Brushes With Fame
Andy Warhol once said, “In the future everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” In the early 1980’s, my friend Rolf Groesbeck was a freelance pianist in New York City. I attended a performance he played for Laura Dean Dancers and Musicians. Afterwards, we were invited to a cast party that Andy Warhol himself attended. I can still picture his unusual face and white hair up close.
While I am still waiting for my 15 minutes of fame, I have encountered many famous people. Recently I decided to collect these reminiscences in one place.
Flutists
I have met many of the world’s greatest flutists during my lifetime, so I’ll just mention a few. I attended a class with Julius Baker in Missoula, Montana in the 1970’s. Mr. Baker was known for teaching mostly through his playing and not through verbal explanations. True to form, each time I played for him, he said, “Well, that’s good, but play it like this,” and performed the entire movement. Later I played piccolo in an orchestra at the Scotia Festival, and Mr. Baker was the Principal Flutist. He lavished many complements on me, as he did this with countless flutists.
I used to frequent Patelson’s Music House across the street from Carnegie Hall and would often catch a glimpse of a famous musician. Once I was browsing through the flute music and noticed that I was rubbing elbows with Jean-Pierre Rampal. We struck up a conversation about Schubert’s Introduction and Variations.
Sir James Galway gave a recital at Tanglewood in 1988 and afterwards invited all five Fellowship flutists and four Boston Symphony flutists to join him and Lady Jeanne Galway for a party at the home of Principal Flutist Doriot Anthony Dwyer. The Galways provided lots of good food, wine, and funny stories.
I had the pleasure of attending William Bennett’s class at Wildacres Retreat in North Carolina. Each participant had the golden opportunity to play with Bennett’s accompanist, Clifford Benson. Mr. Bennett was a demanding and insightful teacher, full of stories about Moyse and “Uncle Geoffrey” Gilbert.
Conductors
I have perfomed under many great conductors. A particular treat was playing Debussy’s La Mer, Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps, and Bartok’s Miraculous Mandarin under Pierre Boulez at the Scotia Festival in Halifax in 1991. There is no better conductor of this repertoire.
I have subbed in the Chicago Symphony under Christoph Eschenbach and Michael Tilson Thomas, but my most memorable experiences were touring Japan under Daniel Barenboim in 2003 and playing piccolo for two programs in a Shostakovich festival under Mstislav Rostropovich in 1999.
At Tanglewood, I played under Leonard Bernstein and Seji Ozawa. In the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, we had many prominent guests, including Leonard Slatkin, Sir George Solti, and Yoel Levi. In the Tulsa Philharmonic and Tulsa Opera, we enjoyed having Lukas Foss, Robert Spano, and Lynn Harrell (as a conductor).
Composers
I have devoted much of my life to the music of Elliott Carter, whom I’ve met on three occasions. As a representative of a student/faculty group for new music, I invited Mr. Carter to Oberlin in celebration of his 70th birthday in 1978. We organized a series of three concerts of his music. When I was at Tanglewood in 1988, Carter visited to coach Enchanted Preludes, of which I gave the second performance after its première in New York that spring. I also attended Centre Acanthes in Villeneuve-lez-Avignon, France in 1991. This festival was dedicated to Carter’s music that summer, and we were able to ask many questions of him over a two-week period. He wrote Scrivo in vento for Robert Aitken, and I played the second performance there. I treasure the personal letters I have received from Carter.
At Oberlin, I played Luciano Berio’s O King with the composer conducting. Olivier Messiaen visited for his 70th birthday the same year as Carter, and I performed his Le merle noir. I was pleased when he said his favorite birdsong was that of the Western Meadowlark, Montana’s State Bird.
John Cage gave an informal talk at Stony Brook in the early 1980’s. An angry fellow student asked him why he didn’t write beautiful melodies as Schubert did. Cage answered, tongue in cheek, that he felt melodies were like a cigarette habit, and once you get them in your head, you can’t get rid of them.
For several years, I have had the pleasure of serving on a judging panel for the Crescendo Music Awards with Samuel Adler, and I enjoy his wit and affability. I have found Libby Larsen and Joan Tower equally warm and engaging.
When I was preparing to record Meyer Kupferman’s Superflute in 2003, I called the composer’s house, and his wife answered, saying he was in the hospital but would be keen to speak with me. So I called the hospital, and we had a brief conversation. However, I was shocked to read, only several days later, his obituary in The New York Times.
I have enjoyed working with many flutist-composers, including Michael Colquhoun, Robert Dick, Cynthia Folio, Katherine Hoover, and Harvey Sollberger.
