A hero’s life . May 30 2018

And then it was Thursday...

I knew this week would go quickly but I didn’t realize just how drained I’d feel by the time it was done - and we’re not quite done yet. It’s my third time subbing with NACO and it’s always been an inspiring thrill. This week’s program is straightforward: Beethoven’s 'Emperor' Piano Concerto with Emanuel Ax, and Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben. Including a fair bit of (very well-executed) spoken program notes by the conductor, and a beautiful encore by Ax to close the first half, the night runs about 2:15 start to finish. Two great works, in one the soloist does most of the heavy lifting... in the other, there’s a ton of ridiculous concertmaster solo playing, which is fantastically impressive and wonderfully executed, but it still feels like every body on stage is sharing equally in a massive amount of heavy lifting to get us all the way through to the end. I’ve viewed other recorded orchestra performances on YouTube but never live - I wonder how it feels to experience it as an audience member, in the room, with all. that. sound.

Thursday night, concert #2 - Two longtime NACO members were retiring this year so there was a celebration planned for them as part of the season-ending after-party hosted at the conductor's condo a short walk from the NAC. I was just an extra but the powers that be were generous enough to invite me and the other subs to attend with the rest of the core members. Aside from plenty of pizza and beer to keep everybody happy, there was a terrific positive buzz and energy of camaraderie flowing throughout the space, it was nice to witness and be a part of, if only temporarily.

A friend I'd met last year as fellow subs, stand-partners for Strauss's Don Juan on a Hamilton Philharmonic concert, happened to have just arrived in Ottawa for a Vancouver Symphony Orchestra concert happening Friday night (and VSO would be playing the last date on their current Canadian tour the next night in Toronto) - she's been subbing with them most of this season - and texted me at intermission to say she was in the audience and enjoying the concert. We arranged to meet in the morning to catch up over breakfast before I had to catch my noontime train back to Toronto. What a lovely morning! We have distinctly different backgrounds but for whatever reason we seem to share (since our very first meeting) a mutual respect and I have realized she is one of few new friends I have made in Canada with whom I feel comfortable talking as openly as we do about the trials and tribulations of playing the freelancing and auditions game. No more details for you here, but it was great to hang out.

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So I pay for breakfast and return to the nearby hotel to finish packing and check out. Call an Uber and soon I'm at the Via Rail station on the train to Toronto. 5 hours later I'm walking through Union Station with my viola on my back and suitcase rolling along behind me, heading to the TTC northbound to the Museum stop where I arrive at U of T for a rehearsal of Hindemith's Trio Op.47 with my friends Wallace and Stephanie. We sort out some issues and play through the 15 minute piece a couple of times, and decide to call it a day. I get back on the train at about 7:45pm heading further north to Yorkdale Mall where I grab some dinner in the food court, still towing my luggage, and then catch a GO bus to Bramalea, connect to another bus, and arrive back home in Kitchener just after 11pm. Yes, the day was a long one and the bus ride makes it longer, but I can rest en route and it feels good to be back home one way or another.

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Saturday. My 11 year old daughter has planned with our neighbor, her teacher, a brief recorder recital to showcase all she has learned in the past months. Complete with colorful program, surprisingly well-spoken program notes, a delicious plate of cookies and another of mini-PB&J sandwiches we parents helped prepare for a classy reception, and a beautiful backyard setting, the event was a pure delight. Our little girl!

Saturday night I see Facebook posts from a mutual friend who attended the VSO concert at Roy Thomson Hall in Toronto, saying 'Bravo!' and sharing a couple of photos. It's fun to see my friend there in the section. I text her to see if she is sticking around for another day or so; I might be able to get her a ticket to the Hindemith chamber music concert. She is, and can come. I get her a ticket.

Sunday afternoon. My family comes with me into Toronto for the day - I have a dress rehearsal at 1, concert at 4. We drop my mother-in-law off at the airport on the way in - she is flying to Greece for a three week vacation with an old friend with connections to some guy with a 40 foot yacht over there, so they're going to spend the bulk of the trip on the water. Sounds fantastic!

