Category Archives: Random Thoughts

One of the people who influenced my life positively in multiple ways and at multiple times was Henson Markham. I met Henson on an elevator going to a performance of the Bolshoi Ballet at the Old Met. These performances were the last ever to be given at that historic opera house before it was demolished. June and I were invited to dinner by our friend Jesse Ceci (who eventually became concertmaster of the Denver Symphony). Coming down the elevator on my way to the show were two elegantly dressed people. I took it upon myself to ask, “Are you by any chance going to the Met?” They were, and I suggested we all take a cab together. On the way down to the Met, I enthusiastically told them all about my new cello, the one later to be known as Floria. Henson, not wanting to drop the ball, suggested that we go back to his place and play some Bach since he had a harpsichord and was an avid harpsichordist.

When we returned after the performance, June was still at Jesse’s, and we all went up to Henson’s apartment and started playing Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos. At first, there were protests from the neighbors but, very quickly, they took their places and listened to us play for another hour. On that basis we became lifelong friends.

The first place in which Henson displayed his seemingly limitless knowledge was at our wedding preparations. Henson had a fine restaurant on Morningside Heights which had some special meal of roast beef and whatever for a reasonable amount of money per plate in a really nice restaurant which I could call the Terrace Restaurant because it was on the top floor with a very nice terrace overlooking the northern part of Manhattan. Among other things, this was one of the things that made our wedding party a big success. June and I were married on June 19^th 1966, right before two significant events in my life.

The first was my recital at the Brooklyn Museum Broadcast over WNYC with Richard Goode where Henson turned pages after picking me up and setting me down on the stage. Right after that recital and my wedding, I became a faculty member of the Dartmouth Fourth Congregation of the Arts which featured many famous composers, most of which Henson knew.

At that time, Henson was the manager of the rental department for the publisher Boosie and Hawkes and new almost everybody. When he came up, he introduced me to many of the important composers, including Peter Mennin who was, at that time, President of Juilliard, where my application to the Graduate School had been only provisionally accepted with my scholarship revoked. Henson made it easy for me to hobnob on equal terms with the President of Juilliard. Not that I would have needed anything else, but it certainly made me feel better.

Henson also arranged for me to give a recital at the newly opened Library and Museum of the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. As my friend, he also involved himself with the various companies I was working for, including the Joffrey Ballet and the American National Opera Company. Too bad for me that Universal had the copyrights on Lulu of Alban Berg since that was my first opera at ANOC. I panicked when I saw the impossibly complicated music of Lulu at the first rehearsal. My assistant, Yuan Tung, encouraged me with comments like “You don’t look too good,” and “I’m worried about you.” When I returned to my “flea bag” hotel room, I knew that I would either master the many difficult Lulu solos or resign ignominiously. I knew that I could read anything if it was at a slow enough tempo, so I used the metronome and played every section at an extremely slow tempo raising the metronome up one notch at a time. By the time every section was up to tempo my rhythm, pitch, and sound were absolute, and I had many sections memorized. I followed this procedure for the next week, keeping myself slightly ahead of the progress of the orchestra. Many players in the orchestra complimented me, saying that I sounded like my teacher, Leonard Rose, and Yuan Tung stopped worrying about me.

Fortunately, the next time I had a new job was at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, where the first opera up was Salome. I wouldn’t have had the music except that Henson ran the rental department of Boosey and Hawkes, which controlled Salome, and got me a part three weeks in advance, which was enough time to learn it.

When I made my Alice Tully Hall debut, everybody told me you have to have a manager in order to be credible, so I used connections of mine to get one. Her name was Sarah Tornay. I charged her with booking Alice Tully Hall for me on May 15, 1971. Additionally, she was supposed to print up a flier, do something about getting an audience, and getting the New York Times to review it. I asked her to take care of these things in May of 1970. When I got back to New York after the 1970 Lyric Opera season in late December I called Alice Tully Hall to make sure that I got my date. The manager whose name was Louise Homer (not the famous opera singer of the same name) told me that she never heard of me and May 15^th was already taken by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. I asked her whether May 22^nd was available she said it was. I asked her what I needed to provide in order to get it. I said that I could provide reviews and letters from conductors. She said, “Just bring a check.” I have written about this extensively before, but briefly, I went down to Alice Tully Hall and gave Louise Homer a check. Then I went to the front of Alice Tully Hall and checked out fliers for upcoming events. I noticed that the very best fliers came from the management of Sheldon Soffer known to my dear friend Hensen Markham. I called Hensen if he could find me the name and telephone number of the graphic artist that worked for Soffer. He did, and I immediately called this man (Walter Harper, a great graphic designer who worked for me for the next 20 years. Below is an example of his work.) and went down to see him right away and told him what I needed. SO without the help of management I had a hall and a flier. In terms of getting an audience I wrote letters to everybody I had ever known, inviting them to come to this concert, and in a word, had the first full house in the history of Alice Tully Hall for a debut recital up to that date. I also got a good review and a fantastically good one two weeks later on another concert (which I also organized) at Carnegie Recital Hall from of all people, Donal Henahan, the terror of the New York times, who dubbed me a “first-rate cellist” a quote which I have used for nearly fifty years.

Over the years, when Henson was running the finances of the New York City Opera, we remained friends and spent time together, mostly eating in good restaurants.

Henson had a heavy hand in both my publishing career and my recording career. It was he who suggested, when I explained to him that the famous cello solos from ballets like Swan Lake and operas like Tosca were available only in their orchestral parts, that perhaps a compilation would be good, saleable, and also give me an opportunity to edit them with my fingerings and bowings based on my own experience. Henson suggested that I write a letter to various publishers, saying that this would be a useful tool for all cellists, and helped me hit upon International Music Company.