Classical Musicians
We had wonderful guest artists in my 13 seasons with the Tulsa Philharmonic and 17 with the Tulsa Opera. As part of his farewell world tour, Luciano Pavarotti sang a concert in Tulsa on September 17, 2005. The audience was huge and traveled from all over the world to hear him. My wife, Shannon Scott, and I were in the orchestra, made up of former Philharmonic musicians. Shannon got to perform the famous clarinet solo from Tosca as a duet with Pavarotti.
When Itzhak Perlman performed the Tchaikowsky Violin Concerto in Tulsa, I was playing principal flute, and I still have goose bumps thinking of the intimate moment that the flute shares with the solo violin in the second movement.
Shannon attended The Marlboro School of Music for three summers, and she introduced me to one of the twentieth-century’s greatest pianists, Rudolf Serkin.
At one concert with the Chicago Symphony, I was warming up backstage at Ravinia. The violinist playing next to me, who I at first assumed was a section player, sounded great, but he turned out to be the soloist, Pinkas Zuckerman!
I joke that I have “appeared onstage with The Guarneri Quartet.” In the early 1980’s while I was a student at Stony Brook, my friend Béla Schwartz and I had stage seats at the Metropolitan Museum for The Guarneri Quartet’s complete Beethoven cycle, several concerts held throughout a season. Thumbing through a book years later, Béla found this picture of us sitting feet from away from The Guarneris.
Pop and Jazz Musicians
Although I am a classical musician, the concert that has most inspired me was a late 1970’s performance in Avery Fischer Hall by Ella Fitzgerald. She was totally at ease with the audience and fully in love with every song, and her intonation and vocal agility were flawless.
In Tulsa, we had many great pops artists, including Tony Bennett, Mel Tormé, Rosemary Clooney, Ray Charles, and Peter Nero. A high point for me was performing with Frank Sinatra, Jr., who brought his father’s arrangements by Nelson Riddle and Sammy Nestico. One song (I forget the title) featured me on solo alto flute.
The Tulsa Philharmonic once recorded a Christmas special for broadcast on national television. It featured country music stars like Vince Gill, Amy Grant, and Chet Atkins. The favored camera angle showed the solo singers with me serving as a backdrop, so my fellow musicians called it the Vince and Leonard Show.
Politicians
I still remember as a small boy going to the Yellowstone County Fairgrounds in my hometown of Billings, Montana to see President John Fitzgerald Kennedy speak. This was on September 25, 1963, two months before JFK’s assassination in Dallas. [photo from the JFK Library]
Growing up in Montana, one of my heroes was Mike Mansfield, longtime Senator and Majority Leader, one of the first major politicians to oppose the Viet Nam War, and a leading proponent of Civil Rights. My Dad took me to shake the Senator’s hand after he gave a speech at Eastern Montana College in Billings. Mansfield once organized an exhibition of Montana artists in Washington, DC, and one of the featured works, a painting by Ben Steele, now hangs in my living room.
When I was a student at the National Music Camp in Interlochen, Michigan in 1974, President Gerald Ford attended a concert of the World Youth Symphony Orchestra. The number of security personnel was amazing. While it was a pleasure to share the stage with the President, there were some quiet groans after he referred to us as a “band.”
When I was a professor of music at The University of Arkansas in the early 1980’s, Hilary Rodham Clinton, then the First Lady of Arkansas, visited Fayetteville to give a speech on early childhood education, which is one of her passions. Very few people attended, so I was able to shake her hand.
TV Personalities and Actors
Another childhood hero was Chet Huntley, co-anchor of NBC’s nightly news show, The Huntley-Brinkley Report. Huntley was also from Montana, and I attended a speech he gave in Billings to defend his proposed venture to develop the Big Sky Resort. At the time, there was much opposition to the development.
When I was a student at Oberlin, I was walking down a hall, following someone with a giant head of curly hair. I recognized Gene Shalit, a witty personality on NBC’s Today Show. Shalit’s daughter, I later discovered, was then attending Oberlin.
One of the greatest educational experiences of my life was taking an interdisciplinary course at Oberlin on Shakespeare’s The Tempest. It featured speakers from almost every department, and the grand finale was a visit from The Royal Shakespeare Company, who rehearsed the play right in front of us and interacted with the class.
As a Fellowship student at Tanglewood in 1988, I received a free ticket to sit in a seat close to the stage. Sitting next to me was Hugh Downs, anchor of The Today Show and 20/20.
Every summer I teach at Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp in Michigan, and one of our favorite faculty haunts is Pinhead’s grill and bowling alley in Whitehall. One night, we found George Wendt, star of Cheers, sitting at the bar.
Sports
I’m not much of a sports fun but am passionate about the Chicago Cubs. I fell in love with them in the 1980’s when Andre Dawson, Mark Grace, and Ryne Sandberg were in the lineup. Of course, I saw all of them hit many home runs and make great plays, not in only in Wrigley Field but in Dodger Stadium, Shea Stadium, and Busch Stadium.
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