The chamber music concert goes pretty well, but I find myself a little more tired than I would have liked to be for the occasion. Yes, too many commitments adding up, too many late nights, long days, not enough rest, not enough dedicated practice time in the past few days. My VSO-violist friend attends and meets my wife and kids at the post-concert reception… and I learn she is already also friends with the pianist I was just collaborating with. Interconnections are fun!

So there's the concert, the reception, and then a post-reception dinner&drinks at a nearby pub with just the performers (and family). And then it's 8pm, and it's Sunday night - a school night. And we have to drive home! So we say goodbye and get back in the car. 90 minutes later we're parked at home. Too long after that our kids are finally asleep. And then... wait, what's on the calendar for the rest of this week?

emptiness! a couple of days off! fantastic.

I was hooked: run-on sentences about my first tastes of life-experience through chamber music . Aug 30 2018

As a high schooler on summer vacation attending Sequoia Chamber Music Workshop in Northern California I discovered the crazy cathartic joyful buzz of sight-reading classical chamber music with friends. Every night after the daily participant concerts on the Humboldt State University campus, the music buildings emanated spontaneous and fantastically rough chamber music as we students - kids aged 12 to 20 - formed ensembles of variously bizarre instrumentation, checked out some sheet music for rare or popular pieces from the extensive chamber music library available to us, settled into otherwise empty classrooms, tuned up, joked around, and dived in. Sometimes one player knew the piece and might act as the guide. Sometimes nobody had a clue and we were the blind leading the blind.  Either way the game was to do our best to figure it out as we went along, from start to finish, playing as much of what was on the paper as we could, striving for musicial characters, faking when we needed to, shouting out rehearsal numbers and downbeats to help each other stay on track and together, to get from the first bar to the last with as little train wreckage as possible. This was musical discovery - no pressure to perform on stage, in front of judgmental audiences. This was just for fun! I was hooked.

In my first days as a post-grad diploma student at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in London England I was fortunate to have been introduced to a friendly circle of players involved in a street-performing group called the Sigma String Quartet. More than a group, it was an organization - managed (founded?) by an arguably brilliant Chinese businessman and musician (violin/violist) named Kai, the Sigma String Quartet featured maybe 20 or more players on a sort of nationwide rotation allowing for as many as (or at least? I never really knew for sure) three or four different Sigma String Quartets to be performing anywhere in England on any given day. Based in London, we spent most of our time and I learned the ropes on the busking pitch in the Covent Garden Market, with occasional outings by bus or packed into too-small cars to busk on other cities' high streets or in popular shopping malls, or to play weddings in country castles, or a variety of other gigs where someone had wanted a classical string quartet. Our sheet music, organized in battered white three-ring binders, included classical pops like Rossini's William Tell Overture and Vivaldi's Four Seasons, Pacelbel's Canon and "that opera tune from Bugs Bunny" (pick your favorite!). My weekly schedule - always careful at least theoretically to maintain some semblance of balance between the gigging and my also practicing "for real" for lessons and my other student-y activities at GSMD - typically included at least a few days of busking for anywhere from a few to way too many hours at a time, and a gig somewhere in the countryside. I thrived on the daily variety, and on the friendships I developed with my fellow buskers (In the same way I'd felt at IU that my non-musician friends helped keep me sane during undergrad, my busking experiences and colleagues added a unique flavor to my two years of postgrad work I'll never forget, that may have had as much an impact on my musicianship sense and skills as my proper studies at the Guildhall.) Before long I'd memorized the binder's worth of busking tunes and at some point one of us in one particular Sigma busking formation suggested we could add some choreography to the set - let's dance the Can-Can while we play the Can-Can! It was a hoot. Audiences loved the show, and I was able to earn enough busking (imagine yourself riding the long escalator into the Underground on your way home after a long succesful busking day wearing cargo pants with pockets absurdly weighed down with pound coins) to cover my cost of living in London those two years of study (I was also given a generous scholarship covering tuition from the school itself, for which, as with all gifts and donations!, I am eternally grateful).

