Jeremy Mastrangelo: Transcript
Jeremy Mastrangelo:
What was an amazing thing about it was being in an environment where you have other kids your age who are also interested in this pretty niche and somewhat strange thing, but they're also really into it because growing up you wouldn't run into a whole lot of people who were that into classical music or maybe anybody, maybe a handful of kids, maybe in your youth orchestra or something, but you're not going to be getting together and pulling out all sorts of different recordings, really getting into, oh my goodness, let's compare all these different Chaconnes with, from Heifetz to Kramer . People really, really into that kind of stuff. And being in that environment again, being exposed to kids who played other instruments, who are really, really, really into it. You learn so much stuff because of the enthusiasm of your peers.
Leah Roseman:
Hi, you're listening to Conversations with Musicians with Leah Roseman. This weekly series features a fascinating diversity of musicians worldwide. Today's guest is violinist Jeremy Mastrangelo, who's a colleague of mine in Canada's National Arts Centre Orchestra. He's known in our greenroom as a wonderful storyteller, on stage as an excellent musician and having heard him give brilliant masterclasses, I can attest to his excellence as an educator as well. This episode is infused with Jeremy's wit and wisdom, as well as a couple of beautiful violin performances. We talk about his mentors, interesting professional junctures, family support and sources of inspiration from books, travel and food. Like all my episodes, this is available on your favorite podcast player, a video on YouTube and everything is linked in the show notes to my website, Leahoseman.com. Hey Jeremy, thanks so much for joining me here today.
Jeremy Mastrangelo:
Thanks for having me Leah.
Leah Roseman:
For those of you who are new to the podcast, once in a while I invite my colleagues in the NAC orchestra and it's really fun to get to know people in this different way. I get to prepare and think about the questions I'm going to ask rather than just having a coffee break together. I thought it'd be interesting to start with the fact that your brother, Dave Mastrangelo must have been both an influence and an inspiration because not everyone has an older sibling who plays the same instrument than them. And also I'd love to start with music soon in the episode. So very soon we're going to be sharing a very special piece of music that he arranged. Do you want to speak about what that was like growing up?
Jeremy Mastrangelo:
Yeah, absolutely. That's a great point. And I'd have to say, I think my first violin influence had to have been my brother Dave because he's about eight years older or so. And so I was just sort of surrounded and exposed to a lot of violin music from a very young age. I started asking my parents for a violin from the time I was three. I just was something about the instrument I loved. My dad is a pianist, did a lot of, played jazz piano a lot, but also learned all the classical repertoire so he could accompany us growing up. But definitely my first violin influence was Dave. So I mean, I was exposed to so much music that was so much more advanced in the head of where I was. I mean, I think to be exposed to things like the Ysayë Ballade from a fairly young age, to be able to fall in love with a piece that for a kid is a little bit more out there, I think was amazing.
So I'm sort of hearing this all the time. I really wanted to play violin and I started to ask my parents for one when I was fairly young, but they thought that I wasn't ready to handle it yet. And there was one point, I don't know if it was before I was going into JK or maybe kindergarten or something, my mom comes home one day from shopping and she's really excited. She's like, "Hey, do you know what I got you when I was out shopping?" and I'm like "A violin?", she's like "a book bag for school". And she was really excited and I think, I dunno if that's the thing that sort of got them thinking, "Hey, this kid really, and he's been pestering us for years now". So finally I had to wait what felt like an eternity and at that point would've been twice the number of years I'd been alive when I was six.
My parents, the deal was they were going to go rent me a violin for a year. That meant that I had a one year commitment. So they were not going to pay for this thing and waste their money. We're doing this, we're going to try it out for a year. At the end of a year you can quit. And they, they rented an instrument from a local place, and I remember it was just the most incredible thing to open up the case, just like the smells, all those things that are still there, but that we sort of take for granted now was all so new. And as soon as I had to actually practice the thing, I really quickly tired of it and just wanted to quit. But it was that year commitment thing that sort of got me roped in and starting right off the bat with weekly lessons with the same teacher that Dave had. And that's what sort of got me going.
Leah Roseman:
Did he help you practice at all?
Jeremy Mastrangelo:
No. I will tell you one funny story, and Dave is a really, really great guy, big heart, but he is also a sibling and an older brother. And starting out mostly I would play, I think most kids starting out kind of by ear. You'd be taught something, but it'd be mostly you're imitating your teacher or whatever. I mean, I hit scales and stuff like that, but there's not a lot of very heavy duty reading of music. So Dave, at a certain point, I don't know how long I'd been playing, I could not have been more than maybe seven or eight or something. And so he says, "Hey, let's do the Bach Double together". And so he hands me a piece of music, he goes upstairs to practice and he leaves me down in the basement or in a place to practice. And I'm looking this, I had never seen a piece of music that wasn't in G Major.
So all of a sudden I'm looking at this thing, I can't even figure out what it means. And he comes down half an hour later, he is like, "so you ready to go?" And I think I just started crying because I had no idea what was going on. And I talked to him about this years later, much, much more recently. And he's like, "yeah, I remember that". He said," yeah, I think I wanted you to cry." So as far as practicing together, there was not so much of that, but it was nice once I got older and a little bit more competent on the violin, then we could actually do things together. And one of the things that I still think is the most fun is when we can get together on occasion and do a little quartet gig together or just some duos or whatever.
He's a lot of fun to play with. He's just a very fun guy to be around. So we have a ball when we get together. And there's really, I can honestly say this, there's never been really a competitive type of thing with us. He was always so much older that wasn't really an issue. And there was only one time where we took the same audition together and even that was sort of like, Hey, we both understand how hard this is and we're just going to support each other and help each other out. So I've been very, very fortunate.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Well, you brought up auditions, which was on my mind. I'm on a lot of committees this year, so I'm going to be listening to a lot of auditions. And I was thinking that maybe you've had a lot of resilience training and we'll get into the more particulars of your education, but I was wondering if you had advice for people with regard to that, if you know what I mean by resilience?
Jeremy Mastrangelo:
Oh yeah, I know what you mean. Honestly, I feel like the circumstances of my upbringing, I think were sort of resilience training in and of themselves. I mean three brothers and kind of a high energy household where people would just get on you for anything. And I think something like that is just sort of, I dunno, I never really thought about resilience training or anything specifically for things like the audition process. But it's definitely something I think anybody can learn and adapt a bit and just have a different type of outlook. But I think for me, maybe some of it was just survival growing up and some of those things have actually had maybe a practical application in my life, which again, maybe a sort of a hidden blessing of growing up with three people that are all smarter, more talented and whatever. And you just have to figure out how to bounce back a little bit. But it's definitely, as far as outlook goes, I mean think now that I think about these things more, you can sort of codify it and put it into, I dunno, strategies to implement as far as looking at setbacks and things like that as all these experiences are. Learning opportunities, things that you can grow from and build on and hopefully have this type of progress in your life that also will apply to something specific situations like an audition scenario. But I think they're just good life lessons.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. Well, I want to dig into this more with you, but I think it'd be really nice for people to hear this beautiful, beautiful arrangement that Dave made of Bach's Goldberg variations theme. So if you want to speak to that a little bit before we share the video
Jeremy Mastrangelo:
Sure, I'll tell you just very, very briefly about it and then maybe we can talk a little about it afterward. But this was a pandemic project, and I'll just throw this out there that he did the entire Goldberg Variations, which I'll just leave it at that. Maybe we should listen to it and then I can talk a little bit more to it afterward.
