Op.2 - Don Ehrlich, viola

Don Ehrlich, Northern California Viola Society's 2014 Tom Heimberg Viola Advocate Award recipient

Until his recent retirement, Don Ehrlich was assistant principal viola in the San Francisco Symphony. He received a B.M. from the Oberlin Conservatory, an M.M. from the Manhattan School of Music and a D.M.A from the University of Michigan. He has been a member of the Aurora and Stanford string quartets and is principal viola of the Mendocino Music Festival. Ehrlich plays an ergonomically corrected Pellegrina model viola designed and made by David Rivinus of Portland, Oregon. His recent recording of the Six Suites by Bach, originally for cello, is available through the San Francisco Symphony Store.

I met with Don a couple of weeks ago for a quiet chat in his kitchen near Golden Gate Park over coffee and home-cooked chocolate croissants. We began by talking about his recent faculty recital program at the San Francisco Conservatory.

...Well, one piece I played I wrote - a memorial piece [“In Memorium, Hana”] for a girl I knew who died, she was 10 years old. Her father had put a paragraph he wrote up on the internet for family and friends – it was beautiful, and I set it to music.

Another was by Ingolf Dahl. Do you know his Divertimento? I don’t know a single violist who knows it! It’s really good!

I made it a point to do something outside of the symphony every year: Play an audition, a recital, something with quartet… It’s easy to die in a Symphony.

Even auditions?

People who have jobs play auditions a lot. It's not so much that they want the job - although I took an audition for the NY Phil principal, figured if I’d won that then I would have taken it. It was the year my mother passed away, about three days before the audition. I took the audition anyway... And of course I didn’t win, but…

I think one of the reasons for taking an audition is for making a kind of progress you can't make any other time, if someone is listening to every wobble, every scratch of your bow…

How I started--

So my mother got sick when I was a kid and had to spend a lot of time at home. Television had just been out for a while, so we got a television for her. I was maybe 4 or 5. My brother had started piano, he was 2 years older. There was a TV program, “The Voice of Firestone.” People of a certain age will remember that. A live televised symphony orchestra. I remember seeing the violins do their thing on the TV, and thinking, ‘I can do that!’ We were in Buffalo, my parents got me a violin and I had a really good beginning violin teacher - he was really good with kids - I remember a lot of what he said.

So you started privately – was there music in school?

There probably was, but I was probably before the curve, when they would have kids start. I was always in the orchestra.

Was it immediately clear, you were into it all the time, or… what else did you do as a kid?

I don’t remember, but I do remember that Far Side cartoon with the dog and the violin, looking out the window, his friends worrying the postman and he’s looking so forlorn…

But it was a prison of your own making?

Yes, it was. I would take a few apricots up to my room, practice for 10 minutes and give myself an apricot for a break.

I wouldn’t say I was excited to play. I practiced, I got better, I guess. I got good enough to get into Oberlin… for the record, my first violin teacher was Bernard Mandelkern, and his wife Rivka Mandelkern took over when he stopped and went into the stock market. Rivka had had her left first finger amputated, so she played backwards.

And then my violin teacher at Oberlin was John Dalley. The [Guarneri] quartet was the quartet, but it wasn’t full time yet - they were all doing different things. And that was his job, and he was there for a couple of years, and then the quartet was able to do their thing and he left. He was my teacher for only one year, because then I went to viola.

Why the switch?

Well, I picked up a viola. (long pause) I knew there were violas - I'd been to the Buffalo Philharmonic, I could see them, the Budapest Quartet came to Buffalo every year... But I didn’t know what that meant, until I picked one up and played it. Then it was disconcerting, disturbing, because it felt like I had gone home. It just felt so comfortable, it just fit. It fit my size, it fit my voice. The violin had always felt a little cramped - I would hit my nose, and... - (demonstrates, laughs)

It was as much the sound as the feel?

Yeah, the sound - my voice. I’ve never regretted that change, ever. I’ve always enjoyed being a viola player.

Would you still ever play the violin?

