoying wearing) life jackets, though. He also took us to the Boston Children’s Museum when it was in its infancy, and took us ice skating at Cleveland Circle. He immediately broke his ankle and had to drive to the hospital in incredible pain. (If I used the word "incredible" when describing something, he would snap at me. "It's very credible," he would say).
We used to go bowling too. And there was a time when we would try to play tennis.
My father taught Marshall to play the violin, and I remember that going bowling was used as a reward for his paying attention. Marshall did not like lessons with my father, who might not have liked to teach him either. But he learned from his father, Nathan Fine, who was, according to my father, as good as anyone in the Philadelphia Orchestra. Like proper Bostonians, we only played candlepins. Our mother never came to the bowling alley.
At seven I was big enough to play the half-size violin that we had. My father gave me an “A Tune A Day” book, and let me teach myself. Perhaps he didn’t want to mess things up for me like he had for Marshall. Richard had no interest in the violin, but he got to have piano lessons, and he became a really good pianist. I became an autodidact.
Our father used to bring me and my brothers to the Tanglewood grounds during open rehearsals on Saturdays in the summers, and eventually we used to go to the concerts on Sundays. Through exposure to the Boston Symphony throughout my childhood I got to hear a lot of really great music. And as a teenager I was pretty much on my own, and I would go to Tanglewood to hear student concerts. Never having the opportunity to be anything other than independent, I enjoyed a great deal of freedom as a young person. If (when) I got in trouble I never told my parents about it. And they never asked.
The Burton I grew up with had a very difficult time telling anything but the truth, or what he felt to be the truth. I imagine it might have gotten him in trouble if he shared his feelings with his colleagues in the Boston Symphony, so he kept pretty much to himself. He read a lot, and knew a great deal about history.
I remember going to a party with him after a concert that was hosted by some very rich people who acted like they were superior to everyone else. I mentioned that I didn’t feel comfortable around those people, and he said that they were people who supported the orchestra, and that we needed to be nice to them. His eventually married someone from a “donor” class family, and grew to be comfortable with it. I prefer to remember my father as a member of the intellectual working class.
When I returned to string playing in my early thirties and I had an instrument in hand, I was able to communicate with my father in his language, and I finally was able to recognize that were cut from the same cloth. When I had the opportunity to play chamber music with him (he came to Illinois to play concerts three or four times), it was always a wonderful experience. He was a truly great musician.
I sometimes hear shadows of the familiar sounds I heard in childhood when I practice. And when I see my hands and arms behaving the way I observed my father’s hands and arms behaving, I feel like he is a part of me, and that best part of him is with me to carry on in music making.
I used to write CD reviews for the American Record Guide, and my father read all my reviews. He would call to talk about the recordings. I loved those phone calls. He would also give me solutions to problems I had with difficult passages in the viola parts I played in orchestra, which I would share with my section-mates. And he would listen to recordings I made of the recitals I played. Some of them must have been painful for him to hear because my development as a violinist and as a violist in adulthood was slow.
A note from Marshall, an excerpt from his memoir.
My father was a puzzle to me when I was a child. He wasn’t at all like other fathers. I don’t remember him ever hugging me or ever telling me that he loved me. I do remember him singing “I want to hold your hand” when we would cross the street. He sang snippets of pieces of music occasionally, and made parody patter songs, which he sometimes sang for us at dinner, but otherwise I don’t remember him singing. But I do remember him practicing.
The greatest memories of my childhood were hearing him practice in the basement. What I remember most are solo Bach (Cello Suites and Sonatas and Partitas), Reger, Brahms (G major Violin Sonata on Viola), Franck (Violin Sonata), and Paganini Caprices. When he practiced he expressed love very freely. Love for the musical line (in any piece of music) is as real as any love from (or to) a human being to me. My mother, who met my father in 1950, married him in the early 1950s, and divorced him in the 1970s, expressed her love through her painting. She always did art, but became serious about it when she could no longer play the flute. My father didn’t think much of her artwork.
