Behind the Baton: An American Icon Talks Music

Praise for Behind the Baton

"As someone who worked many times over many years with Gerard Schwarz, I was always amazed with his enormous capacity for great work. Whether he was premiering new music (in which he has made an enormous contribution), or conducting the standard repertoire, the joy and natural musicality he brought to everything made every performance a memorable one. This book, Behind the Baton, gives us an in-depth look into the qualities that make a great conductor as well as a true servant to music."

—HORACIO GUTIÉRREZ, PIANIST

Gerard Schwarz has been a towering figure in the music world for decades. Now he brings his unique insights to a brilliantly written book that spans his marvelous career. This is a must-read for anyone interested in our great art form.

—MISHA DICHTER, PIANIST

"Behind the Baton affords readers entrance into the mind of a great musician who has accomplished so much in our world. This book tells the remarkable story of his great championing of American music, from Howard Hanson to Jennifer Higdon."

—BRIGHT SHENG, LEONARD BERNSTEIN DISTINGUISHED UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR OF MUSIC, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

Copyright © 2017 by Gerard Schwarz

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, without written permission, except by a newspaper or magazine reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review.

Published in 2017 by Amadeus Press

An Imprint of Hal Leonard LLC

7777 West Bluemound Road

Milwaukee, WI 53213

Trade Book Division Editorial Offices

33 Plymouth St., Montclair, NJ 07042

Tim Page’s review Gerard Schwarz Leads Elegant, Propulsive Mozart is reprinted from New York Newsday by permission of Newsday, PARS International Corp.

An excerpt from Gerald Larner’s review is reprinted from Times of London by permission of News Syndication UK.

An excerpt from Donald Vroon’s review in the July/August 1994 edition of American Record Guide is reprinted by permission of ARG.

Printed in the United States of America

Book design by Michael Kellner

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

www.amadeuspress.com

Contents

Chapter One. Childhood

Chapter Two. Freelance Trumpet Playing

Chapter Three. Erick and Lucia

Chapter Four. Casals versus Stokowski

Chapter Five. New York Philharmonic

Chapter Six. Waterloo Music Festival

Chapter Seven. The New York Chamber Symphony

Chapter Eight. The Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra

Chapter Nine. New-Music Ensembles

Chapter Ten. Mostly Mozart

Chapter Eleven. The Liverpool Years: 2001–2006

Chapter Twelve. Family Life

Chapter Thirteen. The Seattle Years

Chapter Fourteen. Operas

Chapter Fifteen. Composing

Chapter Sixteen. The Eastern Music Festival

Chapter Seventeen. The Milken Archive

Chapter Eighteen. The All-Star Orchestra

Chapter Nineteen. The Mozart Orchestra of New York

Chapter Twenty. What Is a Conductor?

Chapter Twenty-One. Vignettes

Chapter Twenty-Two. A Conductor’s Guide to the Orchestra

Appendix I: List of Awards

Appendix II: List of Recordings

Acknowledgments

Photographs

Chapter One

Childhood

Growing up, I always knew my parents’ story of getting out of Austria and coming to the United States. My mother, Gerta, was from Vienna, and my father, Hans—or John, as he later became known—was from Mödling, one of the city’s suburbs. In the 1930s both were studying at the University of Vienna medical school. But beginning in 1938, Jews were no longer allowed to go to medical school or to any school of higher learning. One day signs went up throughout the halls of the medical building: No Jews Allowed to Attend Classes Anymore. My parents left Austria for the former Yugoslavia, now Slovenia, where my paternal grandmother had a house—it became my father’s family’s country house—in Rogaška Slatina, about an hour outside of Zagreb. They applied for a visa to the United States from Zagreb because my father had not only an Austrian but also a Yugoslav passport. While their applications were being processed, they headed west to Switzerland. They finished their final year of medical school at the University of Basel and got married. Then, degrees in hand, they retrieved their visas from Zagreb, purchased two tickets on the Île de France, and sailed for New York.

Several years earlier my paternal grandfather, Julius, just before he died, had opened a Swiss bank account, as he had felt the rise of anti-Semitism throughout Austria. This fortuitous detail is why my parents were allowed to enter Switzerland and could afford to live there for the year.