Leah Roseman:
This is Jeremy Mastrangelo performing the aria from J.S. Bach's Goldberg Variations arranged by Dave Mastrangelo. That was so beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing that.
Jeremy Mastrangelo:
Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, I love it.
Leah Roseman:
So can I buy Dave's arrangement of the entire Goldberg versions?
Jeremy Mastrangelo:
Yes, Dave has somewhere you can purchase, I think just portions or the entire set of variations. It was a project that came out during the pandemic, and I think all of us obviously found ourselves with a lot more time on our hands, and there's limits to how much Netflix or whatever that anybody can do. So Dave, I had no idea he was planning to do this. All of a sudden he sends me a PDF of just like the Aria and maybe the first few variations. He's like, "I'm working on this, I want to do the entire Goldberg variations". And I was just sort of stunned and I started going through it. And I mean, the Aria is so well known and it stands so well by itself, which is really, really nice. The whole set, I'll be totally honest with you, is really, really hard. One night I was just like, I'm just going to slog through this thing, and it's like going through the A minor fugue, but for an hour, it is that hard. It's really, really challenging. So anybody who wants to tackle that, I think that would be an unbelievable project for somebody with more talent and or time. But it's fantastic. And Dave, yeah, you can,
Leah Roseman:
Well, I'll link that in the show notes of this episode. I'll link to Dave Mastrangelo arrangements, and he also composes a little bit, or mostly arrangements,
Jeremy Mastrangelo:
I think mostly arrangements. I don't know if he, that's a good question. I don't know if he has original compositions. I know he does a number of arrangements for solo violin that he's done.
Leah Roseman:
So in terms of auditions we were talking about before, now not everyone listening will be familiar with the blind audition process for orchestras. Do you want to speak to that and your feelings about it?
Jeremy Mastrangelo:
Yeah, decades and decades ago, I mean, the audition process was less formalized than what we have now. It could be often something as simple as you get maybe a verbal recommendation, word of mouth to a conductor. You go play for a conductor in their hotel room, they hire you for a job, that kind of thing. I mean, it wasn't always like that, but that was one method of auditioning candidates, bringing people in. It was often people we know, people we like, so on and so forth. Orchestras were predominantly male up until the 1970s, and the first time that screens were finally started to be introduced widespread in the industry is an effort to eliminate bias. Almost overnight it became about 50 50 male female. And over the years, the process has become even more anonymized. So when I tell even violin students about some of the procedural things that take place to guarantee anonymity, they're sort of surprised. The fact that you walk out on stage and you aren't walking on just the regular flooring, there's a carpet that's typically put out so nobody can hear footsteps, maybe able to identify or pick up anything about a person.
And in the past, various orchestras have run it where maybe the first round is screened or the first two rounds are screened, or some orchestras used to have or have had all rounds screened. And that's kind of the direction orchestras are moving in. And that's the way that NAC is going with our auditions that every round is now screened. So completely anonymous. And it's again, in an effort to reduce as much bias as possible and really focus on the playing. And I think it's about as fair as a process that you can kind of come up with for trying to find candidates. And you look at an orchestra like the Met, which has for a very long time had a completely anonymous, fully screened process, and it's hard to argue with the results. The other side of the coin is also, and I have to mention this, that the more salary that's offered in any industry, typically the more talented people are going to be attracted to it. So that also helps. But again, the process itself, making it as anonymous as possible, I think has benefited the industry.
Leah Roseman:
And actually, I was going to bring up the Met because as far as I know that the only orchestra I've heard of where they have to hire at the end of the day,
Jeremy Mastrangelo:
Yes
Leah Roseman:
That's unusual.
Jeremy Mastrangelo:
With the exception of principal positions. But yes, at the end of a day of series of rounds, they have to hire somebody, which is unusual. And I'm not sure how many other orchestras do that because one of the things that happens quite often is an audition is held and a committee says, "you know what? Nobody was good enough, so we didn't hire anybody today". And that's not uncommon for that to happen. And it's up to every orchestra, I guess it's their prerogative, but they're looking for whatever. There is something, I mean, I could see both sides of it. I could see where there's a benefit to saying, "Hey, look, make a decision already. You got to find somebody here". Because there can be sometimes a tendency to maybe overthink and get into the issue of I don't want to have buyer's remorse kind of thing. So yeah, I mean, I'm not sure. I don't know if I feel terribly strongly about that aspect of it, but it's interesting. It's another element.
Leah Roseman:
Now you've been involved for some years on bargaining committee and orchestra committees, we call it in orchestra, dealing with collective agreements. Do you want to speak to that, your feelings about the importance of participating in that process?
Jeremy Mastrangelo:
Yeah, it's something I was completely unfamiliar with in school, and even I spent a year at New World, and it's just not something because that group is not unionized, it's just something I was unfamiliar with. I started my first job in Syracuse, and all of a sudden people are talking about this collective agreement, a contract, and it's all completely new for me. I think the value of having something like this, it creates the parameters by which we function within this organization. So a collective agreement is designed to help protect employees. If you want to describe it as labor and management, however you want to look at it, to protect employees from possible abuses. That can happen. I mean, I'm not saying anything that's, I think controversial. Think anytime instances of abuse tend to happen where there's a power imbalance. And when you have an employee relationship, obviously that relationship is inherently unbalanced in favor of the employer.
So a lot of it is designed to protect employees and also to articulate their responsibilities in this arrangement as well, and just provide the parameters in which we work. I think it's very important for orchestras, not just in terms of salary, but working conditions to work towards conditions - And every industry's going to have industry specific needs for musicians. Obviously there's issues with time off or physical ailments for the things that we deal with as our bodies deteriorate and everything else, we experience a lot of the same injuries that athletes experience. And having this understood by management, the employer is really important. It's something I never did at my old job. I had no committee experience that was sort of handled by people who did that kind of thing. And I actually didn't have much interest. I was the musician's representative to the board for a number of years, which
Is a different type of thing. It has its own. That was also very, very interesting. But it wasn't until I got here to the NAC and it was mostly a, because I think at the time there just weren't many people who wanted to do it. So somebody asked me like, "Hey, would you do it?" And I always feel like if there's something that's like, yeah, this thing has to get done, nobody else really wants to do it at this time. So yeah, sure, I'll give it a go. And it was the same thing when I did the board rep stuff in Syracuse. I remember the guy who had done it for many years, who's terrific. He's our principal trumpet, and one day he's like, "Jeremy, would you be interested in doing this?" I was like, "no, I have no interest in doing this". But I'm looking around and I'm like, okay, I've been here for a few years. If I don't do it, who am I expecting to do this? My colleagues have been doing this for 30 years. Eventually I felt like, okay, I got pitch in and help out a little bit. And so that's sort of how I got involved on the orchestra committee. The NAC is, it's something new, something different, tried out.
Leah Roseman:
Well, on a previous guest of this series is Anna Peterson, who was also your colleague in Syracuse. So in that episode, she's an oboe player. We talked a lot about yoga, which she's really involved with. And also when Syracuse folded and she had to find work, and I know your experience was different than hers for one thing, you had kids, your wife Sara, was also playing in the orchestra.