I know very little about either of my parents. Both were puzzles. Their first child, my brother Marshall, was not neurotypical. He, like my father, had a tremendous intellect, but neither of our parents, like most new parents in the 1950s, understood much about parenting. They did bring Marshall to Dr. Spock in Cleveland (my father’s first job was at the Cleveland-based government agency that was to become NASA), but anything regarding the autism spectrum, where Marshall self-identified as an adult, was unknown in the 1950s.
I came out neurotypical in 1959, and my younger brother Richard, born in 1961, came out really gifted in math and things related to the world of computers, where he has been working since he graduated from college. Marshall and I were compelled as teenagers and as adults to express ourselves musically by playing and writing music. Richard is happy as a choral singer and as an avid listener. Joshua, my half brother, who grew up in the 1980s is, like Marshall, not neurotypical, and he benefited (eventually) from an environment of understanding about the autism spectrum that has allowed him to thrive as a choral singer and as a responsibly employed person.
When Marshall, Richard, and I were children, our father did all the driving in the family. He did all the shopping and all the outings. Perhaps it was to take us off our mother’s hands for a while. I remember being almost five and going in a rowboat on Jamaica Pond in West Roxbury. It was shortly after my father joined the Boston Symphony as a violinist. The story goes that he saw an ad in International Musician one day, took the next day off to practice, flew to Boston, and won the audition. My mother didn’t think he would get the job, but she reluctantly left Cleveland when he did.
I didn’t know until much later that my father didn’t know how to swim when he took us boating. I do remember wearing (and enjoying wearing) life jackets, though. He also took us to the Boston Children’s Museum when it was in its infancy, and took us ice skating at Cleveland Circle. He immediately broke his ankle and had to drive to the hospital in incredible pain. (If I used the word "incredible" when describing something, he would snap at me. "It's very credible," he would say).
We used to go bowling too. And there was a time when we would try to play tennis.
My father taught Marshall to play the violin, and I remember that going bowling was used as a reward for his paying attention. Marshall did not like lessons with my father, who might not have liked to teach him either. But he learned from his father, Nathan Fine, who was, according to my father, as good as anyone in the Philadelphia Orchestra. Like proper Bostonians, we only played candlepins. Our mother never came to the bowling alley.
At seven I was big enough to play the half-size violin that we had. My father gave me an “A Tune A Day” book, and let me teach myself. Perhaps he didn’t want to mess things up for me like he had for Marshall. Richard had no interest in the violin, but he got to have piano lessons, and he became a really good pianist. I became an autodidact.
Our father used to bring me and my brothers to the Tanglewood grounds during open rehearsals on Saturdays in the summers, and eventually we used to go to the concerts on Sundays. Through exposure to the Boston Symphony throughout my childhood I got to hear a lot of really great music. And as a teenager I was pretty much on my own, and I would go to Tanglewood to hear student concerts. Never having the opportunity to be anything other than independent, I enjoyed a great deal of freedom as a young person. If (when) I got in trouble I never told my parents about it. And they never asked.
The Burton I grew up with had a very difficult time telling anything but the truth, or what he felt to be the truth. I imagine it might have gotten him in trouble if he shared his feelings with his colleagues in the Boston Symphony, so he kept pretty much to himself. He read a lot, and knew a great deal about history.
I remember going to a party with him after a concert that was hosted by some very rich people who acted like they were superior to everyone else. I mentioned that I didn’t feel comfortable around those people, and he said that they were people who supported the orchestra, and that we needed to be nice to them. His eventually married someone from a “donor” class family, and grew to be comfortable with it. I prefer to remember my father as a member of the intellectual working class.
When I returned to string playing in my early thirties and I had an instrument in hand, I was able to communicate with my father in his language, and I finally was able to recognize that were cut from the same cloth. When I had the opportunity to play chamber music with him (he came to Illinois to play concerts three or four times), it was always a wonderful experience. He was a truly great musician.
I sometimes hear shadows of the familiar sounds I heard in childhood when I practice. And when I see my hands and arms behaving the way I observed my father’s hands and arms behaving, I feel like he is a part of me, and that best part of him is with me to carry on in music making.