In 1939 they settled in Hoboken, New Jersey, where my two sisters, Bernice and Jeanette, and I were born. My father worked at St. Mary’s Hospital and eventually went into private practice in Weehawken, New Jersey. My parents were incredibly smart and gifted. They both played the piano, and they were great music lovers. Their children were exposed to everything—theater, opera, ballet, symphony concerts. We would go to the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall and to the New York City Ballet at City Center. We all played the piano from the time we were five.

My mother often used to say, You’re the son of the doctor, which meant I had to work at a different level. My father worked from seven o’clock in the morning until eleven o’clock at night as a surgeon and family physician. I only saw him at dinnertime for half an hour. He worked very hard, as did my mother after she went back to medicine when I was eight. Before that she was simply our mother, and we were unaware that she was also a physician. My work ethic derives from their example.

When my mother returned to medicine, she did a specialty in neurology at the Veterans’ Hospital in West Orange, New Jersey, and then a specialty in psychiatry at Bellevue Hospital in New York. She was a brilliant woman, but it was a difficult time for her: after being away from medicine for twelve years, she had to reintegrate medical studies into her life, then take her boards and go through certification all over again. She had forgotten a lot, and my father became her coach.

As a female doctor she was unusual in America in the 1950s, just as she had been as a female medical student in Austria in the 1930s. How many women in Austria were doing that at the time? To take an example from the music world, the Vienna Philharmonic did not have any female members then. Today they have a grand total of about six. My mother never made her decision to go into medicine into any kind of social cause. When the women’s movement caught fire, she never quite got it. She thought, you just do what you do—work hard at a very high level. For her, that meant becoming a doctor and, ultimately, a psychiatrist.

My father’s mother, Anna Schwarz, lived with us. She was the only living grandparent I had and was a most extraordinary and loving person. In a sense it was she who brought me up. My parents had their hands full with my sisters, and when I came along, I became my grandmother’s favorite. She was happy to take over, and my mother was happy with the arrangement.

Our house was furnished in a typical Viennese style: antique furniture, portraits trimmed in gold, an abundance of porcelain knickknacks, and a predominance of red, yellow, and—my mother’s favorite color—turquoise. It was filled with warmth, history, family, and elegant clutter. We used to have family gatherings in the basement. It was quite large, and we had stained glass windows with fluorescent lights behind, so it seemed like daylight all the time. There was an organ, a huge brick fireplace, a long table that seated about twenty, and an old-fashioned bar. From the time I was about four, my father would say, Let’s go downstairs and listen to something together. He would then play me recordings of Beethoven—my favorite.

He did everything in those days—delivered babies, treated breast cancer, everything. And when you do everything, you’re on call all the time. I would often make house calls with him. We would drive together to somebody’s house, and he’d go in with his black bag while I sat in the car and waited for him to come back.

My father was a real patriot. He would only buy American cars and American products. He said that in 1939 America took him in, with his German accent, imperfect English, and German name, and he was always grateful to this country. There was a time when shoes weren’t made in the United States, so he bought English shoes—England was okay too.

The Baseball Fanatic

We had a country house about an hour and a half away in Monmouth Beach on the Jersey shore. We stayed there all summer, from the middle of June to September. However, Monmouth Beach was anti-Semitic, something my parents didn’t realize when they purchased the house. We were not allowed to join the Monmouth Beach club, where one could play tennis and swim and go to the beach, so my parents built a swimming pool. Because we did not know many people, my parents allowed each of us to bring a friend from school to stay with us for six weeks.

I loved to play baseball. My mother asked our plumber, My son wants to play baseball—what can we do? He told her the only place to play baseball was at the local church. So she sent me to church. The Sunday school teachers came to each of us and asked, How many communions have you had? Of course, at five years old, I had no idea what communion was. They said, Oh, haven’t you been brought up in the proper Christian way? I guess not. It made me really uncomfortable. I told my mother I wouldn’t go back. Eventually our house in Monmouth Beach burned down (some people said it had been deliberately set). I was in first grade at the time, and when I came home from school my mother told me about the house as soon as I walked in the door and handed me some charred baseball bats. I still remember the smell of the charred wood. It was horrible. But it turned out better for us because in Deal, where we moved after the fire, we were allowed to play tennis and go to the beach club. And we had a beautiful home, designed by Stanford White. We spent every summer there until I went to Aspen at the age of nineteen. The Deal house was sold in the 1990s.