The main editor for International Music was Leonard Rose, who was my teacher. In addition to editing all the major concertos for IMC, he had put together excerpt books for orchestral repertoire. Henson helped my write the letter to International in a way that got an almost immediate response, which was “It looks like this would be a companion to our orchestral excerpts, Wagner, and Strauss.”

I submitted the material in 1994, all from the orchestral parts which, I have to say, look pretty bad. It did finally get published in 1999, and I learned an important lesson.

In 2001, I was offered a contract for a book called Practice for Performance. The reason I was offered a contract was that Henson created a proof of this book and digitized it so that it could be printed up and distributed immediately. Needless to say, Practice for Performance is dedicated to my dear fried and mentor Henson Markham.

Around that time, Henson gave me a call from Florida, where he was living, telling me that his brother opened a CD factory. He suggested that it could just as well make CDs for me as any of his country and western clients. He suggested that I take advantage because, in addition to producing the CDs, he could also put barcodes on the CDs and send them to Amazon for distribution.

Henson also created HM Records so that we could be reviewed.

My personal and professional relationship with Eric Larsen began in 1976 when, as a last-minute substitute, he videotaped four sonatas with me for broadcast over KSCI in Los Angeles. Eric worked incredibly hard with me to produce results that would equal the best of our playing:

Over the course of our association, we have done national and international tours, starting in 1980, both in recital and as members of the American Chamber Trio. Highlights include recitals at Alice Tully Hall, Carnegie Recital Hall, and tours with the American Chamber Trio to South America and China, with concerts under the auspices of the United States State Department and the Chinese Ministry of Culture.

During my career, I’ve had the opportunity to play with some of the finest pianists of my generation. I can say unequivocally that, for me, Eric Larsen’s phenomenal piano playing and exquisite musicianship exceeded all other experiences that I had and made it possible for me to have had the career that I had as a soloist and chamber musician. During the years of our association, I played with him exclusively, except when he was not available. Our cycle of the complete works of Beethoven in Carnegie Recital Hall received a rave review in the New York Times.

Beethoven Sonata Op. 5 No. 1, Second Movement, Allegro

Beethoven Sonata Op. 5 No. 2, Second Movement, Allegro molto più tosto presto

Likewise, our recording of the complete Brahms Trios received a similarly fine review in the American Record Guide:

Review on the CD, Brahms: The Complete Trios for Piano, Violin & Cello; Beethoven: ‘Archduke’ Trio–The American Chamber Trio:

Brahms Trio Op. 87, First Movement, Allegro

As a result of our success, International Music Company published our editions of the three Brahms Trios for worldwide distribution, an edition for which we received a great review from Strings Magazine:

Review on Brahms Trio No. 2 in C Major, Edited by The American Chamber Trio:

October 2008 “This recent edition improves on the widely used Peters edition in several ways, most notably by carrying bar numbers and cues in the string parts during rests. The print is clear; spacing is sometimes generous, sometimes crowded, probably for ease of page turning. There is no claim to authenticity, footnotes, or explanatory introduction. Brahms’ long phrase marks always pose problems for string players, who tend to confuse them with bowings, but the editors wisely avoid this misconception and freely break them up for maximum sound.”

In addition to his great talents as a pianist and teacher, he exhibited an extraordinary talent as an administrator when he was appointed director of the Meadowmount School of Music. Meadowmount is one of the premiere institutions of string education in the world. Over the course of its almost seventy-year history, it has produced the largest number of soloists, concertmasters, principal players, chamber musicians, and teachers of any educational institution. I invite you to check out their website.   

Up to the point that Eric took over the directorship, very little had been done in terms of workshops directed at many of the problems young musicians face. He brought in Elizabeth Sobol, senior vice president and director of IMG (arguably the largest management company for classical musicians worldwide) to speak about the development of a solo career. He started an orchestral audition seminar with myself and several faculty members who hold important orchestral jobs. Also, he invited Pedro de Alcantara, who is the leading exponent of the Alexander Technique, and has had three books published by Oxford University Press on the subject, to work with the students on their physical posture at the instruments. Also, to amplify the orchestral studies program, he invited Joseph Silverstein, long-time concertmaster of the Boston Symphony, to enrich the audition seminar.   

Eric and I were friends, best friends, for at least forty years. We shared our love of music and our desire to bring the great music that we played together to as ultimate fulfillment as we could manage to do. In our later years, we shared the satisfaction of having reached a high standard and that we did it while we could still do it.

On a personal note, Eric was immensely kind to both me and June. In our later years, when June was suffering from macular degeneration and having great difficulty seeing music, Eric worked with her endlessly to help her memorize the difficult spots.

When June wanted her various students to go to Meadowmount and experience what top level playing could be for people of their age, Eric made it happen, saying, “Why not your little kid rather than somebody else’s little kid?” One of them is presently in charge of music education at the University of Oregon in Eugene, and another runs music, drama, etc., in a large school district in Chicago.

I was not a happy performer since I was assailed with repetitive injuries and pre-concert nerves. Eric always managed to get me out on the stage so that I could find out the world would not come to an end if I played out of tune. I can think of a hundred incidents where he exhibited this great compassion for both of us, but he certainly did make it possible for us to exhibit ourselves at our best.

We love him, we will always love him, and I would like to include two poems by my mother who also loved Eric like a son.

He picked up
his shadow

And slipped
into another land

He left a light
shining

Where he
used to stand

We are single threads
intertwined
in the fabric
of each other’s lives

We are words
in each other’s stories

We are notes
in each other’s songs

When it’s time to move on

We step
over the edge
into a new space
where we are transformed

as color
in the thread

as meaning
in the word

as overtone
in the note

We continue
intertwined
through life, death
and transformation

On our journey