I used to write CD reviews for the American Record Guide, and my father read all my reviews. He would call to talk about the recordings. I loved those phone calls. He would also give me solutions to problems I had with difficult passages in the viola parts I played in orchestra, which I would share with my section-mates. And he would listen to recordings I made of the recitals I played. Some of them must have been painful for him to hear because my development as a violinist and as a violist in adulthood was slow.
A note from Marshall, an excerpt from his memoir.
. . . This was before my father, Burton Fine, was a research chemist with NASA, having gotten his Ph.D. in chemistry from IIT. After leaving Cleveland, he would serve as principal violist of the BSO for 29 years before being demoted in 1993; and he retired on New Year’s Eve 2004.My father, Burton Fine, died last night at his home in Newton, Massachusetts. He was 94.
I know a fair bit about what he did as a chemist. Many years ago I read his dissertation, The Solubility of Iodine in Benzene/Carbon Tetrachloride Solutions. It does not sound to me like the work of a rocket scientist; but at the time I read it I could neither know, nor care about, nor even comprehend its practical aspects. I have not seen it since; it must be misplaced in his own house, or hidden. As a rocket scientist, he might have been involved with the Gemini Project. I believe it was classified and remains so, which means I will never know. He wrote 18 papers, mostly for a journal called Combustion and Flame, which I located at the chemistry library at Yale at the time I unsuccessfully auditioned for their music school in 1977. Strangely, the shortest of these--a critical letter to the editor in 1961--became the most widely quoted. Almost every subsequent article would refer to it, freely.
Musically, though, he is a mystery. What I know of his early years is awfully sketchy. He won a composition prize at age nine in his hometown of Philadelphia, where his ancestor, Joseph Fine (1877-1976) came to escape the pogroms of Nicholas III. His prizewinning piece, a cradle song, was orchestrated and performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra under Stokowski. Yet I have been unable to find so much as a mention of it.
At age thirteen he applied to study composition with Menotti and was turned down. It seems he had also been playing violin at the same time; he had several years study with Ivan Galamian, and his father (my grandfather) Nathan (1907-1985) was also an excellent amateur violinist. Anyway he turned there. At some point--for how many summers I don’t know, but it must have been several--he attended Galamian’s camp at Meadowmount. That was probably how he became acquainted with the viola, for it is well known that Galamian would hire a cellist to work in string quartets with three violinists at a time, one of whom would obviously have to play viola. Later he attended Tanglewood (1950) and Red Fox (1954 or so). Despite this musical excellence, he majored in chemistry instead of music while he attended Penn. Why, I’m not sure. Perhaps Grandpa might have told him that music was best left an amateur sidelight. Which is why he wound up in Chicago as a doctoral student in chemistry at the time he married Mom.
Saturday, October 05, 2024
But what have you done for me lately?
"But what have you done for me lately?" was one of the key phrases that I remember from my childhood. My father used to say it in a mocking way, and I guess it might have been in reference to me, but it could have been in reference to something he had read or observed. It could have been in reference to something either of my brothers might have said. Nobody will ever know. My father isn't in any condition to remember this or any other of the memorable phrases he uttered half a century ago.
But the odd thing is that the feeling behind this particular phrase informs my experience as an adult in the twenty-first century. And it seems to permeate the kinds of relationships far too many of us have what we used to refer to as our virtual lives on social media. These days it seems that "virtual" life and "real" life (life as it happens in analog time and without necessarily using mechanical means) are intermingled in such a way that they lack the separation they once had.
But the odd thing is that the feeling behind this particular phrase informs my experience as an adult in the twenty-first century. And it seems to permeate the kinds of relationships far too many of us have what we used to refer to as our virtual lives on social media. These days it seems that "virtual" life and "real" life (life as it happens in analog time and without necessarily using mechanical means) are intermingled in such a way that they lack the separation they once had.
Is a parent supposed to continue to be the source of all things a child might need? If not, when and how does it stop?