In Weehawken, my elementary school was about a half a mile from home. I’d walk to school in the morning, walk home for lunch and back to school, and walk home again at the end of the day—twenty minutes each way. I loved my elementary school because—and this turned out to be so important for the way my life turned out—we had a chorus, a band, and an orchestra, all in this little town of Weehawken.

Our house in Weehawken, where I grew up, had doctors’ offices that you reached through a trap door in our small library. The kitchen was on the second floor, and so were the bedrooms and the television. After my mother annexed two rooms of their offices, the upstairs kitchen became her dressing room; one annexed room included a much-needed extra bathroom alongside the new kitchen, and the television moved downstairs to the other. We were not allowed to watch television on weekday nights unless it was educational.

I had the smallest bedroom, but I didn’t know it at the time. What did I know about bedrooms? Each of my sisters had nice-sized bedrooms, my parents had a very large bedroom, and I had a teeny little bedroom. It never dawned on me, until I went back when I was older and realized how small it was. My room was right above the front door. At night, going to sleep, I could see the lights of the cars going by through the blinds. It was my comfort zone.

In addition to our piano studies, my mother insisted we play tennis and swim. If I wanted to play baseball or anything else, that was my business, but I had to swim and I had to play tennis. I was not a fan of doing laps. When I was about nine we had a swimming coach at the Newark Athletic Club, Kurt Wurtheimer, who had been Buster Crabbe’s coach. Buster became an Olympic swimmer because of Kurt, and once Kurt became my coach, I won a lot of trophies. It got to the point where I had to start traveling to swim. My mother really wanted me to and I didn’t, so I dealt with the problem by somehow forgetting how to swim. My mother and I went to Mr. Wurtheimer, and suddenly I couldn’t swim. They had to give me an inner tube. I would have had to start all over again, so my swimming career ended—to my relief.

Musical Beginnings

The piano was part of life in our household. My father played beautifully. When he first came to Hoboken and worked at St. Mary’s Hospital, he played organ at the morning service for the nuns. My mother also played piano well. When we first started, she would practice with us every day, but eventually we practiced on our own: forty-five minutes. After ten minutes I’d say, Oh, Mommy, I have to go to the bathroom. Mommy, I need a drink of water—anything to get out of it. She practiced with me for about a year, then stopped. Thank God—that was rough going.

When I was seven we went to see a film version of the opera Aida. Sophia Loren played the title role, but the singer was Renata Tebaldi. Then came the Triumphal March toward the end, with the herald trumpets. Wow! I was hooked. At that moment I knew I wanted to play the trumpet.

I was still taking piano lessons. We had a phenomenal teacher, Doris Humphrey. She also gave me a foundation in theory, the depth of which I realized much later.

We had a music club one Saturday a month called the Frank La Forge Music Study Club. Frank La Forge had been Mrs. Humphrey’s teacher, and he was a student of someone who had studied with someone else who had studied with Johannes Brahms. I didn’t mind the club, but it was Saturday morning and I had baseball games to play.

We used to play football in the street, with cars coming and going, and stickball in the schoolyard. All the kids in the neighborhood played outside the entire day. There was a ball field right above the Lincoln Tunnel where I played baseball, and right next to it was a tennis court. No one ever used it, so I used to play there. When you hit the ball out, it went into the tunnel. Thank goodness no car ever got hit.

Grossmutti

Our house had a huge attic where my mother kept all her old clothes and out-of-season clothes in mothballs. There was one little bedroom just at the top of the stairs, where Grossmutti, my grandmother, lived. As a little boy I’d sometimes get up in the middle of the night, go upstairs, and crawl into my grandmother’s bed.