No, I gave it up. I picked it up a couple of times, for different reasons, I remember. Once I went with a friend and their daughter, who was going to try violins for purchase, and I picked one up and played the opening of – (sings the Bruch violin concerto opening) - something anybody could play. I did that just for a friend, to help try to keep them away from an instrument that was, you know, not right.

You became famous for owning and performing professionally on your Pellagrina viola, which has been described as like a Salvador Dali painting, or like it is melting, or has been melted. An article appeared in the New York Times in the late '90s about modern experimentations with ergonomic instruments, featuring you and your new viola. You wrote later you had no idea it would be such a big deal.

What really surprised me, the woman who wrote it, Margalit Fox, was actually researching an article she intended to write on ergonomic instruments that are just out there. She found, for instance, the flute with the bent head joint. But the flutists never took the time to find someone like me who would take the time to work with the makers, etc. etc.

And the only other one that she found was a piano keyboard with smaller keys, and maybe they came around a little bit at the ends. The genius of that is you should be able to pull out the old keyboard and put in this one and just play on a Bosendorfer or a Steinway, whatever you have. But it never caught on and I don't know why!... Since then there’s been a bass clarinet with a head join that is a little different.

And then of course my viola, which was the only one with an interesting story, I guess. And so she wrote this story that was basically all about the viola. That was a really interesting experience -- to be written up in the New York Times. What - a - rush! Hearing from people I hadn't heard from in years and many people I'd never heard from before. And not only was it a big article, but there was another small article and then a squib in the Week IN Review. There were three times where my name was mentioned - in the New York Times! Kim Kashkashian doesn’t get that kind of attention. (laughs) For a while I was the most famous violist in the country, and it was for the instrument, not for my playing. But what a rush, to have that experience.

What kind of experiences stick out to you as particularly significant – mind blowing lesson you learned from a performance or from a teacher, or just from your own life experience as a musician?

OK - Oh man, I have a lot of those. One thing I learned – it took me a while to work through this, but – basically, we teachers don't know what the heck we're talking about. I have a lot of examples of bad advice being given by great teachers, and I can even think of some for myself, for sure, but... For instance, I understand that Dorothy Delay apparently told Nigel Kennedy that he shouldn't do jazz because people wouldn't take him seriously. So he didn't do jazz and it was like he cut off his nose. And then when he put his nose back, and started to play jazz, that's when his career took off. So, just the wrong advice.

I think anything the teacher says has to go through the filter of the student. I tell my students that all the time – all the time. “That fingering works for me, I don't know why it doesn't work for you” - no, that's the wrong attitude! – it should be “This works for me, but will it work for you? If not, let's find one that does.”

I do have this very strong feeling, in fact this whole [Tom Heimberg Viola Advocate] award, is so meaningful to me. It's like we're pebbles and we're dropped into the pond, and the rings expand outward. Well, one of the pebbles that influenced me, was Lehner, Eugene Lehner, in the Kolisch Quartet.

When they broke up, he was in the Boston Symphony and was there the two summers I was at Tanglewood. I think I sort of base myself, and my teaching, my teaching specifically, and a lot of my performance, on things that he influenced in me – And just in the two, eight week sessions – and it wasn't even all 8 weeks each time, just when we worked with him in quartet coachings. One was the Bartok 1, and the other was the Death & the Maiden. And the things I learned from him...

For instance, Bartok - when we were doing the first Bartok. He told us we were, I don't know how many generations removed, 3 or 4.. it was in the 60s.. “You're the 3^rd generation that's playing this. It will be different. It can't be the same.”

And the other one about differences, when we were doing Death & the Maiden – Peter Salaff was the first violinist in this quartet. So Schubert, a lot of times, in a lot of his pieces – symphonies, the Arpeggione – the recap is identical to the exposition: the length, the theme... just the key relationship is different.