[I don't think it stops with death, because I often rely on what I have of my mother, which I experience through her artwork, for spiritual sustenance that I can connect to when I need to, regardless of what she gave me or didn't give me in childhood.]
Maybe this is all just a byproduct of getting older, and I suppose technology changes during every lifetime, if a person is fortunate enough to live a long life.
I wonder if I am alone when joyous moments in my life sometimes seem like they happened long ago in a place I no longer live (I have lived in the same town for nearly forty years). Even if it is I who did nice or generous things for others, memories of deeds or events seem to fade more quickly than they did in the days before we communicated mainly (it seems) through these rectangles that we hold in our hands or prop in front of us on desks and laps.
I admit that gifts I give through the computer, whether it is ordering things and having them mailed somewhere, or whether it is sharing a piece of music as a PDF, feel less "gifty" than when I hand someone a printed and bound copy of something I have written or an item that I can place in their hands (preferably wrapped).
Maybe this is all just a byproduct of getting older, and I suppose technology changes during every lifetime, if a person is fortunate enough to live a long life.
One saying my father used to utter, "It's easy when you know how," is something he might have learned from a teacher or colleague. Or it could have been something he made up himself. It is, as far as I'm concerned, a brilliant bit of truth that I have found works in all kinds of situations. When I mentioned the saying to my father last year, and told him that it has really meant a lot to me over the years, his response to the saying was, "Whatever that means."
Perhaps in advanced old age, the "country" my father now lives in, you can posess knowledge, but nothing is ever easy.
Perhaps in advanced old age, the "country" my father now lives in, you can posess knowledge, but nothing is ever easy.
Sunday, June 04, 2023
Nocturne for String Quartet or Viola Quartet
I wrote a piece last week in honor of my almost-93-year-old father, who spends the greater part of his days sleeping. Now that the weather is warm, he spends much of his time happily napping on the deck, in the sun. I was going to call this piece "my father, sleeping," but decided to call it Nocturne, because it turned out to be more of a night piece than a nap-in-the-sun piece. And I also made a transcription of it for viola quartet, because the two upper parts sound nice on the viola (I could say, "doesn't everything?" but I would not be speaking honestly).
You can listen to the string quartet version here, and the viola quartet version here. And you can find the score and parts for both versions on this page of the IMSLP.
Saturday, September 03, 2022
Mozart Piano Quartet and Piano Quintet Boston Symphony Chamber Players Disc Number Three
What strikes me about this recording is not just the excellent Mozart playing, but the clarity of all the voices. It is beautifully played and beautifully engineered. My father's arpeggiated figures that serve as accompaniment to melodies in the other instruments act like the left hand of a pianist (the superior left hand of Claude Frank, to be exact), being both extremely even and extremely directional, like calm fingers of a potter working on a wheel, allowing for evenly controlled shapes to appear. It is extremely satisfying Mozart playing.
The Quintet for Piano and Winds is really interesting to hear. After listening to Sherman Walt yesterday, the pedestal I made for him in my mind and heart has gotten still taller. What remarkable bassoon playing! What remarkable musicianship! Every single note and every single phrase seems to be more beautiful and more expressive than the last. And Ralph Gomberg is hand-in-glove with Walt. It is lovely oboe playing that somehow, while always being expressive and oboistic, never seems to dominate.
I'm not so impressed with Gino Cioffi's clarinet playing. It is fine during tutti sections, but when the clarinet has solo passages, his sound is thin and unsatisfying. When Harold Wright joined the Boston Symphony and the Boston Symphony Chamber Players in 1970, the "value" of the ensemble went up exponentially.
I love hearing James Stagliano's colorful and beautiful French Horn playing. He retired from the Boston Symphony in 1973. The recordings in this set might be his last chamber music recordings.
You can order the set, which just came out last week, here.
