The Four Seasons
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Jaime Laredo will perform as violin soloist and conduct the Vermont Symphony Orchestra on its annual Made in Vermont Music Festival Tour. He is pictured with the VSO at Johnson State College during the 2006 tour. Stefan Hard/Times Argus file photo |
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By Jim Lowe Times Argus Staff - Published: September 19, 2008
This year, the Vermont Symphony Orchestra, for its annual "Made in Vermont" Festival tour, is mixing classical with popular, without lowering its standards a bit. After all who doesn't love Vivaldi's "Four Seasons"?
The Baroque masterpiece and FM radio favorite actually four different violin concertos, one for each season of the year will be performed by Music Director Jaime Laredo as violin soloist and conductor Sept. 25-Oct. 5 at 10 locations statewide. Laredo will also conduct the VSO in Grieg's "Holberg" Suite, Gershwin's "Lullaby," and "Autumn Rhapsody," a world premiere by Vermont native Pierre Jalbert.
Jalbert grew up in South Burlington where he studied piano and composition, and was a member of the Vermont Youth Orchestra. He attended Oberlin College and the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a Ph.D. in composition. An award-winning composer, Jalbert is currently associate professor of composition and theory at Rice University in Houston, Texas. His parents still live in Lowell. "Autumn Rhapsody" was inspired by the fall landscape in Vermont, particularly by the vista from the Long Trail on Mount Belvidere, near Jay Peak. Jalbert's new piece is dedicated to Arlene Cleary, his Vermont teacher.
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lthough Laredo is better known in Vermont as conductor, he is Vermont's top violinist and one of the world's best. He has only been a conductor for a couple of decades, but he has been a violinist since age 5. He made his concert debut as soloist with the San Francisco Symphony at age 11.
"In the 1920s, it was Yehudi Menuhin; in the 1930s, it was Isaac Stern; and last night it was Jaime Laredo," one critic reported on that occasion.
In 2001, the 40th anniversary of Laredo's Carnegie Hall debut was celebrated with a concert in which he was joined by such illustrious colleagues as cellist Yo Yo Ma, pianist Emmanuel Ax and the late violinist Isaac Stern, as well as Laredo's wife, cellist Sharon Robinson. He was also joined in concerto performances by two of his most successful violin students, Pamela Frank and Leila Josefowicz.
Laredo remains one of today's foremost violinists known particularly for his personal and musical integrity and his warm, expressive playing.
"If warmth comes out as a player, I'm very happy, because that's the most important thing," he once said in an interview with The Times Argus. "If you don't play from the heart, with warmth, then you might as well not play."
Born in Bolivia in 1941, Laredo fell in love with the violin when his father took him to his first concert, by a string quartet, at the age of 5. His early lessons proved so successful that his father moved the family to San Francisco, where he had grown up, so the young Jaime could advance his studies.
It wasn't long before Laredo's teacher, Frank Hauser, associate concertmaster of the San Francisco Symphony, decided that the young student should move on to Joseph Gingold, then concertmaster of the Cleveland Orchestra.
"Again, it was only for a year, because Joe wanted me to go to Ivan Galamian," Laredo said. "For Joe, this was the greatest violin teacher in the world, and he wanted me to be with him and he was right. I must say that I feel fortunate to have had the best of both worlds, because Galamian, I agree, was probably the best teacher there ever has been, but there were things from Joe Gingold that only from him could I get, musically speaking."
So, Laredo went to Philadelphia, to the Curtis Institute of Music, where he studied with Galamian. In the summer, he would go to Galamian's summer school, Meadowmount, in the Adirondacks, where he would work with both Galamian and Gingold.
Asked what he got from each teacher, Laredo responded, "From Joe, definitely the love of the violin and the beauty, and how the violin can be the most expressive and beautiful of instruments imaginable. From Galamian, I think I got incredible discipline. He really gave me the tools to do what I can do."
The 17-year-old Laredo entered the prestigious Queen Elisabeth of Belgians Violin Competition in Brussels, Belgium. He not only had to compete with the best young violinists in the world, he had to play for a jury that included some of the greatest violinists of the century: Russia's David Oistrakh, England's Menuhin, France's Zino Francescatti, Hungary's Josef Szigeti and Belgium's Artur Grumiaux, among others.
"I think every bone in my body was shaking," Laredo said. "It was very nerve-wracking it really, really was. But somehow, it was a very positive experience.
"Of course, the fact that I won it made it even more positive." Laredo, at 17, was the youngest ever to win the world's foremost violin competition.
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Laredo's great success was followed by solo engagements with important orchestras, a European tour and a successful Carnegie Hall recital debut. His native Bolivia received him like a conquering hero, issuing a postage stamp with his name in musical notes (la-re-do) next to his picture. The City of New York presented him with its Handel Medal.
Then, Laredo's musical career took a major turn. Violinist Alexander Schneider of the Budapest String Quartet, a father figure to New York's young string players, took him to Vermont's chamber music Mecca, Marlboro Music Festival in 1961. There Laredo would be a regular participant for most of the next 14 years. Laredo credited Marlboro with helping him become what he is today, both as a musician and a person.
"I was particularly lucky too, being in Marlboro when (pianist Rudolf) Serkin was at his height, and (cellist-conductor Pablo) Casals was really truly remarkable in those years, in the '60s," Laredo said. "It was a learning experience for me the whole time, it really was."
Laredo also made lifelong friends there, many of whom he has invited to perform as soloists with the VSO, including pianists Claude Frank and Gary Graffman, flutist Paula Robison and violist Michael Tree.
"And let's not forget that because of Marlboro I'm married to Sharon," Laredo said, referring to Robinson, his second wife. "Even though I had met her before, it was through Marlboro that we really got together. For that alone I would be eternally grateful."
Laredo also earned rave reviews for his solo engagements and recordings with the great orchestras, including Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, New York and Philadelphia, led by the likes of Daniel Barenboim, Zubin Mehta, Seiji Ozawa and Sir Colin Davis.
More and more, Laredo found that he was focusing on music of substance by Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms and Barber, as well as contemporary works, rather than the pyrotechnical showpieces he performed so ably when he was younger.
"There's something quite wonderful about playing that kind of stuff," Laredo said of the virtuoso literature. "It's just that I've reached a point in my life where I've realized you can't do everything, it's not humanly possible, so I went a little bit in the other direction, because it's more satisfying for me to play the Mozart and Beethoven sonatas than it was for me to play the Paganini Caprices."
Laredo's biggest challenge these days is keeping it all together. His Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio, formed in the '70s with his wife and pianist Joseph Kalichstein, has become one of the world's most successful. Some 20 years ago, he began playing viola as well as violin, and performed and recorded in a piano quartet with Stern, Ma and Ax. After many years teaching at Curtis, Laredo now commutes to Indiana University, where he and Robinson, his wife, now teach. And, of course, he continues to conduct and perform as a violin soloist around the world.
"It's complicated," Laredo said. "I work from the minute I wake up until I go to bed. In an ideal world, it would be so great if I could say, 'OK, this month is dedicated to the trio, this month is conducting only, this month is only playing concertos.' But, sometimes, in a period of two weeks, I find that I'm playing a concerto, and conducting somewhere, and having a couple of trio concerts.
"It makes for a very difficult life, but, hey, it's what I want to do. I love it. How do I dare complain?"