Behind the Scenes with Orin O'Brien: Her Experiences with the New York Philharmonic and Beyond

Orin O’Brien was featured in the **Oscar-winning short film** The Only Girl in the Orchestra. It shares how she was the sole woman in the New York Philharmonic in 1966 and how she paved the way for others. The documentary can currently be streamed on Netflix.

Orin’s Background

Double bassist and longtime New York Philharmonic member Orin O’Brien was introduced to classical music by her parents and changed from piano to double bass at 14 to join her school orchestra. Her mentors were NY Phil veterans, who emphasized clear articulation and understanding of the conductor’s instructions. This experience at The Juilliard School was enriched by working as a Carnegie Hall usher.

O’Brien’s teaching focused on the individual’s role within the ensemble. She encouraged her students to attend Philharmonic rehearsals for real-life learning. At one point, three of her students became members of the Orchestra. O’Brien continues to teach and remains connected with the NY Phil, attending concerts and maintaining friendships with the players.

Our Conversation

Jason Heath sat down with Orin O’Brien in 2017 to discuss her musical journey, teaching methods, and experiences with the New York Philharmonic. We also explore her relationships with other musicians, her perspectives on various conductors, her views on interpreting certain pieces, and the importance of understanding one’s role within an orchestra.

Orin, how are you doing?

I’m nervous. How are you?

Nervous? I’m nervous talking to you!

Oh, really? That’s the other way around. Is there anything you would ask me that I wouldn’t faint on the spot? Chris Mathers has been nagging me for years to do a podcast with you. I finally took his advice, and I think it’s very nice of you to call me.

I’m so appreciative of you taking the time to chat. It’s going to be super fun. Chris and I got together in Prague about a year ago for this.

Prague was the cradle of the German bow. If you know the right people, you can see Miloslav Gajdos play and sing Per Questa Bella Mano at the same time!

Funny you should mention that. I have a really good friend of mine who plays in the Lyric Opera of Chicago, Greg Sarchet…

Did you know that he studied with me at one time?

I did!

He once sent me a video of Gajdos getting off the plane with jet lag. He came right to his apartment, went to the basement, grabbed a strange bass, and recorded this, and I couldn’t believe it. It was such incredible musicianship with a strange bass and jet lag. It’s unbelievable, but if you really know the piece, you should be able to do that.

I love that you have seen that! Guess who is filming that? Me!

Were you filming it? I was. Oh my God. It’s a small world, for sure. Do you realize how great that is? Anybody that attempts to play the first bar of the piece knows how hard it is. That’s a wonderful connection.

He is such a talent.

He is overflowing with goodness, cheer, graciousness, and giving his students everything he can. That’s so wonderful.

And then Ira Gold. I know that you and Ira have known each other.

I admire Ira so much. He loves to teach. Oh, my gosh. In fact, one of my students just sent me an email yesterday. He ran down to Washington, D. C., to catch the last day of Ira’s bow clinic. He’s got a lesson later in the week, and he’s going to tell me all about it.

I invited Ira a couple of years ago to give a clinic for David Grossman and my students at the Manhattan School of Music, and of course, a couple of the other students dropped in to watch and see what was going on.

As a result, Ira was invited to give a master class the following year. I remember he asked me, he said, “Please, I’d like to have a recital too, is that possible?” So I asked the powers at the school, and they said, “No, if you’re not on the faculty, you can’t use our facilities to give a recital.”

Ira sneaked something in his master class, which really tickled me. At the end of the class, he said, “Would anybody here like me to play a Bach suite?” And the kids all said yes! So he picked up his bass and his bow and effortlessly played the entire—I think it was the first suite, from memory—with a Baroque bow that he happened to have along with his bass.

It was just beautiful. It was an example of playing something easily and beautifully with what looked like very little effort.

One of my favorite sayings is art is the concealment of effort, and you would never guess who said that.

Who?

Orin: Charlie Chaplin.

Really? Wow.

Isn’t that amazing? I thought it was somebody like Pablo Casals or Fritz Kreisler. No, it was Charlie Chaplin, who, of course, was an artist in his own right.

Ira just showed that, in essence, was the art of concealing effort. He made it look completely easy and natural. Everything he did was inspirational. The kids were totally blown away. I’m a big fan of Ira’s.

It has been fun to watch Ira continue to grow and develop as a player. I played with him in a chamber orchestra in Memphis, Tennessee, 12 or 13 years ago.

When he gives a class, he goes around to each student, touches their shoulder, and says, “Make sure you’re relaxed, and this is when you put your body here.

The expression of whatever bowing you’re doing is echoed in the way you use your body. You don’t have to use a lot, but you have to know what part of your arm and fingers come into play to get the best results. Ira is just a magician with that because he studied it so much, and he’s fascinated by it.

I love his attraction to teaching and to try to hand on what he’s learned from all the great people he studied with. It’s so important. That’s what teaching is all about: hands-on, all the things you felt were so valuable that you got, and making sure they’re passed on to the next generation. That’s really what teaching’s about.

Chris Mathers and I try to get together at least once or twice a year. He comes over and fixes my computer because I’m a computer dope. I don’t know anything, and he knows everything. And then we go to dinner and talk for three or four hours. And, of course, what do we talk about? Usually, it was about the students that we had because Chris acted as my assistant for about 15 years.

I would send him freshmen to terrify him into listening to me. He would scare them to death with a bad cop, good cop, and then they come for a lesson with me and be properly prepared, so Chris and I, we just love to talk about teaching and bass and life and music and literature and anything. Chris is one of the most esoteric people I’ve ever met, and he’s so brilliant.

Actually, I’m better at writing because I can go over what I wrote and change it, but when you speak, sometimes it just flies out of your mouth, and you can’t call it back. I’m fairly careful about that because I did a lot of interviews during my first 10 years in the Philharmonic. The PR department asked me to speak about the Bernstein Young People’s Concerts on the radio, on, television print interviews.

I did a lot for the first 10 years I was in the orchestra because it’s easy to talk about Bernstein. That’s someone you never can run short of things to say about. I have a little bit of experience in crafting things that you want to say in a better way. Instead of just babbling, you can try to be more concise, which is hard for me because I like to babble.

You’re very eloquent. It’s not surprising that they would have used you for that.

What I thought I could do, as long as you’re recording, I can read off a list. I once made a bio. Somebody asked for a brief biography, and I made a one-page thing. In the end, just for my own fun, I listed some of the conductors I’ve worked with during the past 60 years.

That’d be great.

Leon Barzin, the conductor of the New York City Ballet since it started, also founded the New York National Orchestral Association in 1930. And that he did for 30 years. That were three weekly rehearsals, four to seven, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

The National Orchestral Association’s founding conductor, Maestro Leon E. Barzin, was born in Belgium in 1900, and came to the United States with his parents at the age of two.

You’d read through the entire orchestral literature if accepted in his program. You had to audition for him. in October, and you paid 10 dollars, that was the dues for the year. Then you just sight-read through the entire literature in an orchestra with 8 basses, 10 cellos, 10 violas, 30 violins, and two of each of the woodwinds and brass. Coaches came from the New York Philharmonic and coached you one of the three days, and the Wednesday rehearsal was from 4 to 7 on NPR.

It was a live broadcast of the rehearsal, and everything was sight-reading. It really improved your knowledge of the orchestral repertoire because you started out with Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms and ended up with the Strauss tone poems.

In the 1930s, he had Myra Hess come and read through all five Beethoven piano concertos with the training orchestra, and he had Emanuel Feuermann come and, over a period of a month, read through all the cello concertos with the orchestra. You had an incredible experience. I was in that for the first couple of months, and also, he was the conductor of New York City Ballet when I was in that.

Here’s the list I wrote:

These are only a few of the people I’ve worked with.

That’s a pretty good list!

laughter

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In other words, when I tell my students, you’ve got to trust me because some conductors will ask you to do it this way, and you have to be prepared.

So you have this way, and then you have this other way, but you must be prepared for both because it’s not enough to know just one way. One tempo or one way of playing is not enough.

You have to know a couple of different possibilities to be flexible.

Let’s take a piece as an example, one that everybody knows: the recitatives from Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9. Should we start “up bow down bow” or “down bow down bow”?

It depends on the tempo. If you are preparing it for an audition, I like down bow because the conductors that I enjoyed playing it with treated it as something that you sing, like the bass-baritone that comes in the rest of the movement. You’re supposed to have that same really strong beginning.

I know that Frederick Zimmermann used to teach it down bow because you want the upbeat as strong as the downbeat in this case because it’s “O Freunde.” You want the sound to be equal, like they’re two words, at the beginning of the recitative.