Also during my time in the UK I discovered (thanks to my teacher recommending me as a sub for someone in the late-summer Open Chamber Music sessions) IMS-Prussia Cove in Cornwall. That was an incredible experience (I think I went three times in two years) and I will forever long to return....Don't know it? Look it up. Or ask me about it later.

Also during my time in the UK I got involved in a serious chamber music group, a piano quintet of GSMD students calling ourselves the Etive Ensemble, and managed with the help of the Guildhall student/career office (whatever it's called) to land enough concerts one term to make a little tour of southern England. That experience, as well as a week-long trip to Finland with a different group of GSMD students and faculty to perform recitals at a number of British Ambassador/Consulate properties and events, were collectively my first introduction to life as a touring concert musician. The travel, the sight-seeing, the new people, the foreign audiences, the fancy and plentiful food and drink... again, I was hooked.

When I had nearly completed my "PGDipMus" at GSMD I realized I had to choose what to do next. A few busking friends and I had discussed forming a new independent group to refine an act we could take sole ownership of - but I hesitated and decided to return to the States to, yes, study some more. I figured it was time to get my proper Master's Degree, and I'd been in touch with James Dunham (with whom I'd really enjoyed studying a couple summers earlier in Aspen) at NEC in Boston. He seemed happy to work with me again. I'd go there! That was easy.

I arrived in Boston in late August, moved into my new place - an apartment on Westland Ave., shared with two other NEC graduate students - attended orientation week activities, one week of classes, and then disappeared back to England for one more IMS Open Chamber Music session, during which I forgot nearly everything I'd just learned about Boston. The old Nokia cellphone I'd been using in London barely got enough signal to make a call if I hiked to the top of a certain hill overlooking the crashing waves near our rustic/idyllic lodgings near Penzance and stood stock still in a certain place, and at some point near the end of the session I heard in a voicemail that, having missed the chamber music placement auditions that had taken place while I'd been in England, I had been placed in an oboe-viola-piano trio for the semester, to be coached by my teacher Mr. Dunham. The Loeffler! sweet - I'd played that once in Bloomington, a beautiful and virtuosic piece, it'd be fun to do again, with new and more mature musical partners. I wondered what other music might have been written for that rare combination. I had something to look forward to upon my return to the U.S.

When I got back to Boston, I went to my classes and I met my chamber music partners. The pianist was the assistant to the director of the piano accompaniment program at NEC; she had been performing concerts on tour in Asia so she had, like me, missed the chamber music placement auditions. The oboe player was a Canadian grad student from Saskatchewan, who'd come to NEC from the University of Toronto; she had broken her arm in an accident while moving via U-Haul from Toronto to Boston and so she had, like the pianist and me, missed the placement auditions. We rehearsed regularly and sounded good together, and at the end of the semester we were honored, privileged, etc., to be one of just a few groups selected for NEC's chamber music gala concert. That was fun. And we'd even found another work for our weird trio, by - oh no! I can't remember... It was a set of 5 short character pieces called Schilflieder. Klughardt! That's the guy. Anyway, then the oboe player and I roped in a violinist and a cellist to play some other rare repertoire like the wonderfully bizarre Phantasy Quartet by Benjamin Britten, and wouldn't you know, we got to play on the Spring chamber music gala concert too. Weren't we awesome.

That oboe player is now my wife! We just celebrated 16 years married. Yay us! :) I was definitely hooked.

More later - by the time we played the Britten in Jordan Hall that Spring, I already knew I wasn't staying for another year to finish my M.M. - the CSQ had come calling, and I'd decided to leave Boston and the graduate program to go join a bona fide professional String Quartet!