So we're rehearsing it to get to the next lesson, and we get the exposition, and there's the development, and we come to the recap, and we decide to do everything the same so we can get to the coda, which is totally awesome! (laughs) and Lehner was really upset with us! He was like, “How can you possibly be the same, there, after this amazing – incredibly intense middle section...!” and that was something I learned from him. I loved Eugene Lehner, I idolized him a lot.

Did you get to know him at all outside the coachings?

I sure wish I had, but I think – a lot of people felt that way about him – he was distancing himself from the students.

You recently recorded and released the complete Bach Solo Suites.

It's a life changing experience to do that. I did it as a recital at the Conservatory, which I did from memory. All 6 in a row, from memory.

I know there is some European cellist who connects the Six Suites with different aspects of the life of Christ – so, No.1, which is so happy, is the birth, and, you know, No.5 which is so dark is the Crucifixion, No.6 is the resurrection... Well, I'm Jewish so I can't really get behind that. (laughs)

But I did feel very strongly as I was doing the recital that it was one 36 movement piece. And one of my goals was: to do the same musical idea rarely - if ever - a second time (laughing), if I could figure out how to deal with it. Anyway, the life changing aspect to it is, to know yourself so strongly that you can make it be right. If you try any other point of view it just doesn't work. I think. No teacher can teach how to play that.

It's very personal

Yeah, it's completely personal. And of course everybody has an idea of how it should go (laughs). And I don't! – that's the thing that I know: it's like, today I wake up and I go, “hmm, well that's a different tempo!” (laughs)

What else has influenced you as a musician, as a performer?

So I have a couple that are kind of contradictory - 

Not long after I did the Bach recording, we were on an airplane and I was reading a book – and the book is the “Schopenhauer Cure” - Irvin Yalom, I think was the author. So he quotes Schopenhauer a lot, and there's this one quote that I read on the airplane - I don't know what the source is, I couldn't really find it, the book that this would have been in. He wrote a novel-like book about a flower. The flower must have been dissed by someone for showing off. The Schopenhauer quote is:

The flower replied, “You fool! Do you imagine I blossom in order to be seen? I blossom for my own sake, because it pleases me, and not for the sake of others. My joy consists in my being and my blossoming.”

And when I read that, I burst into tears, in the middle of the airplane. My wife looks at me and goes “What's wrong??” This was me and the Bach – it's exactly what I did with the Bach: It was me, blossoming, and that was part of the life-changing experience.

I want my students to feel, they're the seed in the flower pot. I supply the rich soil and the water and the light, and then they heliotrope however they are going to.

The other side of that, though, is also within the quote, if you think about it, because there is a flower, and people admire the flower.

The [San Francisco] Symphony was on tour and my wife came with me – we were in New York. We stayed in the Hilton, which was like 2 blocks away from the Museum of Modern Art. We always go there when we stay at that hotel. We were standing there staring and enjoying van Gogh's “Starry Night.” This particular time, there were three other people also standing there, watching – two young girls, teens maybe, and another middle aged woman.

One girl looks at the other girl and says “It's different to see it in person.” And the woman rounds on her and goes “Different?? It's THIRLLING to see it in person!” And that changed my life, because it's so easy to be routine-ized, especially in an orchestra situation – and that's when I realized that that's what the audience wants, that's what the audience is there for. That's my job: to be thrilling.

So, between Schopenhauer's flower, and thrilling, there's like, being pulled in two directions. But there you are – that's our life as musicians, I think.

I still can't believe that “It's thrilling!” – whoever that woman was, thank you, for arranging that.. (laughs)

How much do you put your own personal stamp on your performances, rather than trying to do what the composer tells you, what the composer 'meant'?

One influence I remember was when I was getting my doctorate – I actually got a doctorate, but don't call me doctor (laughs) – whatever the class was, we were studying a Beethoven piano sonata, and the guy brought out 6 different recordings. We were listening to the first movement.

The first one, beautiful, followed everything Beethoven wrote. Second guy, same thing. Third person, same thing, then the fourth and the fifth... eventually, finally, the last one he picked up was Glenn Gould, who was of course completely off the charts, and the performance was completely off the charts, and it was the one that was jaw dropping. And going back to Lehner, and “you're the X generation... it's going to be different.”