Jeremy Mastrangelo:
Yeah, it was a very, very difficult time. It was sort of the lead up to when the orchestra shut down was it was like watching the slowest train wreck ever sort of unfold. Sara actually had gotten onto the orchestra committee in 2010. We had just signed a contract, it's supposed to be for three years. It was the first time she'd ever been on any committee. And a month into her time there, the orchestra management came to the orchestra committee and said, "we have to renegotiate the contract. We don't have any money and we're just going to have to shut things down". And it really blindsided everybody. They had just signed an agreement. We had no idea what was going on. So Sara somehow near miraculously kind of took us through a renegotiation, which that orchestra had never done. It was a very, I'd say kind of an old school kind of union management relationship there and not one given too much flexibility. And she somehow managed to bring these sides together and buy us a little bit of extra time. I won't even get into all the details. There's a lot of crazy stuff. But at the end of that year, she'd only been on for about a year or so. She came home from a meeting with the management and she says to me, I think that they're going to shut down the orchestra and I need to go get another job because we're not going to have healthcare because if you lose your job in the States, you have no healthcare. And that week she went out, she took an interview with an insurance company, she got a different job. She quit the orchestra. This is December of 2010, four or five months later in April, the orchestra shuts down and everybody's like," I didn't see this coming, nobody, blah, all this kind of stuff". And I'm like, Sara saw it coming. The handwriting was on the wall. She saw it. As soon as she recognized it, she got out. And then when the orchestra shut down, I mean, she said to me, she's like, "so here's how we're going to do this. I'm going to be working this insurance job so that we have healthcare for the family, and you're going to go out and try to get every possible gig you can and help provide for us, and that's how we're going to get through this."
So it was incredible. It's interesting that some people have that ability. They see it's not a question of the question of if has already been settled, it's now a question of when, but then to act on it is something I think is harder for people to do than you might think. So you see it coming, but it's almost like you're paralyzed. All you know is this one thing. And she just got out pretty much immediately. It was really, it's amazing.
Leah Roseman:
And it was a pretty miserable job, I understand too.
Jeremy Mastrangelo:
It was challenging. It was very challenging. I mean, she was working on straight commission life insurance for a while. And what's tough is how these things work is you start with your personal network. So you got to start calling your friends and family to sell them insurance. And when some of her very, very close friends stopped returning her calls, that's tough. It's very, very tough. So she was fortunate. There was a guy that she worked with who was outstanding, who needed an assistant, and so she ended up becoming his assistant and helping him out. Great at organizing things and stuff like that. So it helped make the job more, I should say, less painful personally and professionally. So I mean, as much as we deal with rejection with auditions when you're in sales, it's even worse. It is tough. It's a tough job.
Leah Roseman:
Hi, just a short break from the episode, which I hope you're enjoying so far. If you want to check out over a hundred episodes you may have missed in addition to your podcast player or YouTube, I have an extensive website, leahroseman.com with show notes, transcripts, the complete catalog of episodes, and you can sign up there for my weekly newsletter to get access to sneak peeks of upcoming guests. Please do share your favorite episodes with your friends, follow me on social media and share my posts. And if you can spare a few dollars to help support the series, that would be amazing. And you can find that link in the show notes. I'm an independent podcaster and I really do need the help of my listeners. Now, back to the episode.
Now I find it interesting. I think you're the only violinist I've ever spoken to who's played so many different roles in the orchestras you've played in. You've probably sat in every chair in both sections, a lot of Concertmaster experience, a lot of Principal Second experience.
Jeremy Mastrangelo:
I feel very, very fortunate because, I mean, for the first 10 years of my career, I was Associate Concertmaster in Syracuse, so it was mostly in the second chair in that orchestra and would play Concertmaster a bit. I had some Concertmaster experience from some summer orchestras, a little bit of Principal Second in some summer jobs. And then I started subbing with the NAC kind of filling in for a bit as Principal Second. And then I have, I think I've sat with every colleague that I've had at the NAC except for Lev. But I sat close to Lev,
But I literally sat with everyone and everywhere, front back, both sections. I was really pleased. A few years ago I completed my personal double Beethoven cycle for having done all nine symphonies, both violin parts, which was pretty cool. And I enjoy the variety. I like getting to sit with a lot of different people, and I can genuinely say I enjoy all my colleagues, really. It might be unusual from talking to other people in other orchestras really like everybody, and it's like, yeah, all these people are wonderful to sit with. They're great colleagues, they're fun, and I enjoy it. So yeah, it's different, but I like it.
Leah Roseman:
So I'm interested. You actually keep track of which symphonies. I don't keep track of things.
Jeremy Mastrangelo:
Oh, well, when you've done all nine, I think that's pretty memorable. And it helped, I think when I finished it was when we did a Beethoven cycle a couple of years ago. I was playing second violin. We did it all nine in two weeks or something. So that one, I knocked that off really quickly, but no, yeah, it's sort of in the back of my mind, which ones I've played.
Leah Roseman:
If we could go back to your musical education, it interests me now, a previous guest of the series, Leslie DeShazor, a Detroit based violist and violinist. So she went to Interlochen with the summer program, and I remember discussing with her this whole thing about having a competition for the chair and encouraging this among the kids, which really I find off-putting. But you went to the residential school during the year for high school?
Jeremy Mastrangelo:
Well, yeah. I went to the year-Round Academy, an arts boarding school. I also did do the summer camp for a couple years and went through the weekly, what did they call 'em?
Leah Roseman:
Challenge or something?
Jeremy Mastrangelo:
Yeah, that's it. That's it. Yeah. The orchestra challenges, which it's funny, even as a kid, the value of it that I recognized was that I didn't see how you could do the rep that we did every single week and get the kids to prepare it well enough without this. So I sort of saw this secondary benefit to it. Well, actually, it's maybe a primary benefit is to ensure that everybody's practicing their music and how else are you going to do it in the summer, it's like, gosh, I could go swimming or I could practice. And it's sort of like, well, I've got this weekly challenge. I should probably be practicing. But yeah, I did attend the Academy for two years, which was a fantastic experience. Yeah, it's a year-round arts boarding school in northern Michigan. And that's what was an amazing thing about it was being in an environment where you have other kids your age who are also interested in this pretty niche and somewhat strange thing, but they're also really into it because growing up, you wouldn't run into a whole lot of people who were that into classical music or maybe anybody, maybe a handful kids, maybe in your youth orchestra or something, but you're not going to be getting together and pulling out all sorts of different recordings, really getting into, oh my goodness, let's compare all these different Chaconnes from Heifetz to Kramer to all these people.
Really, really into that kind of stuff. And being in the environment, again, being exposed to kids who played other instruments who are really, really, really into it. You learn so much stuff because of the enthusiasm of your peers. You get to know Schumann song cycles and things like that because somebody who's a singer who's like," oh my goodness, you've got to listen to this guy Fritz Wunderlich. He's amazing". And you're like, "I've never heard of this person". And you put on the CD and you get to just share that enthusiasm. And being in an environment like that I think was really invaluable as far as setting me on this path. I mean, my parents told me years later, they said, we figured we'd send you out there. And that was either going to be the end of it, yeah, this is not for me. Or you'd really take to it and know that this is what you wanted to do.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, I think you were very fortunate. I don't think there's too many programs like that. I haven't heard of many.
Jeremy Mastrangelo:
Actually.
Leah Roseman:
Any?