The year to come: the 2018-19 edition . Sep 2018

Dateline: Kitchener, Ontario. September 2018

Summer's done. Kids back in school. KW Symphony's season-opening programs’ music folders picked up. Youth Orchestra coaching dates confirmed. Rehearsals for assorted chamber music recitals scheduled. A room for my weekly U of T teaching is reserved, key obtained. Periodic get-togethers with friends penciled into our family calendars…

There's a lot going on! It's been just over two years since I moved from San Francisco to Kitchener, and I regret nothing. (Almost nothing? Meh…)

My wife and I had some good times playing occasional Tuesdays with the Toronto Concert Orchestra at Casa Loma this past summer, and a few other random gigs in the city. Our family took a road trip to visit my mom and brother at her summer cabin in Wyoming, and a couple weeks later I flew solo down to Florida to drive my brother's old Accord back across the border, grateful for the hand-me-down gift. My mother-in-law was diagnosed and apparently successfully treated for a spot of melanoma, my brothers and I sold our late father's house in Maryland, and my son was accepted into both the KW Symphony Youth Orchestra and the KW Youth Concert Band where they've assigned him (mostly) to the first horn parts.

Last week I flew to Edmonton to audition for the principal viola position, made it into the finals with one other guy, but they offered him the job. The next day they were holding auditions for the Assistant Principal position, and I had booked my flights to allow for the possibility, so I decided to stay and go for it again, and won it. Yay me!

The thing is, Edmonton is a long way from Kitchener and everything we’ve spent building - careers, relationships, a new home - since moving here, so the decision to take the #2 spot and uproot my family, even with the numerous pros to making the move, doesn't feel like a simple one.

My son is turning 16 soon, just diving into 11th grade in his school’s International Baccalaureate program, and doing really well in it, and thriving in the school’s music program as a French horn player, a singer, and a music club leader. Transferring in the middle of the program is not straightforward, he’s finally bonded with friends...

My daughter just turned 12 and is in 5th grade. She’s an effervescent, social, playful, caring, empathetic, funny, curious, observant, thoughtful, beautiful girl with significant learning disabilities and physical, mental and emotional developmental delays. Our cat is her binky. Every day is a challenge, for her and for those supporting her. Every year is a marathon, a struggle to secure services she needs to help her grow, and every year there are new and different obstacles thrown down or popping up in our way unpredictably, except that when everything seems like it’s finally in place, something shifts and we’re back in crisis mode...

We’ve heard the Edmonton public school system is great and to expect she’ll finally be taken care of properly, that we’ll finally be taken seriously at the outset and not 3/4 through the school year when the teachers finally acknowledge that something seems off. We’ve heard Alberta health care is great, and the ESO benefits are a bit more comprehensive than what we’ve got through KWS. We know Edmonton’s cold, but we’ve also read that the city enjoys about 300 days of sunshine every year, which is a big improvement over southern Ontario as of late. We’ve heard decent housing is more affordable out west, and ESO proudly proclaims it’s the highest paid orchestra west of Toronto - but doing the actual math shows that even with the relatively higher base salary our family of 4 would have a tight budget, at least at the start, and finding a comfortable home that won’t put us in the red by the end of the year ain’t guaranteed.

So for now, we’re not booking flights and a U-haul just yet, but I will be flying out on my own a few times to play with the symphony when I can, to get a head start getting to know the orchestra before we all move. And when I do go, I’ll be playing in the principal seat because “the other guy” won’t be starting right away either. I’m looking forward to those opportunities, those sneak-previews. I’ve spent a lot of time as the lone viola voice in an ensemble, but in a full orchestra i’ve only been in the back or in the middle, so i’m excited for the chance at the leadership role, if only temporarily, or occasionally.

Meanwhile, back in KW, I’ve got one season to go before the Symphony could give me tenure, securing my job for the future in case this Edmonton stuff goes south.  My intention is to “be a good boy” and be there working hard and earnestly throughout the season, despite my few trips to Edmonton, get that tenure and then, barring any other developments, take a leave of absence for a season to give me the leeway to go try Edmonton full-time beginning next fall.

Watch this space!

Is it Spring yet? . March 2019

Dateline: Kitchener, Ontario. March 2019

My daughter asks me about the weather each night, these days, to figure out what would be appropriate  to wear the next morning. It’s been a rough winter, as everybody knows, but the period of transition into Spring, like the transition to Winter from the Fall, is… difficult for us to navigate.