I do know that I've actually verbalized this, especially when looking at Bach - but really with everything I play - the notes tell me things, and the notes demand certain things, like bowings: If I see a little scale pattern, do I really want the scale to be in one bow, even though he might have written three in one and three in one, or something like that? I'm always looking at things like that. And harmonies – as the harmonies change, what happens? The worlds change with these harmonies. Some people feel like, the composer did it, you don't have to do anything. And I don't feel like that – the composer needs all the help he can get! (laughs)

Two of my favorite quotes are about consistency. Oscar Wilde: “Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative”. And my favorite really is Emerson - Ralph Waldo Emerson: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” A lot of people leave off the 'foolish' – but I really think that's important, because, where does it become foolish? (laughs) Again, that's my decision!

What is your proudest musical moment?

Oh man!

Or top three?

That's a tough one. (pause) Possibly the best single performance that I was ever in – possibly; hard to say that - was a Third Bartok that I did with the West Point Quartet, with Mark Sokol. This was before Concord (Quartet). We were all in the Army - we were all in the West Point Band, and we made this string quartet, with Tom LeVeck and Dave Gibson. It was a really centrifugal quartet, really pulling apart all the time. Made me feel that my role as the viola player in a quartet is to be the glue! (laughs)

But that particular performance of the Third Bartok, we were at the University of Michigan, and it was so intense, all four of us were dripping with sweat. The last chord, “dah dah dah dah—WAP!!!” --- Total silence. The audience was so wiped out they couldn't applaud. And Mark finally looked at the audience, and shrugged (slowly demonstrates a shy sideways glance). Then the applause started, slowly, and built. That was certainly one of the most amazing performances I've ever been in.

It's interesting your most amazing moment, so memorable, was in a Quartet – you've been in the Symphony for many years and done many solo recitals...

Yeah, I'll say, the intensity. And the togetherness, which was so difficult for that quartet. The audience response..

[Another memorable moment was] the first or maybe second time I was acquainted with the Shostakovich Viola Sonata – I felt like it taught me how to play the viola. It kind of grabbed me by the shoulders and shook and said “NO! Find a different color! Find a different mood!” And that was amazing.

Especially since I've been retired from the Symphony, and beginning with the Bach Project, and actually even a little bit before that... OK, well, my history is - my early teachers who were the Mandelkerns – and then I won't say this about John Dalley because I was only with him for a year - but then my viola teacher at Oberlin, Bill Berman. They were so much under the influence of Heifetz, they didn't want me to move. So I'm standing still and playing like this (sits stiffly upright), and it's only as I've been an adult that I've begun to realize that a little movement is really important. Motion helps the e-motion. And I've been trying to break into that.

So I played the Allemande of the 4^th Suite for my daughter's wedding, and also my son's wedding later, but it was my daughter's wedding that was really amazing, because one of the things I did for months before was I would pick up my viola when I was cold, tune, and play that movement. Because I knew I'd be cold and there would be a lot of time before I'd be able to play, and I knew I would be totally involved in the emotion of the situation.

I still remember, there was this one place toward the end of the movement – I feel about Bach a lot that this is art music based on a dance, so many people play this as dance. But this one movement is so touching and warm, and I get to this one place, it's in a major key but it's also so tender. This one extremely tender place right in there, and just at that moment my daughter reached for a Kleenex to dab her eyes for the tears that the music had squeezed out; and there were people who knew nothing about classical music who were saying “Oh that was one of the most beautiful things I've ever heard!” - and I heard that comment, and so that started the chain. Then the Bach project happened, I left the symphony, and I've really been trying to break out of this box that my teachers put me in.

So I'm going to say, each of my last couple of recitals were on that road, and I feel very happy about the way things are going. I've been becoming the violist that I wanted to be.

That's a long time coming.

It is. I would even say that -- But it's certainly gradual. I'm 71, and I feel I'm playing better than ever.