Jeremy Mastrangelo:
I'm not sure if I can name another one, really. CIM has a young artist program with high school students, but you're in a university setting, and I mean, it's in that way kind of similar, but this thing where it's just, it is just high school kids doing this kind of thing. It's a pretty special place
Leah Roseman:
Now, this will be a wonderful place to share the other recording you've shared with us. And I remember you originally when this was posted, this Piazzolla Etude and I right away ordered the music. I wanted to play it, and it took, because it was the pandemic. Do you remember the mail was just messed up. You couldn't get packages,
Jeremy Mastrangelo:
Everything was messed up, nothing was working. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
So this music got lost and I ordered another one, and I ended up, I think with two copies after eight months. So I did finally learn this and taught it and a couple others. So can you speak to when you first heard this piece?
Jeremy Mastrangelo:
Yes, because I remember exactly the first time I heard this one. I was at University of Michigan for grad school, and Gidon Kramer was traveling. He's touring with St. Petersburg Symphony Orchestra, and he was playing, Shostakovich, it's the one that nobody does. It's the second concerto, I think is the one that is not done. And he finishes, it's brilliant, and he comes out and he plays this encore, and I'm like, oh my goodness, what is this thing? I knew I could pick it out as Piazzolla, but I had no clue what it was. So a friend of mine I was sitting with, I was like, "what is this thing?" And he knew immediately. He's like, "oh, it's one of the Piazzolla flute Etudes." And I was like, who knew? So yeah, I went out and ordered the music right away as well.
Leah Roseman:
This next piece of music is Jeremy's performance of the Tango Etude number three by Astor Piazzolla.
Well, thanks so much for sharing this. A really great performance.
Jeremy Mastrangelo:
Oh, thank you, Leah. Thanks. It's something I really love. I've read through all of them. That third is probably my favorite out of the bunch. I mean, they're all terrific. They all have different characteristics and everything, but I'm also just kind of a big Piazzolla fan.
Leah Roseman:
Now, when you were making those recordings, we were locked down. We weren't playing in public. It must have had an eerie similarity as to when your job in Syracuse shut down in that you didn't know what the future would bring
Jeremy Mastrangelo:
To an extent. Actually, it's interesting. I did not really draw that connection so much with Syracuse. I was incredibly fortunate that literally out of the blue work just started materializing that I had no idea about. I did a lot of soliciting as well for work, sending out my resume to places and making inquiries. And literally nothing from any of my inquiries led to any work. It was the first bit of work that I had, which was really out of the blue. A couple days maybe the day after orchestra shut down, I get contacted by the Omaha Symphony Orchestra, and there was a guy there, an oboe player that I had known from a summer festival from previous years. He'd been sort of monitoring, no, it was a clarinet. He'd been sort of keeping tabs on. He'd been seeing what was going on in Syracuse. They shut down and I get a call from their management.
They're like, "Hey, do you want to come in and do some work?" And I was like, "yes, yes, please". So in that way it was a little bit different. I was both untethered, but also had very fortunately a lot of work. The pandemic was very different because I had a job, but no work, which was strange. And at the time, I was doing orchestra committee and we went into three times a week meetings with the NAC administration to do what exactly? Because there's nothing to do. I don't know. But we were in a lot of meetings and it was just, I found the pandemic actually much more eerie. When our orchestra and Syracuse shut down. It was more just half terrifying, half exhilarating, just new experience type of thing. The pandemic was just sort of like, oh my goodness, what's going on? What do we do?
How long is this going to last? I mean, that was a major question. I found this thing somewhat recently when the pandemic hit because people were talking like, yeah, it's going to be the school's shut down for a couple of weeks. So I wrote out for the kids. I was like, Hey, I've got a plan. Here's things we can do for the next three weeks. And it was like, we're going to go on a hike. We're going to do these things. And I looked back, I found this thing much, much later. I was like, oh my goodness. If we had any idea, it's probably best that I didn't have any idea what was coming. And I think a lot of people maybe didn't, which in hindsight I think is probably good. Probably helped me stay a little bit more mentally together.
Leah Roseman:
When you got kind of parachuted in by Pinchas Zukerman was our music director at the time to play Principal Second. What was that like meeting him for the first time working with him?
Jeremy Mastrangelo:
It was incredible. I'll be honest with you. To me, it still feels like when I think about it, it was like being thrown a life preserver when you're drowning in the ocean. So I'd had a certain amount of work lined up and the work was starting to come to an end. And I had summer work lined up, but nothing really immediately. So I get an email one day, it was from Nelson McDougall who at the time was a personnel manager. And it just starts out and it says, hi, Pinchas Zuckerman mentioned that maybe you would want to do some work. And I'm like, what? A, I never met the guy. I've actually never even been to a concert of his. I just never crossed paths with this person. Why on earth would he have any idea what's going on here? Or whatever.
And to me, it felt like the kind of thing, you read the stories in the Bible about, you find this thing on the ground, you have no food. You wake up, there's this thing, and it's like, where'd this come from? What is it? I don't even know. I'm just glad it's here. And so I started coming here. Actually, no, I have to clarify this. The first time Nelson emailed me, I had some sort of concert in Syracuse and said, sorry, I can't do it. And then he got in touch with me again, and I told him the same thing the second time. The third time I was like, you know what? I'd better take this or else it may not happen again. And all I had to do, I had to work out getting out of a single concert, which was granted. And I came up and I played one week, and it was like, oh my goodness. It was one of the most exhilarating musical experiences I think in my life still stands out in my mind. It was a week that Hannu Lintu was here conducting, and it was just incredible. I called my wife, I was like, "I had no idea this place existed. This was unbelievable." And she's like, yeah. She's like, it's a great orchestra. How come you didn't know that? I was like, I didn't know. So the whole way I ended up coming here was I just feel incredibly fortunate to have been introduced to the orchestra that way and to get to work with Pinchas and get to know this orchestra before I ever took an audition or anything here.
Leah Roseman:
What are your feelings about for people that have never played in an orchestra? It's kind of like an organism when it's great, it's amazing the communication we can have.
Jeremy Mastrangelo:
Yeah, I feel like the best orchestral experiences are the closest to chamber music experiences where there's that communication and understanding with your peers and your colleagues. It's something that you can have great orchestras where there's not necessarily that level of communication and connection. I mean, you can have great players who don't necessarily make this effort to do this. And it's the thing that I love about this orchestra is that it really does feel so much like a chamber type of environment where there's just a lot more personal interaction, a lot of communication that happens. I remember when I was at Interlochen and for high school, we had two orchestras, the regular big orchestra, then we had the string orchestra. And the string orchestra was run by the viola professor David Holland. And his goal was to not be involved at all in the end as far as conducting the orchestra.
So what it got to at the end is we'd be in performances and he would just walk off the stage and just leave and we would just keep going. And in rehearsals, he would just make sure, are you paying attention to what the bases are doing? Are you watching the bow and matching the concert master? So all these things that, for me, it was eyeopening that orchestra could be like a quartet, which that's what I always loved, was doing chamber music much more than orchestra when I was younger. And it was the first time I'd experienced something like that. And other than maybe a couple very special summer orchestras that we did for a number of years, I think it's hard to find that sometimes with professional groups, but you do find it at times, and it really, it's so exciting when the orchestra has that type of connection and it has that feeling of intimacy.
Leah Roseman:
Now you're known for your pithy and witty comments in rehearsals and on breaks, and one of them I remember you saying is there's times when no one should be looking at the conductor.