I give my students a couple of pages from another friend of mine, a lovely bass player with a doctorate from Juilliard, a guy named Stephen Sass, who has written a thesis on methods of double bass playing from 1500 to 1900.

I asked him to include a chapter on the genesis of the Beethoven 9th recitative. If you look at the Beethoven conversation books, all the historical biographies, and the people who knew Beethoven speaking about that, they mention that Beethoven wanted words written underneath the bass and cello part so the players would understand what they’re supposed to be portraying.

They’re portraying each of the statements of the recitative, each of the seven sections. Each one is an outburst from the basses and cellos against what the orchestra suggests. You want a bit of the first movement.

“No, that’s not right. No. That’s not right. I want something else, something more beautiful, more noble about the brotherhood of man.”

This goes through, with each movement being rejected in turn. If you know that, you will play it more intelligently, and you also will play it in a more lyrical singing manner.

I was taught to play more staccato, and for the last 30 years or so, conductors have wanted it to be more lyrical, so I tell people to prepare it that way for auditions.

In other words, you don’t want to go so much, “dee da dee da.” That’s the way we were all taught to make it clear, but now they want more lyrical and more legato, more connected, like the human voice. That’s the way people do it nowadays.

I personally hate the way that some conductors follow the Roger Norrington idea that all the early tempos were faster. I don’t believe in that because Beethoven writes in the part where he said, “Yes, in the same tempo, but like a recitative.”

Now, if you’ve ever played a Handel oratorio or an opera, you know what a recitative is. It’s a declamation by a singer of an authoritative way of singing and explaining something.

And you don’t run through it too quickly. That’s ridiculous. You can’t express anything that way. So I like a down bow because it gives you a certain depth of sound and a certain gravity. A certain preparation of the first beat of the second measure.

In other words, the two notes should be an equal attack. Naturally, if the conductor will go very fast, then you play up bow, down bow. Generally speaking, the bowings are in the part. Either the conductor has brought his own parts with him, or it’ll be the part that’s been used by the orchestra you’re playing with for many years, or the principal bass will, in conjunction with the conductor and the first cellist, decide on the bowings.

Very often, the only time you have a choice is when you’re playing an audition behind a screen, and nobody can tell what bowing you’re using. You use what your teacher trained you with, what you feel comfortable with. I like down bow because it gives an equality of sound on both of those notes. It gives equal heft to both of those notes.

I have to tell you, I have an opinion about every note because of how Zimmermann taught it to me. He was insistent. Since he started teaching in the mid-1930s, he took over the Juilliard position.

Frederick Zimmermann was born on May 18, 1906, in New York City. He studied the double bass with Herman Reinshagen, the principal bass of the New York Philharmonic under Gustav Mahler and Arturo Toscanini. He played in the New York Philharmonic from 1930 to 1966 and taught at the Juilliard School, Mannes School of Music, Columbia University, Manhattan School of Music, and New York University.

His teacher, Herman Reinshagen, left because he wanted to go to Los Angeles for his health when he retired. It must have worked because he lived another thirty years. He died in his early nineties, so it worked very well.

He taught the same way. You should play an orchestra part just as beautifully as you play a solo. It has to be prepared with the same care and attention. Zimmermann was absolutely passionate about that. He had all of his students work on orchestra parts in such a way that they knew what they were doing.

You were supposed to have an opinion about every note. You didn’t just gloss through something or flop through it in any old way. You had to know what your function was at that point in the part, what you were supposed to be doing, and how you were supposed to play it. He was very insistent on that, which I’m grateful about, because I think the same way.

You have to prepare things so everything is perfectly prepared and you understand your purpose in playing that part. Whether you’re harmony, rhythm, or melody. Very often, we don’t have the melody. That’s about 10 percent of the time, and melodies, sometimes, are legato.

Our parts are generally not legato. They’re more accented, have more clarity, more articulation, and have more things to go with rhythm and harmony changes than with melody.

You have to play intelligently, you have to play like you’re a chamber musician, not just a bass player that’s looking at a part. You must know what else is going on and how to fit into it.

Your part is part of a giant jigsaw puzzle, and you have to know how to play your part properly. You can’t play like your part is important when it’s pianissimo. You can’t play that as loud as the first bassoon solo, or you’d be an idiot, and you’d be fired, probably. If you play really stupidly, then eventually you don’t keep your job.

It’s important for musical and essentially ensemble reasons that you actually know what it is you’re supposed to be doing, not just the notes on the page. That’s one of my passions.

I’m sure you’ve lost track of how many times you’ve heard Beethoven 9 recitatives played in an audition.

Oh yeah.

It’s just one that people seem to take to such extremes or make it eccentric.

Let me tell you exactly what I think about that. I had that problem when I came to Zimmermann.

I was very lucky in my beginning studies. I had 10 years of piano, from the ages of six to 16, before I started bass. My first bass teacher was Milton Kestenbaum, who was at the Music Academy of the West, and he began to teach me after that summer, I said, “please, will you teach me? I just love to play so much,” and he said “I’ll try to make time. I’m very busy.”

He played in the studios. He played a lot of recordings and television shows. He played “You Bet Your Life” with Groucho Marx, and he also played a lot of chamber music around Los Angeles.

I asked him once, “Why didn’t you join the LA Philharmonic? You played for so many years in the NBC with Toscanini.”

He said, “I didn’t want to play with any conductor other than Toscanini. After Toscanini, most conductors seem rather dull.”

Now I understand what he meant. I didn’t then because I was young and stupid, but I do now.

He was the first bass of the Pasadena Symphony. The Pasadena Symphony was a semi-professional orchestra that played one concert a month on a Sunday afternoon and rehearsed every Tuesday night from 7 to 10 in a high school in Pasadena. Milton played the last rehearsal and the concert, like many of the other principal players: the principal horn, principal cello, concertmaster, etc.

They were all studio players who wanted to play good music occasionally rather than the commercial stuff. The conductor that I was so lucky to work with was Richard Lert, who had studied conducting in Germany and Vienna with Arthur Nikisch and Felix Weingartner, who wrote the book on how to conduct Beethoven symphonies. I give this book to my students when they graduate, and I always tell them that when you read it, you’ll know more than most conductors know.

It’s a secret treatise about metronome markings and certain ways to play things that are problematical for conductors. How to handle difficulties like the beginning of Beethoven’s Fifth.

Many conductors have a lot of trouble with stating that because it’s got an eighth rest at the beginning, and it’s hard to convince an orchestra how to be together without beating a full bar beforehand, which is very unprofessional.

After studying with Milton one summer, he began to teach me in September, and he said, “I think you should be in the Pasadena Symphony. You’ll learn a lot. I’m putting you on the first stand with me. Play the way I play. Copy what I do. Don’t ask me any questions. We won’t have time for that rehearsal. I’ll explain at your lesson if you need an explanation.”

I got to sit with a former member of the NBC Symphony for two years, learning Beethoven’s symphonies and Brahms’s symphonies.

The conductor was a godson of Brahms. His father had been one of Brahms’s friends, so his middle name was Johannes. Richard Johannes Lert. He was a fantastic conductor. I learned Beethoven’s 9th with him, Beethoven’s 5th, Beethoven’s 3rd, most of the Beethoven symphonies, all the Brahms symphonies, a lot of concerto accompaniments, and overtures. We used to do the second act of Parsifal for Easter when other groups were doing the Messiah or something like that. Of course, we did that, too, at Christmastime.

He was a wonderful musician with a history of being a friend and a colleague of Richard Strauss in Germany in the 1930s before he and his wife fled Hitler, like many musicians in Los Angeles at that time.

I got to play with somebody like that, who knew from the horse’s mouth what Till Eulenspiegel should sound like, Don Juan, and some of those wonderful things. I got to sit next to my teacher and hear how it was supposed to sound right from the very first lesson, practically.

When I came to New York, I came with my part of Beethoven’s Ninth, all marked up from how Richard Lert had conducted it. He was extremely romantic and detailed, with an expression on every note. He had ritards and accelerandos and little things that I just loved, and I had it all written in my part.

I brought the part to a lesson, I guess my second or third lesson, and Zimmermann took an eraser and started to erase. I said, “Oh, please, that’s my favorite Beethoven ninth part. And I, oh, why are you doing that? I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be rude, but please don’t.”

He said, “I’m erasing this because this is not right for you as a student. I’m teaching you how to play this at an audition so the nine committee members and the conductor can superimpose their interpretation on your skeleton of playing what’s on the printed page. You can’t do all these exaggerations because most conductors won’t agree with this. They have their own ideas. And some cellist or violist on the committee will say that’s too exaggerated, fast, and slow. I want you to play the printed part. This means that the quarter note in your very first statement, the quarter note upbeat A, that’s your tempo for the whole page.”