What non-musical things do you enjoy doing?

(laughs, thinking) Watching Baseball (laughs). Watching the Olympics.

Do you go to games?

I have gone to games, I used to try to go once or twice a year. I haven't been to AT&T Park but maybe twice. It's partly because it's sold out and partly because... it's cold! I get cold easily and it's not warm over there. I like AT&T park, I like the garlic fries (laughs) I probably shouldn't eat them, but anyway..

What else do I like doing? Walking. We walk a lot. Both of us walk a lot. We live three blocks from the park and we're always in the park walking. For years, even after concerts, I'd wake up early so we could go for our exercise walk in the park. And that was hard, and now that I'm retired I don't do that anymore.

And travel - I like going places. I like going to, well, the Museum of Modern Art in New York. We've been on two Road Scholar tours. One to Padua and Venice, one to France, starting in Paris and sort of following the impressionist painters. So from Paris up to the Normandy coat, down to the Riviera, following all those painters. My favorite period of art, I have to say. So that was cool, and we're planning another one now to Norway, the fjords.

Did you enjoy traveling with the orchestra on tours?

Generally not. (laughs) It's too much work! Every day a different city: (breathlessly) so you get up in the morning and you have your breakfast and you get in a bus and you go on an airplane and you get off the airplane and get on a bus and go to the hotel and try to grab a little snack, get to the hall, do a sound check if there is one, try to get dinner in there somewhere, play the concert, get back to your hotel, get up in the morning, do the same damn thing all over again...

So you enjoy traveling as a tourist more..

There were some places I enjoyed more [on tour]. We do have days off here and there. One of the days off was on a Sunday in Zurich, when the city shuts down so there was nothing to do, and I could see out the window from my hotel room, drug deals going on in the park out there. So that was not a particularly good day off but there were others that were better (laughs)...

But generally, I started off touring on the wrong foot. My first year in the orchestra was the 6 week tour to Europe and the Soviet Union. We left on a Saturday morning. Our twin children were 2 and a half. So that was Saturday; on the Tuesday before one had a 104 temperature and in the hospital we found out it was pneumonia in one lung, and the Friday morning before I left, the other one had pneumonia in both lungs, and on Saturday I ran out on my family, and I was not happy.

I'm sure you weren't the only one.

No, definitely not. You know, these days I would have been able to tell management, “Look, I have to stay home, I'll catch up,” and they would have even helped. But I had just joined, and it was different then.

The whole tenure thing was working its way out and I didn't feel like I could do that, even though I desperately wanted to. So when they finally got healthy, Marcia took the kids east, to spend half of the tour with one set of grandparents and the other half with the other. So before I came back she had to fly back and forth with two kids by herself - with two 2.5 year old kids, the terrible twos... Not a good time, and that really put me in the mood to not enjoy tours. I did not enjoy that part of it.

How'd you end up in San Francisco?

So I was getting my Doctorate. After my Masters [at Manhattan School of Music] I got a job at Kent State University, which would become famous a year after I left – but for the wrong reasons...

So I had to join the Army, and actually I was very lucky, because in the military, each branch has two special bands. One in Washington D.C. and one at each academy - the Naval Academy, the Air Force Academy, the Army Academy. They're all four year enlistments - except for West Point, which was three. (laughs) I was fortunate to get into the West Point band.

I had trouble in basic training – just look at me and you can tell I would have trouble in basic training (chuckles). I had done an audition tape and sent it in. This was of course during Vietnam so there was all this money in the military, and at West Point they liked to have string players around. Because string players would do officer club teas, cadets did a musical every year... there were reasons to have them. But there was not enough work, so there was always something else to do: most string players would be given piccolos, and...