My mother was, frankly, tough on my grandmother, and eventually she decided to move out. So, being a very entrepreneurial woman, she bought an apartment building around the corner that had a drugstore on the ground floor. Her daughter—my father’s sister, my Aunt Helen—lived with her. Helen married a pharmacist, Pat Viconte, who worked at my grandmother’s pharmacy. Uncle Pat was unusual in our family: he was quiet. He had a thoughtful and gentle nature, and sometimes I would watch him work, filling prescriptions in his quiet, methodical way. I admired him very much for his assuredness in his profession, and for his artistic side: he was a superb photographer and had his own darkroom.

After Roosevelt Elementary School I went to Woodrow Wilson Junior High School, which was two blocks from our house. There was our house, there was my grandmother’s building, and there was the junior high school. So I walked two blocks to the junior high school, and since my mother now was practicing at Bellevue Hospital, I would go to my grandmother’s for lunch, usually chicken pot pies. A loving, giving woman, incredibly generous of spirit and heart, she died at the age of ninety-nine.

After my mother went back to work, my parents had to hire someone to take care of us. My father found a succession of nurse’s aides who needed work, and they would live in my grandmother’s old room. My sisters and I used to torment them. We were terrible. When I was ten my parents hired an Italian woman with minimal English named Concetta Persico. She was a doll, and we children all adored her. As with my grandmother, the more we loved someone, the more trouble they received from my mother. But all that just rolled off Percy’s back.

Percy was an astounding Italian cook. Not only would she cook lavish Italian meals every night, she would relish cooking individual dishes for each of us. If I wanted pasta with meatballs, she would make it for me; if my father wanted fish, she would make it for him. She filled our house with creativity and joy, always singing in Italian while she cooked. One summer in Deal we were all gathered in the kitchen while Percy cooked. WNCN was on, playing the Stravinsky arrangement of Happy Birthday, which distributes the pitches over a very wide range. None of us realized what it was, and suddenly Percy was singing Happy Birthday. She was not only an unbelievably gifted chef, she was a deeply warmhearted person, with a love of music, life, and, seemingly, us. She stayed with us for many years, as we all loved her dearly, including, in the end, my mother.

First Trumpet

One night at the elementary school, all the fourth-graders were allowed to try instruments to see what they wanted to play. They had teachers on each instrument who were there to help you decide. I was still just a third-grader, but I really wanted to play the trumpet, so I went to the gymnasium at the high school and waited in line to meet with the trumpet guy, Leon Rossman.

Mr. Rossman said, I know you. Aren’t you Dr. Schwarz’s son? I told him I was.

You want to play the trumpet? he asked.

Oh yes, I want to play the trumpet! I replied.

What grade are you in?

I’m in third grade.

Come back next year.

So I waited a year, and the next year I did the same thing—waited in line to try the trumpet. I made a sound right away, but Mr. Rossman said we had to rent one at a music store. My mother was not thrilled with my choice: Jewish Viennese children don’t play the trumpet, they play the piano or the violin. Finally she acquiesced, saying, Okay, play the trumpet, but you still have to play the piano. I said, Of course I’ll play the piano. And then she said, But you’re on your own for the trumpet. You’ll have to rent it yourself.

I went to my grandmother and my uncle and my aunt and everyone I knew, and I shined shoes for everybody to make fifteen dollars to be able to rent my first trumpet for three months. Mr. Rossman became my teacher.

The same day I tried the trumpet, my best friend, Raymond Schoenrock, tried the saxophone. In Weehawken most of my friends lived in the same square block, because we were not allowed to cross the street. On our block there were mostly homes, but on a street called Park Avenue there were businesses. Mr. Gerson was the tailor. There was an itty-bitty post office. There was another shop, a candy store, and there was the bank. Raymond lived above the bank in a really nice apartment. Ray was a great friend. He was the boy who came down to our country house in Monmouth Beach for six weeks each summer. Although not a great baseball or stickball player, he was a good student and a wonderful saxophone player. He was in the first band I formed; it rehearsed (mostly popular music) in a room in our basement, which I made into my music room. Years later, once I had decided to become a musician, my father would always be able to hear what I was practicing, since his office was directly above. If he heard me improvising to jazz chords, the phone would ring, and when I answered my father would say simply, No jazz! and hang up.