I was astounded, and I was shocked.

Of course, naturally, I realized in five minutes that he was teaching me how to play an audition correctly. When you’re in an orchestra, you have to be the tabula rasa for the conductor. You have to be there supporting whatever the conductor tells you to do then, and you have to be ready to do it. That’s what he was training me and anyone else who studied to do.

You have to understand the basic skeleton first. After that, you can have your own ideas, and you can play them, you can show them to your students, and you can play them for them in different ways. But you must also explain exactly what he explained to me, which I think is right.

If you do an exaggerated crazy version, that’s too far from the printed page. The answer from the personnel manager will be, “Thank you very much, don’t call us, we’ll call you!”

It’s a joke, but it’s true. ” Next! Thank you very much,” after five minutes. If you play a very wild version of that.

I find a lot of students that come to me today. They’re full of a lot of crazy YouTube performances that I don’t allow my students to watch. I tell them, you listen to Toscanini recordings, Szell, or Reiner with Chicago for Strauss because he knew Strauss. He was a friend of Strauss and premiered many of his operas. He knew exactly what Strauss wanted, and it shows in those performances with the Chicago Symphony.

Bernstein was also very good with Strauss and with many other things, but I would say choose Szell with Cleveland and choose Toscanini with the NBC or with the Philharmonic for anything else because those are bedrock interpretations. They’re solid. They’re not too fast, not too slow. They’re exactly what you should learn from when studying how to play something the best way.

Then, when you get a job in an orchestra, you have to do whatever the conductor says or the principal bass wants to do. That’s different. Then you’re flexible. You can do that, but you’ve got to know the bedrock truth about the best conductors and the best performances. I don’t let my students listen to the lowest-level philharmonic conducted by Joe Shmoe.

I don’t want them to see this. I don’t want them to hear it. If it isn’t Szell or Toscanini, or Bernstein, for a lot of things, too, for Mahler symphonies. You can have Bernstein, Bruno Walter, and Dimitri Mitropoulos.

Stick to those names, and you won’t go wrong. You won’t go far afield. You may have a metronome of one or two details different, but you won’t have the basic feeling of the piece wrong. As Hamlet says in the soliloquy, “tear a passion to tatters,” that finishes you at an audition. Unless you’ve got a crazy conductor who likes that, and I don’t know of anybody today. I really don’t.

I don’t think that conductors hear a player before they get through the preliminaries. Your colleagues are going to listen to the preliminaries. I would say most of the teachers and players that I know today are pretty much like Ed Barker, Hal Robinson, Max Dimoff, people like that who tell their students the truth, which is that you have to observe the printed page.

You have to take that as your basis. If you don’t do that, you’re in danger.

One of my main teachers was Michael Hovnanian, who played in the Chicago Symphony for many years.

Oh, I know him. Yes. He wrote that wonderful article about how the Arpeggione Sonata could be in the original key. The scholarship that he shows is great.

I remember him saying exactly what you said to me. He said he realized when he started doing well on auditions he just decided to play exactly what was on the page and not worry about anything else.

And amazing that he started to win, right?

Yeah. That was the moment that all of a sudden, he started advancing and started being in the finals.

I think people have that misconception, though. They’re trying to stand out in a certain way.

I had a lovely young lady come here for a lesson with me today. Don Palma is teaching her at New England Conservatory, and she’s only a sophomore. She’s already so smart! She asked me, “Can I play the second movement of the Bottesini Concerto No. 2?”

I said, “You’re Only a sophomore, and you’re studying that?” I thought, “Oh my gosh, that’s so advanced.”

I said, “go ahead.” So she played. I said, ” Wait a minute. You don’t want to make an opera out of this yet. You have a long way to go before you get to the variations in the middle of this movement. This is only the basic theme. Don’t do that.”

Don’t do what Jeff Turner says in your shift; don’t give a meow. He calls it a meow, which I think it’s really sweet, so it’s less offensive than, ” don’t do a slide, that’s so ugly.” Instead, he just says, “Please, less meowing,” which is a charming way of correcting someone. So I said, “How about that?”

So she snapped right away. She realized it immediately, and she corrected it, and she found out. I said, “You want to do that because you want to save some of the little changes that you’re going to make for later. You don’t want to do it immediately and spoil the beginning basic theme. It’s perfectly lovely.”

She was really smart. She’s going to be a terrific player. It’s great to see somebody like that. So young, too.

I’ve heard every audition at the Philharmonic, I think, since 1974. That was the first year that they allowed members of the section to take place. Before that, it was only the principal players and the assistants who were allowed to be at an audition and the conductor, of course. After that, we had something in the contract that allowed members of the section to take part, which is great.

I’ve heard every single audition since then, and believe me, accuracy counts. It really does. I agree with Michael Hovnanian. Really, that’s very important.

What a tremendous perch to take in decades of bass players coming out. What makes people sit up and take notice versus, “Next, thank you very much.”

A very good sense of rhythm. Impeccable rhythm is one thing, and impeccable intonation. If you’ve got that, you’ve got like 85 percent right there.

Zimmermann used to say, “If you don’t have excellent intonation and rhythm, nothing else counts.” He was right in saying that. Before we get into what makes a successful audition, I wanted to talk to you a little bit about Zimmermann.

That’s why I suggested you talk to Don Palma; he had a year with him before Zimmermann died. The only reason that he called me up and asked to study with me was because he knew that I’d studied with Zimmermann and that I also started teaching at Zimmermann’s request because Zimmermann became ill for a year in 1959.

He had phlebitis, and he had to keep his leg up on the couch so he couldn’t stand up and teach and play. He took a year off from the Philharmonic, and somebody else went to sub for him there, and it happened to be that bass player, Jimmy Bernand, was the first bass of City Opera, so I got all his work.

I did the busiest year that I ever had done at that point, because Zimmermann was sick and the other people filled in all in a row. We all just moved up one, in a way. I started to teach then, and I was paralyzed with fear. I didn’t sit down for the first five years that I taught because I thought people would think I was being rude if I didn’t stand.

Zimmermann stood when he taught, so I thought I should stand. I only gave up and sat down after about five years. I had very little experience teaching. A little bit in high school, to younger players, but for teaching someone that is interested in studying with you, I wouldn’t know what to say.

He said, “Just tell him what I told you.”

I first came to Zimmermann after studying only three years in Los Angeles with Kessenbaum. He was a wonderful teacher, but he showed more by example, by the way he played, and by taking me through tons and tons of etudes, chamber music, and things like that.

I did a lot of playing, but I didn’t really know what I was doing very well, and he wasn’t so specific and particular, like Zimmermann was, about how every single note had to be just a certain way.

When I came to Zimmermann, I was using the bow, and of course we were all playing gut strings in those years, I was using the bow as if I felt if I practiced enough, eventually the bow would do whatever it was doing by itself.

I didn’t realize that I had to control the bow. I felt somehow the bow was magic, and it would somehow do some nice things if I learned how to practice enough.

At first, I came, and I was using too much bow on every note. Zimmermann had two little half-bows that he used for teaching. One was a French bow frog, and the other one was a German bow, and they were about half the length of a regular bow.

And he asked me to play the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Scherzo with the little half-a-bow, and of course, I ran out of bow in the first two notes.

He said, “Now, use this little bow and control the amount of bow, and you’ll find that when you go back to your own bow, you’ll feel like you’re driving a Cadillac. You’ll understand how you have to use it. If you stay in the upper third of your real bow, when you’re playing that, you can play the whole thing using one-third of the bow. Then it’ll be soft enough. Then it’ll really be pianissimo, and you’ll have no trouble controlling that.”

That was amazing to me. He said, “When you’re using so much bow, you’re letting your wrist flop around.” I thought I should use a lot of wrist motion, another misconception about any bow. Including a cello bow. He said, “You’re letting the tail wag the dog.”

Suddenly, the light bulb went on, and I thought, “Oh, I have to control how I put the bow on the string.”

He said, “You’re still using too much bow. Let me mark a chalk mark.” He kept chalk by the music stand, and so did I. He put a mark in the middle of the bow. He said, “now, when you’re playing eighth notes, don’t go past this mark. In fact, you can even use less. I’ll just put a mark at the quarter of the bow.”

He said, “You’re going to 42nd Street when you want to get off the train at 34th. Do you realize that?” I thought that was such a marvelous image. I use that all the time. And I also use chalk.

Violinists have three years of 50 different kinds of bowing, whereas for bass players, you play a couple of months, and you’re thrown in the orchestra and have to play very difficult material with no bowing advice whatsoever.