There were basically two performing organizations: the concert marching band, and then this group called the Hell Cats which was a Fife, Drum, and Bugle Corps, which was a horrible service - but OK, you're not out firing at people and getting fired at. So mostly they gave piccolos to the string players and made them learn the fife part in the Fife, Drum, and Bugle Corps. But the week I got there, there weren't any more piccolos! A week later, the Quartet became official. They formed without me actually – they were looking for me, they wanted me in the quartet, but I had taken too long in Basic. Andy Berdahl was there, they wanted to get the quartet going. When he got out of the army, they put me in. So anyway, I spent two of my three years playing string quartets.

I got married in the Army. My wife was pregnant with what we didn't know yet was twins. I got out of the Army and that's when I went to Ann Arbor. I figured if I was going to stay in academia - which was my choice, I thought - I figured I should get a doctorate, and it'd be easier to get it without having a job at the same time.

And actually I did end up having a job for half a year while I was getting the doctorate: Berman took a sabbatical from Oberlin and had me fill in for him, which was very nice. I liked that half year a lot, too. One reason I moved to Ann Arbor was it was close to Oberlin, and they were the most flexible school, with its ability to let me out for that [teaching at Oberlin].

So... I'm getting a doctorate and I've got two children and I'm thinking “I need a job!” Somebody showed me the [Musicians'] Union paper and the job, so I wrote away to San Francisco and I came out here with actually a great attitude – “I don't want this stinking job, I'm going to be an academic!” - you know, all the academics thought the orchestra jobs were the pits! And it wasn't long after that that it turned around completely, and I think it was because of unionizing, because of the ability to have 52 weeks employment at living wages and with benefits...

It had already begun: New York was of course the first orchestra to go to 52 weeks, and ours when I joined was 49 weeks, but it wasn't even full orchestra for the full year because we and the opera shared the opera house – this is before Davies [Symphony Hall]– so they had to make work for the rest of us: kiddy concerts and new music concerts... So I came out here with this attitude, “I don't want this job, I want to be an academic.” So of course I played great and won the job! So then I called my wife...

There had been one academic job available for a violist in the country that year, and it was in Columbia, Missouri. So I win this audition and I have to call my wife – and it's like, “Do we really have a choice, to wait for the possibility of a job in Columbia, Missouri at god-knows-what salary?, or accept a living wage in one of the great cities of the world?” And when I thought about it like that, there wasn't a choice – I took it, and I've never been unhappy. It's a good job. If you have to have a job, it's a good job.

How has the orchestra changed over the years?

There were always days of peak performances, when things were really great, and I remember – my first concert was Mahler 8, the opening of the season, my first concert as a regular – before that I was a sub, or an extra. It was with [Seiji] Ozawa, and it was wonderful. I'd never played in an orchestra that was that great. There were peak performances, but also a lot of not peak performances going on.

Because...?

(simply) We weren't that good. Also, largely, the conductor, who was conducting... I remember Rachmaninoff 2^nd symphony, jaw-droppingly gorgeous, and also with Ozawa.

And then Ozawa left, sort of under a cloud – he was a great music conductor, but a terrible music director, in my opinion. He could never make a decision about anything – repertoire, auditions, anything.. Which is not unusual for music directors, but I think it was particularly hard for him.

Then we got De Waart who was much more in control and he started really to develop the control that the orchestra has shown. And not a lot of spark.

Then we had Mr. Blomstedt, who continued in that way, but with more spark. And of course under De Waart we built Davies, and a lot of people decided they wanted to stay in the opera, or were helped to stay in the opera and not do the symphony. There were like 30 or 40 new people.

We would go head to head during the fall [with the opera], and then in the winter, the ballet would take over and we'd mix it up with the ballet. With Davies open, we didn't have to do that anymore and the Ballet and opera became sort of the same set of people. You couldn't do Symphony and Opera anymore and people had to make decisions.. That was really the beginning of when [the Symphony] started to get good. So De Waart, then Blomstedt, and then Michael was next – 20 years about. And he brought a spark.

I will say this of Michael, when he wants to be, he's about the best conductor I've ever worked with. There are times that he turns it on.