Friday, September 02, 2022
Boston Symphony Chamber Players Recordings 1964-1968 Disc Five
Today I listened to CD number five which has the Poulenc Trio for Oboe, Bassoon, and Piano, the 3 Bagatelles for Oboe and Bassoon by Alexei Haieff, and the Variations for 4 Drums and Viola by Michael Colgrass. I started with the Colgrass, because I remember my father practicing the piece, and I remember how much I loved hearing him practice it.
Now that I am no longer a child, and now that I understand the ins, outs, ups, and downs of the viola, I am completely in awe of how great a violist and a musician my father is. And I also understand what a great chamber music player Everett Firth (better known as Vic Firth) was, and how beautifully, sensitively, and creatively Michael Colgrass wrote for the instruments. There is so very much to learn about music from listening to this recording of this piece.
I didn't have the original LP of this recording, so my last memory of this interpretation of the piece was probably from a concert in the late 1960s or early 1970s.
The first time I heard the Poulenc Trio was with oboist Ralph Gomberg, bassoonist Sherman Walt, and pianist Claude Franck, and that was most certainly in the late 1960s or early 1970s. I have enjoyed the piece played by other people for sure (it is such a lovely piece), but there is something distinctively superior about this recording. Perhaps it is because Sherman Walt might have been the greatest bassoonist that ever lived. At least he was the first great bassoonist I ever heard, and he set my standards really high.
I do recall hearing this recording of Bachianas Brasileras No. 6 with Sherman Walt and Doriot Anthony Dwyer. In my flute-playing days I used to be quite critical of Dwyer's playing, but time and distance reveal to me what an incredibly strong player she was. And her flute sound has as much physical substance as Walt's bassoon playing. It is an unforgiving and relentless piece, filled with physical and musical struggles. And in this recording it is a joy to hear.
I don't remember anyone talking about Alexei Haieff around the dinner table at home, and this is the first hearing for me of his three very short Bagatelles for Oboe and Bassoon. I imagine that either Ralph Gomberg or Sherman Walt must have lobbied to have these included in the BSOCP repertoire, but I'm glad they did. Now we can all look out for more of his music.
Which volume shall I listen to and write about tomorrow . . .
You can order this set here.
Sunday, August 22, 2021
Bruch Four Pieces from Opus 84
This recently digitized recording from a Boston Symphony Chamber Players concert given on December 1, 1974 somewhere in Boston (Jordan Hall or Sanders Theater, possibly) of four of Max Bruch's eight pieces for viola, clarinet, and piano (published in 1910 as Opus 84) is incredibly beautiful. We get to hear clarinetist Harold Wright, pianist Gilbert Kalish, and violist Burton Fine (my father) play chamber music the way I remember chamber music sounding when I was growing up. In the course of adulthood I thought that I might have had an inflated nostalgic memory of how beautifully my father and his colleagues played these Bruch pieces.
Now, when I listen with the ears of an adult musician as well as with the ears of a violist, I find that their playing is even more beautiful than I remembered it to be.
I imagine that you, my blog-reading friends, will share my enthusiasm.
Now, when I listen with the ears of an adult musician as well as with the ears of a violist, I find that their playing is even more beautiful than I remembered it to be.
I imagine that you, my blog-reading friends, will share my enthusiasm.
Sunday, June 17, 2018
Friday, November 22, 2013
A Tremendous Expression of Grief: November 22, 1963
Read the article about it here. It was my father's first season in the orchestra (he began as the last stand of the second violins and became the principal violist the next season). I talked with him about it for the first time the other day. He told me that the conductor, Eric Leinsdorf, told the orchestra right before they played.
Friday, April 06, 2012
It Was a Different World
My aunt sent me this article from the September 6, 1964 New York Times. It is pretty astounding the way the musical world has changed during the last half a century.
Howard Klein mentioned that my parents had two boys. I must not have been at home during the interview. I recall that even at the tender age of five, I was pretty comfortable roaming around the neighborhood without adult supervision. It WAS a different world.
Howard Klein mentioned that my parents had two boys. I must not have been at home during the interview. I recall that even at the tender age of five, I was pretty comfortable roaming around the neighborhood without adult supervision. It WAS a different world.
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