Jeremy Mastrangelo:
It does sound like something I'd probably say, yeah, I mean this is not a slam on conductors or anything, but this is just sort of a reality of how orchestras kind of work best at times and understanding what the role of the conductor is and then what the role of the orchestra is, the responsibility that the orchestra has for maintaining ensemble and stuff like that, regardless of what's happening on the podium, things like ensemble are our responsibility. You can't - you know the conductor doing this? The conductor goes like this, and everybody plays with what they see at the same time, it will sound a mess because light travels at a different speed than sound. So you go like this, everybody plays when they see it and their sound develops and happens at different times, and the ensemble's just horrendous. So making the ensemble work is the responsibility of the orchestra.
The conductor is there to provide interpretive ideas, tempo ideas, phrasing, things like that, balance issues, all those kinds of things. But the ensemble work is the responsibility of the orchestra. A couple of years ago, I heard, there's a guy I went to school with for a couple of years at CIM, Frank Wong, who's now Concert Master of New York, Phil, and he made a comment in an interview to exactly that same point. He said, look, he said, it doesn't matter who's up there conducting, we have a responsibility to, we will sound great and we will play together all the time because we're the New York Philharmonic and that's our job. And then like I said, the conductor's there to provide other things, but the conductor's not there primarily to make sure it's together. The physics don't allow it to happen. So, you know.
Leah Roseman:
Now you're married to a violinist, as am I, which can be wonderfully supportive, I think. And it might be interesting to talk about things like you have some of your family background is Italian, and I know you've traveled there a little bit to Italy, and you went to Cremona with Sara when you were younger. What was that experience about going to the birthplace of violin?
Jeremy Mastrangelo:
It was very, very cool. And not just for the violin aspect of it. There's actually this thing and this, it still kind of blows my mind when I think about it. So growing up as a kid, my dad's side of the family is Italian background and his relatives, my grandmother, I never met my grandfather, unfortunately, he passed long before I was born. But we would go visit my grandmother a couple of times a year and always at Christmas time, and my grandmother, every year you'd get the same gift. You'd get a thing of socks, you'd get a soap on a rope and you would get Torrone candy. So it's this little nougat candy that has almonds in it. And as a kid, I would read on the back of the box how this candy was invented in Cremona and it was supposed to resemble this big clock tower in the city.
And this is something from my childhood that I'd completely hadn't thought about it in ages. And Sara and I made a first trip to Italy in 2004, and we were going to go to Cremona to meet this violin maker that had been recommended by a friend. Sarah was looking for an instrument. And I remember we're driving into Cremona and I see this clock tower and all of a sudden this flood of memories and connection to this thing, this candy that I'd had as a kid from my grandmother. And then you see that they sell it in Cremona, of course, and this is the birthplace of this candy. So I mean, even more so than the violin thing, the first thing that hit me was this buried memory of this connection with my grandmother, which was pretty neat. But there's still the violin maker that we both now play his instruments Vittorio Villa.
He made a crack. There's still over a hundred violent makers that live in Cremona, and he insists because it's a cheap place to live and because violin makers tend to be kind of frugal. So he said, yeah, there's still a lot of violin makers here, but not necessarily because of the history. It's just because they're very practical. But it is a, it's a small, beautiful city. There's great shots in the film, the Red Violin, of Cremona, and you see the clock tower there and on, I forget if it's certain days of the week, there's a market that they set up in front of the clock tower and sort of like a piazza there. And there's opening shots in the film that are shot there. And it's just a beautiful, beautiful city. The history is so rich and violin making in itself is such an interesting art form with a lot of mystique to it, a lot that's still not quite understood. And I find things like that fascinating and alluring.
Leah Roseman:
And I'll just point listeners who haven't heard my episode of Theo Marks, a violin maker and connection with many people we know, a really interesting episode. So you said Sara was going to buy a violin from Villa, but you ended up buying one. Was it at the same trip?
Jeremy Mastrangelo:
No. So actually what happened was, Sara, she goes, we try out the violins. And so she commissions an instrument, but she's not sure if she wants the Stradivarius copy that he makes or the Guarneri copy that he makes. So he says, you know what? I'll send them both to you. Pick out, pick which one you'd like, the one you prefer, and sell the other one. And we're like, okay. So the instruments show up, she prefers the Guarneri copy, and then we have this Strad copy, which then sat in our house for years because it's just not the easiest thing if you don't have an infrastructure and a network to go selling instruments. We tried for a little bit, but somebody sends you an email, they're like, yeah, I want to try the violin. Can you ship it to me across the country? And it's like, how do I know I'm ever going to see this thing again?
I find the whole thing, the business aspect of it kind of perplexing. So it was just sitting in our house for a few years and I had reached a point where I was just looking to try something different and I was like, funnily enough, we have a violin sitting in the house collecting dust, so maybe I should dust it off and see what it sounds like. And so I started playing on it and it has certain qualities that I find really attractive. There's a real, I think, sweetness to the sound. There's other things I find I'd love maybe a little bit more someday if I get a different violin. But I've been happy with it. It matches Sara's obviously very, very well. So when we play together, there's no issues there. Same violin maker,
Leah Roseman:
And you put together some lovely duo videos with her, which I'll point people to as well. I can listen to those. So let's go back to your violin education. You studied with a couple of very well-known teachers.
Jeremy Mastrangelo:
Yes. I was very fortunate, well, first of all, to have had, oh goodness, I mean from the very beginning, my first violin teacher, and if you don't mind, I mean I won't go down the rabbit hole too much, but I mean just very sort of an interesting, my background with my teachers, my very first violin teacher was the one my brother Dave studied with. His name was Rafail Sobolevsky. He was an immigrant from Russia. He'd left the Soviet Union in the late, maybe mid 1970s and had been sort of an up and coming soloist there who was being sort of trotted all around Europe as any number of soloists were by that government. And he ends up moving to New York City. He has a small studio in Syracuse. He taught for a little while at the university. So he was my first violin teacher for seven years.
It's who I got started with. And I'll circle back to him because there's a really interesting story that ties in with the pandemic and sort of a crazy, crazy connection. But I studied with him for about seven years, so until I was like 13. And then he said, you know what? I am not going to be making this drive anymore to Syracuse every week. He told my parents, you need to drive down to New York every weekend for lessons. Now my dad, who vocationally or professionally, he sold radiology equipment. He was on the road all the time. You've got four kids, you're not driving down to New York City every weekend for violin lessons. So all of a sudden without a teacher, my parents were a little bit, were sort of like, gee, what are we going to do? And at the time Dave was at, I think he was in school, he was at SMU down in Dallas.
And he calls up one day and he's like, Hey, I just heard that there's this guy he plays in Atlanta Symphony now he's coming up to Eastman School, which is in Rochester, like an hour from us in Syracuse. And he's going to be playing with the Cleveland Quartet. He's supposed to be pretty good. His name's Bill Preucil. Maybe you can get lessons with him. My mom being the kind of mom she is, she's, there's always these sort of great quality. It's the flip side of a personality to erase. So my mom is just a person who, she just goes whole hog into things and she can just go from nothing to a hundred instantly, just one of these people kind amazing that way. Just a wonderful, wonderful energy. And so in just a real kind of boldness, so Bill moves to Rochester that summer. She calls, this is back in the days before, obviously internet and looking people up.