Jeanette and Bernice paved the way for me in elementary school. When people expect you to be nice and smart, you tend to be nice and smart. My favorite teacher was the effervescent Miss Murphy, whom I had for sixth grade. There was an upright piano in our classroom that she played for us every day, sometimes singing as well. She was especially supportive of the school’s musical endeavors.

Foreign-Language Records in the Morning

My father was a believer in all kinds of education. For many years we awoke each morning to French-language records blaring throughout the house. One year he switched to Hebrew records. He spoke German to us at the dinner table. My parents talked about medicine all the time in German, and my sisters and I would sit and listen; all three of us understood and spoke German quite well. Eventually my parents only spoke German when they were trying to keep something from us. But my father had done his work too well, for we understood every word they said.

Religious Study

My mother’s parents were not allowed out of Austria when my parents left in 1939. In 1943 they were murdered, shot before an open grave in a concentration camp in Riga, Latvia. My mother blamed her religion for causing so much pain, right or wrong, and she was never happy about going to synagogue. My father, on the other hand, though his Jewish education pretty much ended with his bar mitzvah, was strongly committed to Jewish culture, Jewish history, and the temple.

The temple in our neighborhood was in Union City. Many Jews had emigrated to Union City and found work in the once thriving embroidery industry. Our temple was the Orthodox Temple Israel Emmanuel, where women worshipped upstairs and men downstairs. There never seemed to be enough money for any upkeep of the temple, and years later, with the population changing, the synagogue closed.

When I was nine or ten I had to get serious about my bar mitzvah, so I began taking Hebrew lessons three times a week at the Jewish Community Center of North Hudson, one block from the temple. The Community Center provided us a gathering place and a gymnasium where we played basketball. Once, on our way there, my friend Howie Karp grabbed a slice of pizza by the slice. The rabbi, Rabbi Hershman, saw us coming in and said, Mr. Karp, is that pizza kosher? Oops! At least there wasn’t any pepperoni on it. We all loved Rabbi Hershman and his wife and children. The cantor conducted the service, which was all in Hebrew, so there were no sermons. The temple was very old, small, intimate, and beautifully designed. I had the impression that money was tight for the rabbi and cantor, but it never seemed to matter, because religion was their life.

The kids at temple argued tirelessly about whose family was more religious. Was it Mr. Wopinsky’s, the jeweler’s? Cantor Rosenbaum’s? It definitely wasn’t ours! None of the kids at temple seemed to care nearly as much about professions as they did about God and the Torah, and I felt as though I did not quite fit in. Nevertheless, my father insisted on a good religious education.

My bar mitzvah was traditional and Orthodox. I officiated in the service from nine in the morning until noon and did almost everything the cantor did. My mother and sisters wore beautiful dresses and sat upstairs, which they said they liked because they had a really good view of everything. I was so deeply moved by the experience that for some time I continued to lay tefillin and even wanted to be a rabbi. That lasted until baseball season.

Carnegie Hall at Eleven

In the fall of 1959 I was twelve years old and had been playing the trumpet for four years. My parents took me to Carnegie Hall to hear Leonard Bernstein conduct Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5. The orchestra had just returned from the famous tour of the Soviet Union that Fritz Reiner had been slated to do with the Chicago Symphony. Reiner and the manager of the Chicago Symphony had been working tirelessly toward this U.S. State Department tour. It was the fall of 1959, a time when many musicians were unemployed. Orchestras had thirty-two- or thirty-four-week seasons that usually began in October. The tour represented six weeks of additional work for the musicians. Reiner made some requests that today would not seem outrageous at all. For one thing, he did not want to conduct every concert: he wanted his assistant to do some, including some of the concerts in smaller cities, which included extended bus travel.

In the meantime, Leonard Bernstein had just become music director of the New York Philharmonic, and I think that—behind the scenes—that orchestra was vying for the tour. Reiner pushed hard on some of his requests, which gave the State Department an excuse to look elsewhere. In the end, they gave the tour to the New York Philharmonic, with their new American music director, and Reiner lost his job. The Chicago Symphony musicians burned him in effigy because he had, in their eyes, cost them a month and a half’s work. Bernstein requested the same terms as Reiner, and the State Department granted them all.