People don’t think that’s important when they start out. They think, “Oh, I gotta find out where the notes are.” The left hand becomes an obsession. And it’s really the bow arm,

Zimmermann said, “That is our voice. That’s 90 percent of it. 10 percent the left hand, 90 percent of the artistry is in the bow.” And I have to say, I think it’s true.

If you see a wonderful, experienced, clever player like Ira Gold, you realize how many different sounds you can make with this piece of wood with hair on it.

That’s another thing. Zimmermann had no prejudice against either German or French or for one another. He played both because when John Barbirolli was the music director of the New York Philharmonic in the late thirties after Toscanini, he wanted the whole bass section to play French bow.

So Fred Zimmermann switched to French bow. He taught himself how to play the French bow. He also felt that his students should also have the opportunity to play and audition for Philadelphia, which preferred the French bow for many years. For about 40 to 50 years, they were pretty much all French bow.

He thought that it was a shame if his students didn’t get to audition because of the wrong bow. So he taught both, and I thought that’s the right attitude to have, that either bow is wonderful.

As he used to say, you don’t play with your bow. You play with your brains.

I have talked about this endlessly, and we laugh because many people have the old prejudice from a hundred years ago.

My teacher told me when I came to New York that The Franco-Prussian War was still going on, or the Hundred Years War between France and Germany.

[laughter]

It’s still going on as far as both are concerned. Don’t be surprised if somebody scorns you because you play the German bow. Fortunately, I haven’t experienced much of that, and certainly, it’s an indication of stupidity if you hear anything like that now. It’s that the person doesn’t know anything. They don’t have any experience.

But at the time, 60 years ago, it still was a bit of a thing. I was shocked that Zimmermann changed to French bow because the conductor didn’t want to see anybody with German bow in the section.

That’s already from the 1930s, so that’s ancient history, and I’m glad it’s not now.

He said this to every student. Everybody that studied with him all compared notes that he’d say this, that he’d say that.

He said that to everybody. I love it because it’s very clear what’s meant. You don’t let the bow do anything it wants. You have to steer it correctly to get the best result.

What a revolutionary teacher. What a fantastic experience it must’ve been to study with him. I’ve had A Contemporary Concept of Bowing Technique on my music stand since I was a teenager.

One famous colleague looked at it when it came out, and he said, what’s so hard about this? It’s only two notes.

I had a good laugh over that. It wasn’t printed when I studied with Zimmermann. He hadn’t written it yet, but he had notes. He had a notebook with many examples from the orchestral literature, particularly with the bowing pattern written on one line and, above it, the actual notes of the passage. He would make the bowing symbol the open strings, or the A and the E, and he thought that was a great way to understand how the bow works before you start worrying about fingerings.

He said, “Here’s one pattern. Would you do eight variations of that, please?” By then, I had a copyist stamp. That’s how I made a little extra money, by copying things for people, because that was before the age of Xerox. That was, like, the cave days. We were living in caves then… And we were copying I had ink, and I had a special pen, that the nib spread slightly for the larger notes and so on.

I had very good copy handwriting and musical handwriting. Zimmermann said, “Here, take this and make me a page with eight variations.” Then he would give me patterns in 6/8. So, I basically hand-copied that whole book.

He took my copies, especially of the permutations, which are complicated to keep your eye from crossing while you’re copying it. He ended up taking that to the publisher and making the book out of that.

He had me do that by hand, and so by the time I had done all those exercises, and actually, I practiced them, took them home, I wrote them, I practiced them, I brought them back the next lesson. To me, it was a revelation.

It helped things that were always so difficult for me, like the last movement of Mozart 40th. I couldn’t manage the two slurred and two separate. I thought the two separate had to be off the string. That was one of my first stupid misconceptions because I saw dots over the notes. Zimmermann said, “What are you doing?”

I said, “I thought I saw the dots.”

He said, “Don’t you realize that when the dots are in part, that’s only the editor’s way of saying, not slurred? It doesn’t have to be staccato. You must understand that even violinists don’t play that off the string.”

I said, “You can play it on the string?”

“Yes,” he said, “and keep your bow on the string, use two inches of the bow, maybe one inch would even be better if it’s a faster tempo, and just play like the bowing pattern.”

Oh my God, I suddenly could play it. I couldn’t play it before, and suddenly, that understanding of the basic violin bowing technique made it possible for me to play like a musician instead of an idiot.

To me, this book was unbelievable, a revelation. How to practice it is to ensure you stay on the string legato if you’re practicing for something fast. If you’re practicing spiccato, start staccato at 92 to the half note, go until you get to 132, and then go back on the string. You’re not required to do off the string past 132, you’re not required. That’s not a requirement that they can force you to do. Only certain people can do past 132, and that’s sautille, and it’s a very soft volume. It’s not a loud volume. If you want louder, then you go on the string.

There are certain formulas that you need to know as a professional string player that many people are not taught. That’s what I found. The Zimmermann book was so essential to help you that it gave you formulas to play any passage.

That’s what every violinist has. They know this from age six, and we don’t get this most of the time. That’s one of the things I was so grateful for. When I started teaching, I started listening to the lessons that he gave other players because I was trying to pay him back for what he taught me for free for a couple of summers.

He said, “no, I don’t want you to go anymore to a festival or anything.” I never went to another festival after attending the Music Academy for four summers. He said,” I feel that you lose too much in the summer.” He said, “I’ll teach you if you’ll do some copying for me.”

I tried to organize his music library. At the same time, while I was writing down in longhand and then taking it home and typing it on cards, I sat in his teaching room, which is the living room, and listened to him teach, so I got a good education on his approach to everyone, which, by the way, was to the individual.

He used to say, “If someone comes in with a broken leg, you don’t give them a Band-Aid and an aspirin. You try to set their leg and give them six weeks in a cast. You don’t treat someone for something that they don’t need, or you don’t fix something that they badly need so they can go ahead and do something else.”

You must fix something wrong before you can do anything else. You can’t teach repertoire if they can’t handle the bow with a good understanding of what the music means and how to execute it. You have to have some direction for this. You can’t learn it on your own, mostly.

That’s why people study the violin for ten years. You can’t learn something like that really well on your own. You have to have some guidance. He taught to the individual. He didn’t hand the same stack of music to everybody except A Contemporary Concept of Bowing Technique.

He was a big fan of etudes, and so am I. Believe it or not, I’ve had a few pupils, very few, that didn’t like etudes. I’d say, “Okay, we’ll make whatever piece you’re studying into sort of an etude.” But I really think that etudes are great because they give you a chance to do something in a pattern and get very good at it.

You can do the Storch Hrabe 57 Etudes. I don’t teach the Bille Method, but some of those etudes are wonderful. They’re very musical, a lot of people love them. The Findeisen Etudes are incredibly difficult. One of the summers that I studied with Zimmermann, he was editing the 25 Findeisen Etudes for International Music, and he said, “will you come and write down the fingerings and bowings while I play through?”

In his living room, he played through the Findeisen Etudes while I wrote down the fingerings and bowings. I saw him play them all. They are playable, but they’re the most difficult etudes that I know. I can’t play all of them. I’ve studied a few of them, but I didn’t have the time to study all of them.

They’re really worthwhile. The Gradus ad Parnassum too. I know Don Palm is a big fan of Gradus. They allow you to repeat certain patterns until they’re ingrained into your fingers and arms. I’m a fan.

People today start taking auditions at ages 19, 20, and 21, and they want to be prepared for that. But it does help to have a background in all the basic things we need as players.

Most violinists have it starting at age 3 or 4. We have to wait until we’re older and tall enough and strong enough to hold down a bass string.

By the way, up until 1960-61, most players played on gut strings.

What was that whole transition like? Talk about a total revolution in how people were taught and even string height.

I’ll tell you exactly, and I’m glad you asked. Chris Mathers wrote me that one of your fans asked what it was like with the Gunther Schuller Quartet.

I’d be very happy to talk about that because that was one of the musical experiences of my life that I would never forget. I worked with the composer Gunther Schuller and with my three beloved colleagues, who are all gone, but I will always remember. because of their kindness to me and because of what they showed me about playing and about what we did together and for Gunther, too.

Bob Gladstone was one of Zimmermann’s pupils who was first, I think, in the New Orleans Symphony, then in Pittsburgh, then he was in the New York City Ballet, and then he got in the New York Philharmonic. That’s the way it used to be. You had to be in the junior leagues, like a baseball player, and then to get into the big leagues, you must have plenty of experience.

Bob won the Philharmonic in 1956, and he recommended me for the New York City Ballet, which was wonderful because the conductor knew me, because it was Barzin, and he knew me from having played in the National, and he tried me out for a week with a couple of other players, and he picked me.