She calls Rochester information, she gets his home phone number and she calls him up, this is what moms do. And she's like, Hey, Mr. Preucil, I've got this kid. Could you give him some lessons? And he's like, I don't really teach high school kids my schedule, I'm touring a lot. The lessons aren't regular. She's like, look, can we just come play for you and just make a decision after that? And I said, okay, sure. So we go to his house in Rochester. My dad is accompanying me, I play for him and everything. And it ends up working out that he took me for two years in high school, and then he's the one that encouraged me to go to Interlochen. He said, look, if you're going to study with me as an undergrad, I want you to have a break. So it's not like four years of me, then another four years of me.
So two years and then a break, and then you can study with me for undergrad. And the thing, it's funny, my dad always talks about this. We're in this guy's house, we still have no idea his reputation or really anything about him. And my dad said he's looking at his CD collection and he notices that in his CD collection are recordings of him. And that's when my dad was like, maybe this guy's pretty good. Again, we had no idea. We were just looking for a teacher. And he was unquestionably, I think probably the biggest musical influence on me in terms of, I think there's something of such great value, especially at a young age, to get a certain sound in your ears.
And for the longest time, I could pick out on any recording, it's like hearing a parent's voice. I could easily pick him out of a lineup of a hundred violinists. And just something about the sound that, and I think especially then I think was really just this still to my ears, one of the most beautiful violin sounds I've ever heard in a way of getting around the instrument that also lent itself to this type of, I'd say like a vocal quality in his playing. But I was also, when I went to Interlochen, I had great teachers there. My teacher my second year was this guy, Hal Grossman, who still was a huge influence on me in terms of understanding how to start to approach Bach and interpreting Bach.
You're a kid, you open up something like the G minor adagio, and it just looks like a whole mess of notes. It's like, I don't know where to even start with this thing. It's just like it's chords, it's notes that look really fast, but they're not really fast. How does this make any sense? And he was great at, and very influential for me as far as being able to take a look at this thing on the page and make some sense out of it, understand the structure, how to phrase, looking for various lines to give you direction and stuff like that. So I had him for a year in high school, and then for grad school, when it came to that time, I remember talking to Bill and asking him about if I could study with him for a grad degree. And he said, at this point, he's like, you've studied with me long enough that you kind of know what I'm going to say before I say it.
He said, I think it's time for you to move on. So he had a couple recommendations for teachers. And so I ended up at University of Michigan with Paul Kantor, who's just a great, great guy. And that's where I also met Sara. So if for nothing else, I'll be honest with you, the education was in some ways kind of secondary to the fact that I was fortunate enough to meet Sara there. And just the environment at Michigan was also one that very, very different from the small conservatory type of environment of Cleveland, a much bigger school, even when you're on the campus that has the music school, the campus itself much bigger, then you're just part of a major university, which was a lot of fun. So it was a nice way to finish up my education. And at that point I was like, man, there's no way I could get another degree. So done with school. It's time to move on. So it worked out.
Leah Roseman:
Now, your first teacher, what was his name?
Jeremy Mastrangelo:
Yeah, Rafail Sobolevsky.
Thank you. If you don't mind me sharing the story, because this sort of blew my mind. He's somebody that, again, I stopped studying with him when I was about 13 and then completely lost touch with him. My brother Dave actually lived with him for a couple years in New York when Dave was in grad school there at Mannes studying with Sally Thomas, which remind me to circle back to that because there's a connection there that I want to talk about that I find funny. But so I completely lost touch with him. And then at a certain point I'm like, gosh, I wonder if I could ever reconnect with him, find him or anything. And then I find out that he passed, maybe it was like 2012 or something, and I sort of unfortunately missed the chance to reconnect with my first violin teacher. Then in the middle of the pandemic 2021, and again, just kind of out of the blue, I get an email one day, and it's this lady in New York and she's telling me how a friend of hers just purchased an apartment in New York and it had belonged to this guy, Rafail Sobolevsky. And there were still items there, the apartment that they were just looking to get rid of. And so she did a Google search to see if she could find any students of his who might be interested in any of these items.
And she found my name through something and looked me up. And so she gets in touch with me and I was like, well, what do you have? And she said, well, I've got some framed items, I've got some records, but the writing's all in Russian. And I was just like, you know what? Yeah. I said, send me the prints, send me the, and there were a couple little bookends, just like mementos, right? So this stuff, the getting it here from New York was in itself kind of a nuisance and everything. But what fascinated me was, so these records show up, and we had only just purchased a record player sort of randomly because my daughter had gotten into picking up some records as decorative items on the wall. And I was like, well, you've got these great records, it'd be nice to actually listen to them. So we'd bought a record player at the Shopper's Drug Mart. It's like you just something just sitting in one of those random things. You can buy a PlayStation there, you get record players. So I put this thing on, and again, it's all cyrillic. I can't read it or anything. I start listening, and the first record I listened to was the Bach, the C major solo Sonata.
And I'm listening like, oh my gosh, it's like an old record. The playing. The playing is phenomenal. And I'm listening. I'm like, it's not because you get familiar with some of the old recordings. I said, it's not Milstein, it's not, but it's of that era.
But the playing, it's super clean, it's just different. And I start to think, is it possible that this is Rafail?
Recording of him? So the first thing I did was I've got a cousin who worked for a number of years as a journalist for AP in Russia. So he's fluent. And so I take a picture and I send him a picture of the record label. And I was like, Hey, can you just tell me what this thing is? And then as I'm waiting to hear back from him, I'm like, wait a second. There's ways of figuring this out nowadays. So Google translate and got the thing when I load it up and when I first see that, yes, it reads it and it says Rafail Sobolevsky playing on these records. And it just floored me because I never heard the guy in his prime. By the time he moved to the us there were all sorts of issues, and he made reference and allusion to how he had to immigrate, which was very, very challenging.
He managed first to get out by going to Israel because at the time the Soviet government was allowing some people to leave first to go to Israel, and then he came to the us. But the whole story about how he left was it was very dramatic. He reached a point where he knew he was being watched by the KG B because they were suspicious that he might want to try to defect. There were issues with his career. By the time he got to the us, his playing was not what it had been. And so there were always these things about Rafail. He's a bit of a hacker. Who knows if he was ever really that good. And then there's these records and I'm listening, oh my goodness. He was not only good, he was a first rate talent and listening to these recordings, he was, I think at the time I figured it out, maybe in his early to mid twenties, he'd done Queen Elizabeth competition and things like that.
And to hear somebody of just exceptional talent at their peak with the type of confidence, knowing how good they are and just reveling in their ability, it is something that's so special. These recordings are just, the energy is so visceral, and yet the playing is so refined. It's this incredible blend of just power, but refinement. And so there's the Bach. There's a series of Shostakovich short pieces. There's the Tartini Devil's Trill Sonata, which he always told my brother was one of the pieces he was well known for in the Soviet Union. And it was just like a treasure trove of amazing recordings that for me, it was incredible as an adult and a professional to get a window into what he was like when he was younger. And then I'm thinking, oh my goodness. And this poor guy had to come and basically just teach a bunch of little snot kids. He goes from being like this brilliant. I was like, I wonder what that might've been like for him. So yeah, it was just a really kind of neat thing that happened over the pandemic and this connection I had with my first teacher.
Leah Roseman:
Well, that woman who contacted you, who went to that trouble, kudos to her. That's wonderful.