The Shostakovich Fifth Symphony was the centerpiece of the tour. Bernstein’s interpretations were always highly individualistic, relying strongly on the conductor’s own musical ideas and phrasings. Shostakovich attended the concert in Moscow and was said to have remarked, It was a fantastic performance, but it was not what I wrote. This is especially notable at the end of the piece, which Shostakovich indicated in the score to be played at a slow tempo. After the very difficult minor-key beginning of the symphony, the work ends in a major-key, but not triumphant. Bernstein instead performed it very fast, making it sound triumphant—not Shostakovich’s intent at all.

That performance of the Shostakovich symphony at Carnegie Hall by Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic on their return from the Soviet Union was life-changing for me. It was a whole world, a world I desperately wanted to live in.

Television and Radio

As a conductor, of course, the person who meant the most to me in my youth was Bernstein. He was my music director, because he had been the music director of the New York Philharmonic in the late 1950s and ’60s when I first attended concerts. I could never get enough of him, whether live in concerts or on television.

I remember when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic did a performance of Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony for CBS in his memory. Think about it. The Resurrection is an hour and a half long, and they did it live on television. I can’t imagine a network doing that today. And as it was on such short notice, I am sure they rehearsed very little. It may not have been the cleanest performance, but I remember vividly being glued to the television and caught up in the depth and breadth of emotion that only Bernstein could elicit from his players.

In the 1950s and ’60s television and radio included the great performances of the great orchestras and the great maestros. I saw Arturo Toscanini on television. Reiner had an hourlong Chicago show most weeks on Sundays. There were very few television stations, and if one of them had classical music on, it was likely many people were watching—and listening.

Those were also the golden years for classical music on radio. There were four classical radio stations in New York: WQXR, the New York Times station; WNCN, which ultimately changed to a pop format; and two public stations, WBAI and WNYC. I used to hear the WQXR String Quartet live in a little auditorium in the New York Times Building. I cannot imagine a radio station today with its own string quartet, but those hourlong concerts allowed listeners and lovers of classical music like me to hear the radio broadcasts live each week. I loved radio then and I love it today. Even with modern technology, it continues to be an immense resource and opportunity to hear new artists and repertoire, not to mention unique performances that you might not otherwise happen upon.

Performing Arts High School

In elementary school I played the piano for the orchestra and often for the chorus. I also played the trumpet in the band and sometimes in the orchestra. In sixth grade, I was drafted to play in the Weehawken High School marching band. That was huge for me, including wearing the red-and-black uniform. In junior high school at Woodrow Wilson, in addition to playing with the orchestra, the band, the chorus, and the jazz band, I formed a Dixieland group that became the pep band. My father decided he wanted me to have a better academic experience, though, so after the eighth grade I left Woodrow Wilson and spent one year at the Jersey Academy, a private school in Jersey City. It was excellent academically, with smaller classes, but there was no music and no sports. After that year I pressed hard to attend Performing Arts High School. Luckily my sister Bernice, a dancer, was already attending Performing Arts. Sometimes I would practice with her in front of the mirror, holding her waist while she went through her positions.

The head of the dance department was Rachel Yocum, a physical education teacher and athlete. Her partner was Gertrude Shurr, a modern dancer who worked with Martha Graham. They became friends of my parents. In 1949 they co-wrote a book, Modern Dance: Techniques and Teaching, which documented Martha Graham’s philosophy of movement. Liza Minnelli and Ben Vereen were among Gertrude’s students. Dr. Yocum was strict, and Gertrude was like an angel.

One summer Dr. Yocum and Ms. Shurr visited us in our house in Deal, and I played tennis with Dr. Yocum. When she heard me play the trumpet, she thought I should try to go to Performing Arts. That sounded great to me, because I yearned to be surrounded by people who loved music as much as I did.

Dr. Yocum arranged for me to play for Julius Grossman, the head of the music program at Performing Arts. He told my parents, We want him, and arranged for me to enroll. That’s when my whole world changed. Not everyone loved Mr. Grossman, but I found in him a mentor and a tireless supporter. He offered me many opportunities, both in school and after I graduated.