It was just great. I got a job my last year at Juilliard. It wasn’t a long job. It was only 10 weeks the first year, but it turned out to be a wonderful job, and the players there were fantastic, and I learned a lot from them.

Around 1959, Bob Gladstone was in the Philharmonic with Fred Zimmermann. Fred Zimmermann was assistant principal for many years. They were in the Philharmonic, and I got a call one day from Bob Gladstone. He said, “I am doing Gunther Schuller a favor. He asked me if I could get together a group to play his double bass quartet because he wrote it in 1948, and he took it to Oscar Zimmerman, and Oscar Zimmerman said, “This is unplayable. It’s so hard. Nobody could play it. I’m sorry. I can’t do it.”

So Gunther asked Bob, and he said, “Do you think you could find people that could play this? Cause I’d really like to hear it.” Bob said, “You bet. I know players that can play this. So Bob called me. And he called Alvin Brim, who was another dear friend of mine and of his. He was a composer and a freelancer around New York and also a Zimmermann pupil. And Fred! He asked Fred to play.

Gunther called me up and said, ” I have handwritten parts, but I’ve lost the score. I hear you have a copying stamp. Would you copy a score for me if I give you the four parts?” I said, “Sure.”

He gave me the parts, and I spent about a month copying out a score for him, which I still have a copy of. I copied onion skin so he could reproduce it, and we all practiced and played from the score to see what everybody else was doing. We read through it after we practiced our own parts, and we read through it with Gunther one Sunday morning because Sunday morning was the only time of the week that all four of us were free because, at that time, the Philharmonic had concerts on Sunday afternoon.

Gunther conducted us, and we were astounded at the sound. In those years, Fred and I were still playing gut strings. Bob and Alvin, however, were at the forefront of putting steel on.

Bob had put steel on in the mid-fifties when Vienna strings, the Thomastik strings, began to be made really well, and he put them on. I didn’t like the sound of them under my ear. They sounded “guitary” to me. So I stuck with the gut strings, I think, just because I wasn’t willing to give them a chance.

We rehearsed for a couple of months on Sunday mornings. We did about seven or eight rehearsals and got it pretty good.

And Gunther, in the last rehearsal before he hired a recording studio in July of 1959, said, ” Fred and Orin, your strings really don’t hold the pitches of the harmonics, especially the double-stopped harmonics. They go down in pitch. The other guys there, their strings hold the pitch better. Would you mind switching to steel string for the recording tomorrow?”

We didn’t realize you need a different lower bridge set up, you need the strings broken in for a few days, because otherwise they found tinny.

We didn’t realize that if you put that on with the gut-level bridge, they’d be too high. We just ran out, bought the steel strings, and put them on. The next day, we had a recording session for three hours. I thought I was gonna bleed to death. I thought my fingers were going to be cut in half.

They didn’t, but they were very sore, because the strings were too high. . Also, it’s a different bowing technique, which I didn’t realize until I let them stay on and went home and tried to practice. We finished the recording, and I couldn’t get over that Fred also played an encore on that recording, which is not on the commercial version.

He played an arrangement of the Bach 6th Cello Suite Sarabande, which Gunther had arranged for four basses. And Fred played the top line, and it was just breathtakingly beautiful. I couldn’t realize how he could do that with the strings so high. But he did. We were all trying our best.

Gunther was very pleased with the way it worked out, and he published it. He made an LP, which he printed with his record company in Boston. The next day, I went home and ripped off my steel strings, put the gut back on, and went to work at the Ballet.

The next year, Gunther said,” I’d like to give a concert in Carnegie Recital Hall. Three other composers and I want to give an all-composers concert, and I want the bass quartet.” So we rehearsed for another couple of weeks, and because we knew it already, it was easier to put together, and we got up and played it.

Of course, Gunther was conducting. Nowadays, kids play it without a conductor! Kids in school play it without a conductor! I bet they’re so talented, and they know it, and they love it, and they enjoy working on it. I coached it last year at Manhattan School with four bass players and two freshmen.

I couldn’t get over it. It was a great experience. So anyway, time goes on and we play this in the Carnegie Recital Hall, we get a wonderful review where it says it sounds like Bartok and Stravinsky and it was wonderful and virtuoso and never knew the basses could sound that way.

By then, I had put steel strings back on because my two colleagues in the Ballet, Ted Flowerman And David Walter, had changed to steel strings. And when we played it at the Carnegie Recital Hall, most of the bass players in New York were there, and they all saw and heard what steel strings could do.

So those that didn’t already have them, which were very few, switched that year. Also, that’s when Fred began to teach on steel. He left the strings on after we made the recording. He kept his steel strings on. He said, “You know why I will keep them on? Because it takes six months to teach a new student how to play a clear, pure tone on gut strings. It takes six months to get people to have that kind of finesse. And with steel, it takes five minutes.”

He said, “There’s no comparison to the ease of playing. No comparison.”

In 1960 or 61, two bass players invented the bridge adjusters, so you could have a bridge that could go up and down.

Jesse Teichel and George Andre. George was the first bass of the Met, and Jesse Teichel was a freelance bass player who later played in the Met. The two had gotten a guy together to craft the first experimental bridge adjusters, and everybody ran out and bought them. They made a huge difference.

When the weather got hot, you know what I did in the ballet for five years? My stand partner, Teddy Flowerman, was so kind to me. He used to cut little pieces of a cigar box top and put them underneath my bridge feet to raise the bridge in winter when it sank low because the wood shrank. In the summer, he’d take out the pieces. He always did it for me, so I didn’t have to know how to do it. I wasn’t very good mechanically, but he figured it out. He did it on his bass. He said, “I’ll do it on your bass.” But then the adjustable bridges took care of that.

You can’t picture how horrible it was to play an outdoor concert on gut strings with no movable bridge. You can’t imagine the torture.

Imagine playing Mahler Symphony No. 1 on gut strings in the parks with a 95-degree temperature and 100 percent humidity. We used to joke, “Oh, it’s good weather for a bass recital.”

imagine being surrounded by two bass players, like Teddy Flowerman on one side and David Walter on the other. I just learned. All I had to do was just do what they did, and that was right. It was, like, perfect. Whenever we had to play The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, we would practice the middle section together for intonation. The rest was easy.

You’ve talked a lot about joining the Philharmonic and that sort of thing. Obviously, a bunch of people asked me to ask you about the experience of being the first woman in the orchestra outside of the harpist that they would hire.

You shared a story that I just got such a kick out of.

Which one was that?

It was the one with the wardrobe cases.

Oh, that was about Walter Botti, the father of our second oboe player in the orchestra, Robert Botti. That was his dad.

Walter was so kind and so sweet and thoughtful. During my first month on tour, he said, “Just close your eyes, and I’ll guide you through the backstage melee of everybody changing their clothes in front of their trunk. And then you’ll, I’ll get you to your trunk, and you take out your clothes, and I’ll guide you back. You just keep your eyes shut.” it was so thoughtful.

I’ll tell you something: it was easy for me to make the adjustment because I knew most of the people in the orchestra. Most of the men, half of them at least, I had memorized their names when I was an usher at Carnegie Hall. When I was a student at Juilliard, my first two years at Juilliard, I ushered.

Ten shows a week at Carnegie Hall, that was part of the job. You had to usher ten shows at every concert. There were four or five concerts a week of the Philharmonic. So I got to know everybody by sight. I would say hello to them in the street. Oh, hello, Mr. So and hello, Mr. So, and I knew them because they were like heroes to all of us.

Any musician that ushered there knew the music, especially those of us who studied with people in the orchestra. We worshipped those people, and they were our heroes, and we looked up to them. We looked forward to when someone was going to have a little solo.

Bob Brennand was the first bass then, and he was still playing gut strings when I joined the orchestra. He played gut strings, I think, to the end of his life in the orchestra.

He used to ask me, “Does the Mahler first sound better with the mute or without? Why don’t you go in the back of the hall and listen?”

When we’d be putting the programs together at the front of the stage before the audience came in, he would say, “Why don’t you go?” He would make me feel like I had something to offer as an opinion, that he asked my opinion, what did the Mahler sound like?

I felt connected with the orchestra from being a student and from studying with somebody in the orchestra, and also from listening to the broadcast when I was a kid in Los Angeles. I used to listen to the Sunday broadcast of the Philharmonic.

I felt steeped in their history and in the respect for the orchestra and for the men in the orchestra. Also, the second bassoon in the ballet was Harold Goltzer, who became the assistant principal bassoon in the Philharmonic before I joined. He joined the Philharmonic in 1959. I joined in 66. So he was somebody I knew.