Can I wear my running shoes yet? Do I still have to wear my snowpants? Can I just wear a warm sweater or do I still need my jacket? Is it going to rain? Or snow again? Which boots should I wear? Is the ice melted yet?

Meanwhile, my 11th-grader son, who seems to have finally gotten used to the daily walk to school no matter the weather, despises boots and snowpants unless he’s going sledding. The warm layers make no sense for him to bring to school where the air conditioners are offline and/or the heat is cranked up, and recess ain’t a thing anymore. A true California boy, he can hardly wait to start wearing shorts again. I had a friend in high school who wore shorts all the time - literally every day of the school year, like it was a challenge, or a uniform. But that was California, this is Ontario. Seasons are different here!

I feel lucky to experience the changing seasons right along with my children as they’ve been growing up, little by little, year by year, these past few years since relocating to Canada from California. In my former life I was sometimes away more than I was home, and the constant irregularities in my schedule made it difficult to stay truly connected with my wife, and with my kids as they were developing. These are some serious benefits of my post-quartet career shift - basically settling into life as an orchestral player, freelancing and teaching commutes notwithstanding: I’m home more regularly, I think I'm a more involved dad, I’d like to believe I'm a more connected husband. I’m able to see, and talk in person with, and cuddle with, my wife, and hug my kids, almost every day. I can actually be there for family dinners, parties with in-laws and friends-of-friends, nephews’ birthday parties.

But it’s been a busy concert season and another round of career-shifting changes are a-comin’. I’ve been on the road a lot since January - the Edmonton Symphony work has been enjoyable, and I’m learning a lot, and quickly, in the quasi-principal position - and more travels are looming, and the separations and the uncertainties have been hard on all of us. I don’t recommend it! That said, but perhaps the relevant saying is ‘can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs’ — yeah, it’s a stretch... but it helps us all to keep looking forward to when this will all settle down.

As I wrote earlier, I won an audition last September for the Assistant Principal (2nd chair) viola in the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra. I’d been in the finals for the Principal seat the day before, and the update here is that I later learned the guy who did win that ended up turning down the job a few weeks later, so the top spot ultimately has remained open. Until recently, that is, when a different previous finalist from a previous audition was invited back for an official trial this month. *Cue the Jeopardy timer music. Or a reallllly long drum roll.

Meanwhile... There was an audition in Ottawa last weekend (Saturday through Monday) for a Section Viola position in the National Arts Centre Orchestra, considered by many to be the best (and best paying) orchestra job in Canada. Thanks to my existing relationship with them as an occasional extra player, and because of my current job as a titled player in another professional orchestra, I was granted a ‘bye” into the semi-final round taking place on Sunday. I had requested simply to not have to play on Saturday because in my efforts to be a good boy in Kitchener, I needed to play in a concert there Saturday night at 8pm, making my participation that morning in an audition in Ottawa impossible, or at least impractical. In any case I of course appreciated the allowance, even though it meant I would have to drive from Kitchener to Ottawa after the KWS concert (10:45pm departure, 5 hour drive), sleep 3 or 4 hours, wake up, warm up, get myself to the audition venue by 11am.

So I did that. Except at about 7am I found myself lying in bed half asleep trying to visualize a shift in the music I had to be prepared to do because at the last minute an email had come through from the personnel manager notifying us of an update to the audition repertoire, and in my head I tried the shift over and over and over again and could never quite complete the motion, and it was only when I got up out of bed and staggered around the house for a few minutes, checked my email and saw there hadn’t actually been a message, that I realized I couldn’t make he shift because the music didn’t exist.

I played a pretty good audition - friends had suggested I might be so tired from the drive I wouldn’t have the energy to get nervous and choke - and ended up by Monday night one of three finalists to be offered a trial with NACO. My trial is scheduled for the end of April, for a week. I don’t know yet when the other two will be playing theirs, but I suppose I’ll know the final result by the second week in May when NACO goes on its big 50th anniversary European tour.