There were two music schools in New York then: Music and Art, on 135th at Convent Avenue, and Performing Arts, on West 46th Street. Originally Performing Arts was created as a vocational school, and vocational schools were less academic than others. By the time I attended, Performing Arts was a regular high school with half our day devoted to the Arts.

Music and Art had a chorus, an orchestra, a band, and visual arts, in addition to the academics. Performing Arts was much smaller, but there were dance and drama as well as instrumental music. It had many students who went on to great careers, including Murray Perahia, who was a year ahead of me, and Pinchas Zukerman, who was a year behind. In many ways my musical foundation was built during my four phenomenal years at Performing Arts.

We were required to take private lessons, but the school did not pay for them. During my sophomore year I began studying with William Vacchiano, and I stayed with him through Juilliard. I had lessons every other Sunday morning at his house in Queens. Since I lived in New Jersey, it took me almost two hours to get there. I took a bus from New Jersey to the Port Authority, a train to Queens, then a bus on Queens Boulevard to his street, then walked the rest of the way to his house.

Youth Orchestras

By the time I was twelve I had decided to become a professional musician. In high school I practiced for hours and hours every day and played in a number of amateur orchestras: the Williamsburg Settlement Orchestra, the Third Street Orchestra, the Henry Street Settlement Orchestra, the Columbia University Orchestra, the New York Youth Symphony, the New York All-City High School Orchestra, my high school orchestra, and the Hudson Symphony—a different group every night of the week.

My friend Bernard, a fine percussionist, was the son of Reverend Gilbert Helmsley, the minister at a Protestant church three or four blocks from our house. Bernard’s sister, Alberta, was an excellent trumpet player, and Reverend Helmsley would drive us to many of our rehearsals. Bernard played the timpani. He also owned the timpani, and the Helmsley station wagon was big enough for all three of us and the drums.

In grades eight, nine, and ten I played in the Henry Street Orchestra, which performed at a theater in the Soho area. The conductor, Felix Popper, was a répétiteur (rehearsal pianist) for the New York City Opera. He was an old-school Viennese musician, sensitive and very knowledgeable, who specialized in the Austro-German repertoire. I played my first Felix Mendelssohn Scottish Symphony and Robert Schumann’s Symphony No. 1 with him. Those are still highlights for me. Felix later became an administrator at the New York City Opera.

I fondly remember Helen Lindsay, the exceptionally fine first horn player and personnel manager of the Henry Street Orchestra. She ran a tight ship. She had had polio as a child and was in a wheelchair much of the time, but she also walked with crutches. I was the first trumpet and she was the first horn, and if she didn’t like something I did, she would lean over and smash my foot with her crutch. We did some great repertoire—but my poor foot!

I loved playing in the Columbia University Orchestra with Howard Shannett. Howard taught at Columbia and wrote the first history of the New York Philharmonic. We did a television show with him as well as many interesting new pieces, including the premiere of a cello concerto written by a descendant of Theodore Roosevelt.

When David Epstein wanted to start the New York Youth Symphony, he posted a notice for auditions, and we all went. I remember playing all the excerpts, and he seemed very happy. I was chosen to be first trumpet, and one of my closest friends, Gene Nagy, was my second trumpet. We played everywhere together. Gene went to Juilliard, then dropped out and became a professional pool player. A really great one, too, I’m told. The New York Youth Symphony still exists. Andrew Grossman, our first horn, was an extraordinary talent. After some time with American Ballet Theatre Orchestra and the Cleveland Orchestra, Andrew became a legendary artist-manager while serving as a vice president at Columbia Artists.

Reverend Helmsley’s parish house was where the North Hudson Symphony began, conducted by Arthur Rubenstein, a violinist. Gwendolyn Mansfield was the first flute. She was married to Newton Mansfield, who later became a close friend of mine in the New York Philharmonic. On Friday nights we played in the Swiss Band of Hudson County, conducted by a clarinetist, Herman Schlisserman, who had become a chiropractor when he couldn’t make a living in music. He was a fine, clear conductor, who