1941 NY Philharmonic bass section. Pictured (L to R): Anselme Fortier, Joseph De Angelis, Frederick Zimmermann, Robert Brennand, Emmanuel Tivin, C. Raviola, Homer Mensch, Max Schlossberg, D. Rybb

I knew the second trumpet, Carmine Fornarotto, was in the New York City Ballet. Ed Erwin was the associate principal trombone. He was in the New York City Ballet, and he went into the Philharmonic. Another few musicians I knew by sight, because at the end of every concert in Carnegie, the ushers downstairs have to march up to the edge of the stage and stand there to prevent the audience from going on the stage.

There are steps at the side of each side of the stage, and we would have to stand there to prevent in case an audience member from rushing onto the stage. Maybe to hug one of their favorite musicians or the conductors, we were there to prevent that. So I knew them all by sight, and I knew their names to be respectful.

I used to call them “Mr. So and So” when I joined because I thought that I was a young member and I should show respect. Then they would all say, “No, call me by my first name.” People were, by and large, very nice and very welcoming. So it wasn’t strange because I knew so many of them.

I had freelanced with the concertmaster. David Nadien became a concertmaster the same month that I joined the orchestra. Bernstein had just chosen him as the new concertmaster. I had done Baroque recordings with him. One bass, one cello stuff, Baroque stuff with him for years. So I knew a lot of them as musicians, and they knew that I wasn’t some kid just out of school. I already had 10 years of experience.

So it wasn’t difficult. They gave me the outside locker, the one that was closest to the door, so I could open my locker door and wouldn’t have to see the guys dressing in the bass room. There was a kind of mutual consideration and respect, which I think is common in any group that works together. And that’s how it was in the Ballet, which was very much mixed men and women. It was not just one or the other. There were many women in the ballet orchestra, including the concertmaster.

It was not a strange feeling for me because I had already worked. in New York for ten years. I subbed at the Met for five years. Leinsdorf hired me as extra bass, as the seventh bass for the Ring Cycle, so I started to work there, and then I began to be used as a sub when somebody was sick. They would call me to come in and play an opera, which was a thrilling experience, because the conductors then were so fantastic.

And I even played Falstaff with Bernstein in 1964 at the Met, which was so exciting. Oh man, I’m so lucky. The experiences I had even before I joined the Philharmonic kind of prepared me for how to be in the Philharmonic, and I didn’t feel out of place because I already had lots and lots of experience.

I already knew most of the repertoire. I remember my first year. Out of the 104 pieces we had that season, I only didn’t know four. I already had so much experience before I even came to New York. I had already had two years in Pasadena. I played in any orchestra that needed a bass player the whole time I was at college. I had one year at UCLA.

I played with Lucas Foss in the UCLA Symphony. I played with Jan Popper in the opera orchestra. I had a lot of. Experience even before I came to New York, and I was very grateful for all the stuff that I knew when I got into the Philharmonic.

People don’t realize the context that they need to know. They can’t just know the bass part. That’s really not well-prepared. You’ve got to know the whole piece.

That’s another thing that a lot of young students don’t understand, that the more they can listen to recordings or go to live performances of their local symphony orchestra and look at the bass section and see how things are done, that is very instructive.

A lot of people forget about that. That’s a great way to learn.

Totally, I see that so much. I did a little informal survey, just looking at people who have gone on and landed bigger orchestra jobs, that sort of thing, and people who hadn’t. And one of the things that kept coming up was people just going and seeing live concerts. Like the people that did that had success. I always thought that was so interesting.

Orin: It’s true, you’re absolutely right, and nobody talks about that really. Teachers do. Certainly, all the teachers I know do, because as a matter of fact, those of us on the Manhattan faculty and Mannes that play at the Met and play at the Philharmonic, we make sure that our kids get comps. I just taught this young lady today from Boston. She goes every week to the Boston Symphony. Her teachers get her into rehearsals or a complimentary ticket.

That’s so important because you’re seeing the context of what you’re studying. If somebody’s really fascinated and wants to learn, that is a really good way to learn, really. Then you pin your teacher down at the lesson and say, “I noticed this and that. And that’s different from what was, I saw last week in the, when you did it last year with this conductor, he did something different. Why is that?”

When you absorb all of that, then you’re really ready to take your place amongst all those wonderful trained people.

It’s a tremendous training. When you realize it’s like the old medieval apprenticeship. It’s, like Meistersinger, being an apprentice. First, you learn the beginning of this, and you’re allowed to sing in the chorus. Then you’re allowed to have a little small part. Then you get a secondary part. 20 years later, you get to sing the lead in Aida or something.

It’s very much like that when you’re a conductor, too. If you start off coaching the chorus and doing piano rehearsals with the soloists, then you’re allowed to conduct maybe one rehearsal, and then next year, they give you one opera, and then meanwhile, the head conductor supervises you.

I don’t know if conductors get that kind of wonderful experience anymore. The Europeans did. They all started out in opera, which prepares you for the symphony. But nowadays, I don’t know. They go to school, and they get an assistant job. Suddenly, they’re a music director of someplace in Florida without really being competent, you’ve got to know.

There was a saying amongst New York cab drivers. When I first came here, you got to know your onions.

Nobody said that anymore, but I think it’s a great thing. You got to know your onions. Whatever that means.

[laughter]

I love it. You were in the Philharmonic with Homer Mensch, right?

We were even standing my stand partner my first few years. I used to freelance with Homer, too.

We used to do all kinds of jobs at Columbia University, playing with Vladimir Ussachevsky and Otto Luening, the two loony composers at Columbia. Recorded tape stuff while the orchestra played something else. We did all kinds of jobs together before I joined the Philharmonic.

We played in parking lots with Julius Grossman, conducting trust fund concerts. Local 802 has a trust fund where they fund special concerts and free concerts for the public. So we used to do stuff in the summer in the parking lot in Queens playing the Mendelssohn 4th with Julius Grossman.

We used to do really awful stuff, so when we got in the Philharmonic, “Gee, it’s air-conditioned, it’s nice.”

[laughter]

You can’t believe some of the stuff that freelancers have to do. Homer was a wonderful professional. We always used to joke about Homer.

He was impeccably dressed and groomed, and he carried a briefcase. We always felt that he had a complete change of clothes and a new bass in the briefcase. That’s always the way he was. He was like the perfect professional. He was wonderful to play with, just wonderful.

I have very fond memories of Homer and many of his students, too.

It’s fascinating to me, looking back, that someone like Homer would leave the Philharmonic and go play jingles and sessions, right?

Let me explain to you why. Let me explain exactly.

My teacher, Milton Kestenbaum’s first job was in Washington, D. C. with the National Symphony. From there, he went to Pittsburgh as principal bass for Reiner, and Homer was his band partner.

And then in 1939, or around then, Homer got into the New York Philharmonic. His teacher, Anselme Fortier, was the first bass in the Philharmonic. Fortier, I believe, was French Canadian, and he had studied in Paris with Edouard Nanny. So there’s the French connection with that beautiful French conservatory approach.

That was like the Prague School of Playing and then the Nanny French School of Playing. Two very distinct and wonderful schools of playing. And I think that Fortier and Homer represented that school. So Homer joined the Philharmonic, I think, in 1939 or 40, something like that.

He then left in 1948. because he got the CBS orchestra job. Now let me point out something nobody knows these days or thinks about. In those days, NBC had the Toscanini orchestra, which also played all the other shows on NBC during the week. Toscanini didn’t know that. He thought the orchestra was only for him, but they played all the commercial things, the Helen Hayes hour, and everything else. They were all doing that.

So NBC and ABC, each of those networks, had their own orchestra, and Homer got the CBS Orchestra. That job paid 52 paychecks a year, approximately $7,500 a year in those years. The Philharmonic was paying for 30 weeks a year.

If you had 30 weeks, it was about 3, 500. The year that I joined, that I came to New York, 1954, NBC was making $7,500 a year, and the Philharmonic was making $3,500. Now, that’s double income if you are at NBC, ABC, or CBS.

So Homer left to make a better living, and he did a lot of commercial recordings. He did movie scores. He did toothpaste commercials, whatever you did. In fact, there was a little guy named Ernesto who used to be a bass caddy. He used to run from job to job with the bass so the players wouldn’t have to tire themselves out carrying it. Homer would have this little Ernesto running behind him carrying his bass. Yeah, it was before the bass wheel was invented.

When the freelance stuff started to dry up in 1966, Homer came back to the Philharmonic at the same time that I joined. That was the new, as of August 1st, 1966, the new bass section was Bob Brennand, John Schaeffer, Walter Botti, Homer Mensch, me, Jimmy Candido, Benny Schlossberg and Mario Polisi.