Jeremy Mastrangelo:
Yes. She found this stuff and she felt like, we can't just throw it out. I'm going to at least see if there's any student of his around that I can track down who might be interested. So I was just very fortunate that she took the time to do it.
Leah Roseman:
Now, you wanted me to remind you about the connection with Sally Thomas and your brother.
Jeremy Mastrangelo:
Yes. Yeah. So a couple funny stories about that because my brother, I think it was maybe right before he was going to go study with her at Mannes, he spent a summer at Meadowmount studying for there. So Dave goes away to Meadowmount. I went away to Interlochen into the summer. I was like 14 or something. He comes home and all he can do is rave about this young kid. He met this violinist, this brilliant kid from Canada,
And I'm like, Dave, I'm pretty good too. How brilliant are we talking, really? So he had this cassette tape from the summer, and it's James Ehnes who was at the time, I think he was 15 or something, and he does some concert at Meadowmount, and it's Bottesini, the Dance of the Goblins and Bartok's Solo Sonata. So the Bottesini is one thing. It's a virtuoso brilliant piece. You could probably find a number of kids who could navigate it and maybe even, well, Bartok's Solo Sonata is unusual for a kid that age. That's the thing that's a little bit like, okay, we're dealing with somebody a little bit different. And I listen to this thing and even with an inflated adolescent ego, I listen to this thing and I'm like, this guy's, he's at another level. And so my brother Dave gets to know James initially from meeting him and met him out when James was a kid. And
I actually came across, again as one of these pandemic days. I have this box of these old cassette tapes with just random recordings. I found this recording of James from that summer, and I had a bunch of stuff put on CD, and I listened to this thing and I was like, it's actually more impressive to me now than it was back then. But that's how Dave got introduced to James. And just one funny aside, it's just a story of days. I don't think he'd mind if I mentioned this one, but he was talking about a lesson once with Sally Thomas and he was working on some Bach and he had the International edition that I think a lot of us have worked off at some point. And he brings it in for a lesson and he's worked out his own kind of bowings and fingerings.
And Ms. Thomas just says to me, Dave, I'm just curious. There's bowings and fingerings in the part. Any reason you're not using those? And he said, well, yeah. He's like, I just don't think they're very good. He's like, I like this stuff better. And he said that she got really upset about this in a way that sort of surprised him. And so he goes home or something that day and he's talking to a friend of his and he's like, Ms. Thomas had this sort of weird reaction when I told her how much I didn't like these bowings. And he's like, well, Dave, have you ever read the dedication at the front of the book? He's like, no. So he opens up the international edition. It was edited by Ivan Galamian, and at the bottom of the page it says, it's like an acknowledgement of Sally Thomas who worked so closely with him in editing this part. So Dave's sitting there completely unknowingly insulting the addition that his teacher had made of the Bach, but that's how Dave is very, he'll just tell you what he thinks.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. James Ehnes is previous guest of this podcast, so he talked about Sally Thomas quite a bit, and actually also Tracy Silverman had studied with Galamian, and I won't give away the story, but he tells a story with relation to playing Bach for him in his first lesson that relates to this.
Actually, we talked about your trip to Italy and violins. I know you're really into cooking. I'm curious, are you a recipe user or more off the cuff?
Jeremy Mastrangelo:
You know what? I definitely started out as a recipe user, and I've gotten to the point now where if there's something new I want to try, I'll look up five versions of the same thing and sort of figure out what I think I'm going to like and sort mishmash. And now I sort of look at recipes as sort of a guideline to sort mess around. I've got a decent idea of what I like and how I like things seasoned and different things that I think will work for me. But I'm always curious to try new stuff. And I like cooking all sorts of different types of cuisines. So I've put together in our spice rack, like the tandoori spice mix for when I'm doing Indian food, I've got a Jamaican spice mix for when I'm doing Jamaican food and Caribbean food and any number of things.
I'm always curious to try new things, different types of cuisine, and I like all of it. I'm not just omnivorous in terms of types of food, but just regions and different cultures of food. I like all of it. It was one of the interesting things years ago, one of the more unique tours that the orchestra took was to the Northern Territories and among other things, it's always interesting to try different cuisine and places or you've never been so trying like whale blubber, stuff like that, or raw caribou, all these things I'm usually game to try just about anything.
Leah Roseman:
And in terms of keeping inspiration and balance in your life, I know you read a lot of books about music and composers. Are there a couple of titles you'd recommend to people?
Jeremy Mastrangelo:
Absolutely. Yeah. And it's interesting you mentioned that I do reading a lot of stuff, and I've found more recently I've been reading more nonfiction than fiction and some of the fiction I've been reading, I've been going back and sort of actually rereading stuff, but two that, well, actually three that I love are one is Brahms, who's my favorite composer. It's by Jan Swafford. It's called Johannes Brahms. Very simple, and I'll tell you a little bit more than in a second. The other one, which is outstanding, is Christoph Wolff "Bach, the Learned Musician", which I actually just repurchased. I read it the first time on Kindle. Now, the books that I had on Kindle as book books, I just like Paper better. That's a great, great book and really gives you a window into Bach as a person in a way that I know. And I find PDQ Bach, his satirical stuff, humorous.
He has one sort of poking fun at a lot of the correspondence that we have of Bach, which was a lot of very dry correspondence with the town council about like, Hey, you need to pay me stuff like that. But this actually gives you real insight into who he was as a person. And there's also a great biography of Mozarts by Maynard Solomon, another really good one to read, but the Brahms one, before Swafford, one of my brothers back in the nineties, he knew how much I love Brahms. He bought me this biography, which was probably one of the better ones at the time. But the thing with Brahms, he got rid of so much, so many traces of his personal life, burned lots of letters. He destroyed so many copies of music that he didn't think were good. So he left as little as possible.
So my younger brother, and it was really very sweet of him to do this for me one year for Christmas, buys me this biography. And the thing is, because there's so little, you'd get a biographical chapter then an analytical chapter, which I find very dull. So it was kind of a tough slog. And then Swafford writes this biography kind of, I dunno if it was late nineties, early two thousands or something, which much, much richer in terms of just the personal biographical stuff. And I absolutely, it's a fantastic biography. I'd recommend it to anybody who likes Brahms at all, but really just, well-written very insightful. I've also read, I found this in a library years ago, the letters between Brahms and Clara Schumann, which is really also very, very interesting to read. It gives you a really firsthand window into the relationship that people can write about their relationship.
But you read the letters and you really get a sense of how intimate they were and just in terms of their affection for each other. And even if you want to maybe take somewhat put in the context of the type of language people used to address each other at this time in history in Germany, all that aside, it's still incredibly, like I said, the level of affection between the two of them is remarkable throughout their entire lives. And they had such an interesting relationship. Brahms would sometimes help watch her kids when she was out touring and stuff like that. She would invest his money. So they had this kind of funny, almost like in some ways the way some spouses look out for each other. They had to some extent that level of closeness with each other. But yeah, Jan Swafford's biography, I'd recommend to anybody and the other two as well.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, we recently had this wonderful Brahms, Robert Schumann and Clara Schumann Festival, which I thought was really well done, and we got to play the Brahms Double Concerto with James Ehnes on violin and Nicolas Altstaedt on cello. And that's one of the pieces you've performed as a soloist.