Watch this space!

Moving on . May 8 2019

Dateline: Kitchener, Ontario. May 8, 2019

I was granted tenure today by my colleagues in the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony. I've been a member, as their Assistant Principal Viola, since I won the audition in May 2017.

I was also granted a 12 month leave of absence today so that I’ll be able to move with my family to a new job in either Edmonton or Ottawa over the summer.

The NACO trials are all completed as of yesterday, so we're all (three of us, and all our friends and family) awaiting the results of a vote, whenever that happens. Now, NACO has just departed today for an 18 day European tour, so I'm not sure when this vote will happen, but it's gotta be soon. No?

So it's been quite a year. My second season with KWS, my wife's first substantial string of freelancing work with KWS and, over the past summer, with the Toronto Concert Orchestra at Casa Loma and this unique (and rather infamous) “Mandle Phil” experience that so many Toronto freelancers have taken part in over the last few years…

I've made a few trips west to Edmonton to get a headstart on working in the ESO, while my 16 year old son works his way through the 11th grade in an International Baccalaureate program and my daughter makes her way through 5th grade in a French school in Waterloo, and my wife keeps everything running at home while preparing for auditions that have been coming and going throughout the season.

And all the while we've been putting off confirming for anybody what our plans are for everything beyond June 2019. While we wait. And now the waiting is almost over.

I am fortunate to have these options in front of me, whether Ottawa ends up being an offer or only an almost, it's a good set of possibilities by any measure.

Family is in Waterloo and Gatineau. New friends and colleagues-to-be eagerly await us in Edmonton. The KWS family is already sad to know we're heading out, and I am thankful for their support and encouragement as we all wait for news from NACO.

My competitors for the section job in Ottawa are talented and accomplished, and nearly 20 years my junior. My friends tell me NACO would be lucky to have me, but I know they're already lucky to have the three of us to choose from.

So I'm waiting. Two more days? Three? We'll see.

But March! What happened in March? I played some recitals with different friends in different places. Jamie Parker was my Sonata partner in a noontime concert at U of T on March 14.

On the 16th I shared a repeat of the program with my KWS colleague Jody Davenport, with Wilfred Laurier University faculty pianist Beth Ann de Sousa accompanying each of us and a few fun viola duos thrown in for good measure.

Then on the 24th I drove down to Kutztown Pennsylvania where my friend (and past collaborator from my days in the CSQ) Daniel Immel is a pianist on the faculty, and we played back-to-back recitals there on the 26th at KU and on the 27th at Lebanon Valley College in nearby Annville, where my other good friend Hannes Dietrich teaches violin and viola, and had for many years welcomed the CSQ to campus to spend a week at a time almost every season in residence working with LVC students and performing concerts there and in neighboring communities. Hannes’s wife Marie-Aline Cadieux teaches cello at KU, and another old friend and collaborator Kurt Nikkanen teaches violin there... the whole week was full of wonderful reconnections.

And April? It’s a blur, mostly full of KWS services - a “Baroque & Beyond” program with our music director Andrew Feher at the helm (usually it’s a guest conductor involved); our retiring principal oboe, the legendary Jim Mason’s final Signature Series performance conducted by great violinist-turned conductor Joseph Swenson - brother of longtime San Francisco Conservatory faculty violinist Ian Swenson; and a crazy choose-your-own-adventure program of Hollywood Hits that the audience votes in real time for their favourites out of three options per category (musicals, sports films, John Williams scores, etc.) conducted by Cincinnati Pops’ own John Morris Russel, aka “JMR”.

And my son had a youth orchestra concert, and a youth concert band concert, and a high school music concert, and I taught my last lessons at U of T, and my students had their juries... Plenty of stuff to keep me busy and my mind off the stressful waiting for my upcoming NACO trial.

But because the trial is happening so late in the season, when I finally know the deal, there won’t be a lot of time left before summer hits, to get organized for the move in one direction or the other. Yikes! 

Watch this space!