Certainly in an orchestra, one has an energy field, an aura, and when you're in a group you can merge that to a large degree - and I know I've felt this a lot, and a lot of my colleagues have sort of ignored it, but it was there, even so. But, to a degree greater than any other conductor I've worked with, I felt he could change our performance by his thought into our energy field. When he really wants to – I mean, we could change tempos and it'd be like we always did it that way. I remember talking to the personnel manager on tour once, and he said that Michael had said “Gee, I can do anything I want!” (laughs) and he can really focus his energy or thought or something, and it affects our energy, and we just change.

If you play unaccompanied, it's like you're going for a walk in the park. You can go look at this flower over here, you can go to that grove – or not. You can go look at the kids on the merry-go-round, or even ride on the merry-go-round. If you want.

If you play with a quartet, it's like the four of you are going for a walk in the park. You have to make decisions: you want to go to those flowers, but they don't, so you don't. You have to make decisions.

But if you're playing a concerto, it's like you're on a train. (laughs) You have absolute control of what's going on in your car, but you go where they take you. (laughs) And I think it takes an unusually sensitive orchestra and an unusually sensitive conductor to be able to do a chamber-music kind of flexibility, to have that kind of influence on each other.

I'm pretty sure it was Sarah Chang doing Sibelius, with a conductor I really did not care for. And he would not listen to her, and he would not take her tempos! And I would watch her in the rehearsals and, to a degree, in performances – just, daggers, looking daggers at him when he wouldn't give what she wanted.

You had a good seat for observing that sort of thing!

Very good seat for that! I will also say the lesson I got from that is, as soon as the last chord was over, everything was great. Everything was great. She'd kiss the conductor, she was happy! And I knew she was not happy (laughs). So that was really interesting.

I also have to tell you a Yo-Yo Ma story, also from that chair. He did a pension fund benefit, and he did three concertos. Who else in the world would do three concertos in one concert? The second was one of the Haydns, but the orchestra being reduced, I moved from my third chair up to second and I'm sitting almost 6 or 8 feet away...

Haydn viola parts, you know, not very interesting. “dun-dun-dun-dun-dun” So I'm laying back. And all of a sudden Yo-Yo looks at me, (craning his neck as though looking back from the soloist position) he looks at me, and he gives me the ear, and so I goose up my sound, and he gives me this HUGE SMILE! And I know what he needs - He needs to hear my 8^th notes so he can bounce his rhythm off of it. (laughs) Not a word was said. (laughs)

What a wonderful connection!

(laughs) Yeah!

Any parting advice to young players? For anyone in high school, considering what to do or maybe looking forward to college..

OK, in the first case – if you can't live without it, you should try. If you can live without it, you shouldn't; the competition is so fierce.

The other thing to say is, and this is something I can't really do or deal with, there are so many avenues of music making available - there's world music, things that I'm just too old to adjust to at this point – but they should be looking at all these things, there are so many...

When I was coming up, there was the symphony, and if you could make a quartet - which seemed like a very precarious existence, and usually you needed a university to sponsor you in a quartet - and there was teaching. And that was about it. And now it's exploded, in ways that I can't even begin to imagine. Jazz, world music, I don't know, but they should be looking in those directions as well.

One more Yo-yo ma story – there was a masterclass he ran, and this girl was doing the Schumann Concerto, and she was completely bent over (hunches over) and the first thing, he talked about certain technical and musical things, the line, one very long line, he pointed out something about the groupings.

But then he started other things, “What about the orchestra?” and she turns and there's Timothy Bach at the piano behind her, and he smiles at her, and so he asks her “Play it again” and now she's doing chamber music with Tim. And it's completely different.

And then he says “Now what about that nice lady over there?” (pointing to a woman in the audience) and so she plays it again, and it's like – she got lost, she became the music – [but] she's sitting up, she's playing chamber music, she's expressing herself out into the audience. I'd heard the expression, “The audience gasped,” and I'd never experienced until just then when the audience gasped, it was like (gasps). He'd never even said “Sit up straight”, and there she was, just, yeah.. (laughs)... Great teaching! Perfect.