The second stand was Walter and Carlo Raviola. I promise you, there was a bass player named Raviola. It was true. He was Italian and was in the orchestra for one year before he retired. He retired the year after I joined, but I had the pleasure of knowing Carlo. He retired back to Italy when he left. He was quite a character and a very good player, too. I was sitting with Homer. My first couple of years in the orchestra was with Homer.

The nuances of being a principal of a section in an orchestra. I think that’s interesting to think about. There are musical skills and social skills that you need for that job.

I would imagine on any job, but particularly in music, where in any section, I would say the string sections, particularly everybody in the section, probably inside secretly thinks they can do a better job or as good as whoever is principal. That’s a given that everybody feels. “Oh, I know how to do that.”

Then, when you get stuck in that chair, and you realize this heart-stopping moment, it’s not so easy. You have to play perfectly, really. You have to understand what the conductor wants and be able to play it his way. At the same time., Playing the way you know is customary and traditional, which everyone will understand is the correct way.

One of the keys to being a terrific principal is keeping the mood light in your section. Keeping everybody feeling that you appreciate them. I have to say that a section greatly appreciates somebody who says that was great at the end of a concert. If you go to a section member after the concert, maybe backstage in the bass room, everybody’s changing and getting ready to go home, and the principal says, “That was really great tonight, fellas. That was really tremendous. I thought we did beautifully.”

You know that means something, and it doesn’t cost anything to do that, but it gives a little sprinkle of compliments to everybody and makes everybody feel appreciated. And that’s what you need. You need the troops to feel appreciated because it is a group effort.

It is not one person playing and everybody else faking. It’s not that. Everybody has to listen together and play what they know goes well with the group and what will support the rest of the orchestra. To have somebody there who knows their job and also is psychologically astute is a great thing.

Some people can do it, and other people are just thinking about playing, and then they also may have hang-ups psychologically that happen, sometimes because of their childhood or other experiences they’ve had, and they bring that to the job, and then the job becomes awkward and unpleasant and hard. People don’t enjoy coming to work.

The ideal situation is if you enjoy coming to work and you enjoy the companionship of your section. That’s fun. We try to have a bass dinner when we’re on tour. We try to have a bass dinner. We’ve done it in China the last couple of trips that we’ve been there. And it’s very nice. It makes for social bonding.

Actually, we have a coffee machine in our bass room, which one of our friends, the first bass of New York City Ballet, Ron Wasserman, gave us a coffee, one of those Nescafe things you put in the little pods. He gave us that several years ago when he used to sub with us a lot.

We call it the Wasserman Memorial Coffee Machine. We think of him every time we have coffee. One of the guys goes and buys all these pods, he takes orders and says,” what would you like, what would you like?” And that’s like a ritual. I only drink one cup of coffee at home, otherwise I wouldn’t sleep all night if I had coffee afternoon.

But the guys do the coffee thing, and I inhale the smell of the coffee, and it’s just beautiful. it’s really nice. And once in a while, somebody will make something and bring it. , it’s a nice sharing feeling, and it really makes any job a better job. If the principal and the other players know how to integrate and spread a little balm on the difficulties of everybody’s life.

No matter what, nobody has a perfect life. Nobody has a life where everything goes smoothly, and everything is great. Everybody has something that is not great. You come to the job, and you try to keep your feelings of negativity away from that, but sometimes people need cheering up because things are not going so well, or they’re not feeling well. It’s really wonderful if you have a group that gets along and that the principal can support that.

It is a tremendous thing if a principal is sensitive to people’s feelings and does not just treat you like you’re in the army and he’s the captain. That’s a bad attitude. I think most bass players are more normal than violins that way, somehow.

It taps into that sort of “bass spirit.” Like what you’re describing, they’re such simple things, but it means so much.

It smooths the difficult things.

I’ll tell you, when there’s a difficult conductor, you bond together in the bass room, you close the door, and everybody can go make jokes and tell silly stories and vent their feelings, in a feeling of safety that nobody’s going to rat you out.

It’s very important, and it’s something that builds a very good feeling.

I must tell you something I’m really proud of, not for myself, but for my section. We got a rave review on tour. We were on tour in Europe this March and April, and we were in London for a couple of days. In fact, that’s where I saw Chris Mathers and his wife.

I can’t remember the hall; it might have been Royal Festival Hall or might have been the other one, but we got a review. We were playing Symphony Fantastique, which has a tricky bass part in several places. You can mess things up really beautifully for the conductor if you want to.

And the conductor, if he doesn’t leave you alone if he tries to overmanage, it can also be bad. But this was really, this was great. And we got a review. in one of the London papers, the critic actually got what we were doing, which is rare. Most critics don’t hear below middle C. They don’t pay attention to the bass part that much.

So we got a review that said the magnificent eight of the New York Philharmonic bass section, which I have to explain, we’re nine, but one of our guys was sick in the hotel. So we only had eight that night. So it’s at the magnificent eight bases of the New York Philharmonic played with double the volume. But always with perfect clarity, that was the review.

And we thought, “Oh, somebody got it that we play big, but we also play clean.”

So we walked around with our chests puffed out for the rest of the tour. And I said, we ought to have t-shirts made up, so there’ll be no doubt in any conductor’s mind when they face us that they’re dealing with people who know what to do.

One of the things I always loved about being a musician was the funny stories about funny things that happened or, from a previous year or a previous conductor. I always loved the old guys in the Philharmonic. When I joined, they used to say things like, “We tell a conductor, leave the driving to us.”

When you get on a bus and you want to go to Pittsburgh, you don’t tell the bus driver, here, take this street and go left here and go right. Tell us what you want, and we’ll do it. Don’t tell us how to drive the bus. Any orchestra has its own style and has its own kind of traditions handed on of how to play certain things, and if a conductor is smart, they will let the orchestra play their best and not interfere with it too much.

Wow. That’s a great visual. I like that. Leave the driving to us. I love that.

The older musicians had such wonderful ways of expressing themselves. When I joined the orchestra, the English horn player was a man who’d been in the orchestra since 1929. His name was Engelbert Brenner, and he was a wonderful musician.

He had joined as second oboe, and then when Bernstein heard him play the English horn, he asked him to switch to the English horn, which he did after one of the players retired on the English horn. So Bert took over, and he played beautifully. He once told me, “I never played a perfect concert,” and I was shocked.

I said, “Bert, how can that be? I heard you play everything, all those solos you play, the Swan of Tuanela, the Symphonie Fantastique, and the slow movement, oh, it’s so beautiful.”

He says, “No, but you don’t understand. I’m not talking about notes.” He says, “I’m talking about my vision of how to play. Maybe I didn’t do a dynamic, particularly the way I planned. Maybe I didn’t phrase something the exact way, or I didn’t have the kind of sound that I had. It’s the things that probably people wouldn’t notice unless they listen to me play the same thing several different ways.” He said, “but I have to please myself.” And he said, “I don’t think I ever played a perfect concert in my own mind.”

I was so moved by that. Because I thought, “Oh my gosh, I’d better start listening.” I better start being very careful about the lengths of notes. If you play a half note, don’t let it leak into the next rest because you may be disturbing the harmony of that person who comes in there. Don’t let your tone waft on forever if there’s something else going on. Pay attention.

Part of the fun of playing in an orchestra is paying attention to everything else that goes on. There’s a lot going on that sometimes you don’t hear everything. Sometimes, you aren’t aware of things that you need to be aware of, like when you’re with the bass clarinet, which is on the other side of the stage.

And things like that, little things like timing a pizzicato with the harp, who’s on the other side of the stage, or the timpani, who’s on the other side of the stage. We used to have a timpanist now he’s been gone for many years. His name was Roland Kohloff, and he studied with Saul Goodman, who was the timpanist when I joined the orchestra, the great Goodman who taught everybody and invented the pedal timpani, and so on.

Roland used to look at the bass section to play notes, like in the Tchaikovsky fourth when there’d be little things with the bass sections, staying quiet for 10 measures, and the timpani would just have, “bum bum.” then we would come in and start to join him, and he would look at us when we joined him as if he was trying to be with us, which he was.

In other words, there was a kind of mutuality there and understanding that we were playing the same part and we should have the same quality of sound and be exactly together. Things like that go on without any conductor saying anything, but that you’re aware of all the time. That happens on every page, almost in every bar of every piece, that people in the orchestra are doing chamber music on a huge, large scale that the audience has no idea about, except the sophisticated listeners and maybe the bass players that are listening.

They would be aware of all these things that have to be together with other things. It’s really extremely complex, but that’s what makes it fun.

There’s something about experiencing the orchestra from the periphery and taking in the whole thing versus being in the middle of the first or second violins and caught up in that.