Jeremy Mastrangelo:
Yes, that was one did in Syracuse with a good friend of mine, wonderful, wonderful cellist David LeDoux now in Detroit Symphony. When Syracuse shut down, he very quickly started taking auditions and got a job in Detroit. I love the piece. I love kind of the history of the piece. It was written as something of almost like a peace offering of a reconciliation sort of gesture with Joachim from Brahms. I was just very, very fortunate that the music director of Syracuse at the time, Daniel Hege, a terrific, terrific guy who really was so very supportive of me when I was first starting out with my career. And it makes a big difference when somebody puts a lot of confidence in you to do something like that. So it was meaningful for me that way also. And getting to put together a piece like that with a brilliant, brilliant colleague, it was just so rewarding.
I do remember for me, and it's something I remind myself of when we have soloists visiting, how difficult playing a concerto with an orchestra is, I call it sort of going into the tunnel for a little while, for a certain period of time. This is the thing that sort of dominates your thought and recreation and your waking, resting moments. It's this thing that, at least for me, it was anytime I've had a concerto performance with an orchestra, it becomes this thing that really kind of takes over for a while and remember starting to have those bad dreams because we were playing it towards the beginning of our season, around October or so. I remember in the summer at one point, having one of these dreams where I'm at the first rehearsal and I'm like, oh my goodness, I've been practicing so slowly. I never got to the third movement, and I've got to play it this week. What's going to happen? So there is that element of it also that goes along with playing concertos. And it's something that I really admire about soloists. It's not just the playing. There is so much more that goes into that life than just getting around the fiddle and stuff like that. There's the things of living your life as somebody on the road playing in any number of different places, having huge amounts of repertoire that everybody expects you to have flawlessly. And when I've played concertos, it's the one thing I've got coming up and I'll spend months super focused on it, and that's hard enough. So it's a remarkable thing I think that soloists do, and I've been fortunate to have a few opportunities to get to do it, get a taste of it, experience the parts of it that are amazing, and be thankful when it's done.
Leah Roseman:
So just you were saying that was a bad dream you had where you weren't far enough along in your preparation?
Jeremy Mastrangelo:
Yeah, it was one of those preparation dreams where, yeah, I think a lot of people who are maybe tend to be conscientious have these dreams of the tests that you forgot to study for whatever. And I remember I started having those dreams in the summer before it was even close to having rehearsals
Leah Roseman:
I always have these dreams, of course. And we always used to start our, it does
Jeremy Mastrangelo:
Not surprise me, by the way.
Leah Roseman:
We used to start our season with opera in September after our August break, and one of the recurring dreams I would have is that I was expected to be on stage singing, of course in Italian or something with no rehearsal. And here's your dress and go, and other many variations on those dreams. Do you have other variations of that stress dream?
Jeremy Mastrangelo:
I have the class, the classroom dream, which, and I should be careful saying this because my daughter's at university now, but I wasn't always the most diligent attender of all my classes. So I would occasionally actually have that situation happen when I was an undergrad where I might've missed a unit of say something in sociology and you show up and it's like, oh yeah, there's a quiz on this thing that I hadn't been to classes. So I still sometimes will have class related dreams, preparation things, but that's also somewhat rooted in a reality of my past. So I don't know how much is a conscientious thing and how much is like, no, this actually happened to me.
Leah Roseman:
I'm curious, with your love of history and music history, do you think in an alternative life you might've done that? Written books, done research, written biographies?
Jeremy Mastrangelo:
I think it's something I would probably really enjoy. The little bit of stuff I've done in terms of writing about music for just random little things. Years ago we in Syracuse wrote a thing for a local paper about life as a musician, or I've written program notes to various concerts I've done at different times or just talking to students about the history of pieces that they're learning.
I find it just gives so much more richness to the music. It's one of those things, do you hear it when somebody plays it? I don't know. But I think it definitely makes it more meaningful for the performer when you understand the context of when pieces were written, what the composer was going through, what they were like as a person. I still find certain things. I think about Schumann Sonata, like A minor sonata in that second movement, which I love. There is this really, there's, it's going along (singing) I'm probably not even in the right key, and it's a really kind of easygoing, you're just sort of like you're walking out in the sunshine and everything and there's this turn all of a sudden and it gets, it's like a cloud sort of comes over the music. And I have to think that somebody Schumann with his kind of well known struggles with the mental health and everything, if this somehow sort of connected with something he would've experienced in his own life, where all of a sudden things are going great and then it's like a cloud and you can't even do anything about it.
It's just something that happens to you and then you're going through this next phase that's much, much different in how do you get out of it. And I think understanding composers their lives and stuff like that, I think it just adds a richness. And if nothing else kind of helps you enjoy maybe the preparation and the practice more than just like, okay, I've got to play this in tune. I've got to have a good sound. The very kind of dry mechanical things that we spend a lot of time you're having to deal with because of the nature of the instrument, but I think it gives more depth to the music.
Leah Roseman:
Beautifully said. Thank you. Well, on that note, I'm going to thank you for today. I really appreciate you being on the podcast.
Jeremy Mastrangelo:
I appreciate your time very much, Leah. And could I have time for one more just quick story?
Leah Roseman:
Absolutely.
Jeremy Mastrangelo:
It's something that, I've never told you this, and I actually feel like this would be the ideal time to mention this. So I talked about my first week here, how much it sort of floored me playing with this group. There was something I remember very distinctly that happened that week. We're playing Beethoven's fifth. I remember at one point you hear the section like Lintu makes some sort of gesture, and all of a sudden you hear the vibrato of the entire section like change as a group. You hear it and everybody's doing it, nobody's sticking out. And it occurred to me that, wow, everybody in this group is engaged and focused and really bringing it. And what reinforced that for me was another concert. Maybe it was later that season. I remember it was Carlo Rizzi conducting Sibelius five. And the end of that first movement, there's this E-flat arpeggio thing in the first violins (singing).
It's insane. And I remember being backstage and hearing somebody work, practicing this thing, but not just playing it how sometimes, well, I'm in a section, it's not super important, but somebody practicing this thing. This is like a concerto. This person is playing us to go out there and just nail this thing. Getting ready to just lay it down. And so that was you practicing this thing backstage. And it was, honestly, I found it very, very inspiring. I was like, so here's somebody who's been doing this for a while, who's playing in the section, who is absolutely bringing it every single day, just completely, not just playing it so that it's good enough, but playing it to play it. This means something. And I think that type of, that's a really special quality I think that this orchestra has. So I admire you for that. And I think one of the reasons that this orchestra sounds, the way it does is you and people like you have that kind of integrity to maintain those types of standards.
Leah Roseman:
Well, thank you very much. I think I do remember learning that lick. Okay, well, I'll see you at work and hopefully we'll have you back on the podcast later on for a catch-up episode.
Jeremy Mastrangelo:
Sounds good. Thanks, Leah.
Leah Roseman:
I hope you enjoyed this episode. There's such a fascinating variety to life and music and this series features wonderful musicians worldwide with in-depth conversations and great music With over a hundred episodes to explore, many episodes feature guests playing music spontaneously as part of the episode, or sharing performances and albums. I hope that the inspiration and connection found in a meaningful creative life, the challenges faced and the stories from such a diversity of artists will draw you into this weekly series with many topics that will resonate with all listeners. Please share your favorite episodes with your friends and do consider supporting this independent podcast. The link is in the description. Have a great week.