I just feel like we see structures and things that. Also, we have a little more time. We don’t have the kind of complicated first violin parts playing solo melodies all the time. We actually have the leisure to enjoy the harmony. What makes me a happy player is the harmony and the rhythm. We contribute so much, like in a Mahler symphony or a bit of the Beethoven slow movement of the third symphony.

That can be heart-stopping if the conductor’s not good. Then, the bass section has to take over. We have to do it ourselves, which a good section will do. We’ll make it work. It’s going to be good no matter what happens. We’ll take care of it. Don’t worry. Just sit tight. We’ll take you where you want to go.

When a section plays together well for several years, that is the feeling. The feeling is that we’ll take care of it. That’s okay. You don’t have to exhaust yourself. We’ll be okay. Just give us a nod once in a while and leave us; let us do our job. And it’s a good feeling.

One of the things that Chris mentioned what about about all the remarkable performances that you remember.

I have to tell you one thing about Bernstein. Bernstein never conducted a piece that he didn’t believe in thoroughly. He chose really well. He chose great repertoire.

He liked good composers. He liked Copland, for instance. He didn’t conduct his own music all that much, actually. He was not selfish that way.

Any Mahler symphony with Bernstein was unbelievable because, based on what I’ve read that he wrote about Mahler, he considered himself almost a reincarnation of Mahler, being a composer, conductor, and pianist. You felt he was following the compositional process right before you on the podium. He was recreating it. It was so exciting to play with any Mahler symphony with him.

Also, in my first or second year in the orchestra, we did Des Knaben Wunderhorn of Mahler, all those songs. Krista Ludwig was the mezzo soloist, with her husband, Walter Berry, as the baritone. The two of them, plus Bernstein, were like watching people composing in front of you. It was just miraculous. I still have the LP record of that.

I remember my first year in the orchestra, Bernstein conducted Das Lied von der Erde. You only play Mahler symphonies usually. Now, the kids do it in school. But when I started to join the orchestra, I had never played a Mahler symphony because it wasn’t done outside of the big orchestras.

First, there are extra instruments, contrabassoon, horns, and percussion. Every measure is a different tempo, so school orchestras generally didn’t do it. I was just thrilled. I had never played Das Lied, which some people feel is like Mahler’s 10th symphony, even though he had another 10th symphony, but this is like a symphony with a voice.

The male soloist was Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, whom Bernstein absolutely adored. I was so stunned by the performance. I remember the Friday afternoon concert. I started to cry while we were playing it. I lost the contact lens out of one eye, and I had to finish the concert with only one eye.

My stand partner was very sweet. He understood, and afterward, we looked for the contact lens on the stage, but we couldn’t find it. I remember crying during Bernstein’s performances because he just gave everything. You couldn’t be immune to his, the force of his personality on the stage.

Luckily, my stand partner, whether it was Homer or Jimmy, they were very sweet. They didn’t mind that I cried. Maybe they didn’t poke fun at me. They sympathized and offered me a handkerchief. That’s the way everybody felt, whether they admitted it or not.

You crave those moments, like Rafael Kubelik with Janacek. We did a Janacek opera with him that was unbelievable. We did the House of the Dead, which was so incredible. I had never played any Janacek opera before. I don’t think most of the orchestra had either because it’s not repertoire that’s done every other day.

Kubelik had studied with Janacek, I believe, when he was growing up. He knew and loved every note of it and was marvelous with it. It was very deeply felt.

Of course, I envy the Chicago Symphony now because they’ve got Muti. Muti was the one we wanted eight years ago, but the manager decided otherwise.

We had voted for Muti, and this is something that I couldn’t say until now. Maybe bass players will be surprised to hear this, but that’s how we felt. We thought Muti was probably one of the best, one of the few living conductors that’s outstanding. And I’m so happy for Chicago that they have him because I understand they’re doing wonderfully.

They needed someone like Muti to bring out their best.

What is it about Muti that attracted the Philharmonic members to him?

First of all, when Muti conducted us as a guest conductor in one rehearsal, we sounded like the Toscanini recordings that we all cherished, that we all grew up with. Most of our teachers were influenced by the Toscanini articulation.

Let me give you one example of Muti’s care and feeding of orchestras of what we need.

The week before, he was due to start rehearsals of an obscure Hindemith opera called Sancta Susanna, which I had never heard of. He had the opera libretto put in each of our mailboxes a week before the rehearsal so we would know what was happening.

He coached the singers individually before we started the first rehearsal. He had worked with each of the singers before that. So it was like a finished thing when he stood up in front of us he was, and he obviously loved the piece. And now, Hindemith is a little bit thorny, a little bit difficult.

It was staggering. The orchestra just was completely blown away by it. And I got a CD of it because, as orchestra members, we’re allowed to request it from the archives. I wanted to relive this excitement that he brought the precision of it and also the feeling of it.

This little momentary ripple in the flutes. He said, “That is the smell of the almond blossoms outside the convent wall that she smells, and that awakens her joy and love and the spring, the feelings of spring, the sap rising in the trees.”

My God, he spoke about the music the way Bernstein used to speak about it, and all the great conductors gave you an image to think about. Most of the great ones had some kind of an image that they would give the orchestra, even if it was a very short sentence, something that inspired you.

I never had the privilege and pleasure of playing with Carlos Kleiber, but the Met guys told me about him. The Philharmonic Orchestra had an artistic committee for the first time in 1974, and the first conductor we asked for from the management to hire was Carlos Kleiber.

He had just made his first recording with Vienna of Beethoven’s Fifth. We heard that recording, and we all agreed we had to work with this man. Our manager said he wants five rehearsals and we only give four a week. We can’t afford that. So sorry, you can’t have him.

I was so disappointed because I thought if we had started a relationship with him when he was very young at that time, then maybe we would have him conduct once a year.

Even once a year would be wonderful because he conducted four operas at the Met, and they still talk about it. In fact, some of the musicians who didn’t have to play put on their tuxedos and went and sat in the pit the night that he was conducting so they could see him work. What does that tell you about a conductor?

[laughter]

Nobody gives up their night off. I went standing room for one of the operas because I couldn’t get a seat, and next to me was standing the first cello, Jerry Grossman, who used to play in the Philharmonic in the early 70s. He was in our orchestra for a few years.

I said, “Jerry, what are you doing?”

He says, “I gotta see this guy. I played with him last week, and now I have to see him play the other opera.”

You want to be around something like that. You want to feel that wonderful feeling of this person, who has this magic quality that lifts you up, and you understand more about music when you listen to him. When you work with him, you understand whatever you’re playing.

It opens something new up for you, which is something terrific. You played Beethoven’s Fifth a hundred times and then played it with somebody like that. Oh, my goodness. I never heard that before. It’s so exciting.

One of the other things about the old Philharmonic members was that many of them were artists, including Fred Zimmermann.

Fred Zimmermann used to come home from a concert and paint until 3 in the morning. He also used to draw sketches of conductors on the blank pages in the music, which are now in the archives. When I joined, a violist named Ray Sabinsky used to draw sketches of everybody, of conductors, of his fellow musicians, all on the blank pages in whatever part you had.

Bernstein’s in that category, certainly, too. But Carlos Kleiber is music. You can see Beethoven 5.

I’ve seen the videos of him with Concertgebouw. I think a Beethoven 4th and 7th. Very often, like Bernstein, he’ll stand still and won’t do anything and just let the orchestra keep time by themselves, which makes them listen and watch him even more.

There’s a video of Bernstein conducting the Vienna Philharmonic in Haydn 88. He lets them do the last movement as an encore without conducting, just looking at them. The camera shows his face, and the orchestra reacts. It’s such a vote of confidence and security on the part of a conductor to do that. It’s wonderful. It’s like mind control. I’m controlling you with my mind!

[laughter]

Which is what a conductor does, basically. The good ones. They don’t have to wave their arms that much, and I think that’s why people who aren’t in music are so fascinated by conductors and that connection and like when it works. What do they actually do?

What are they doing?

Yeah, exactly.

I have been asked to buy a Philharmonic donor group if I go, and I will have dinner with a group of donors. I find some of the questions when they ask what conductors really do. So I tell them, “Would you rather have Lawrence Olivier or Burt Reynolds play Hamlet?”

That’s the difference between a bad conductor and a good conductor.

A great conductor has all the qualities of a great actor and director. I don’t know if you’re a fan of Laurence Olivier. I was when I was a teenager. That was my hero, and I think he’s a lot better than Burt Reynolds.

[laughter]

Congratulations to the Orin at the team for their 2025 Oscar Win for the short film.

Behind the Scenes with Orin O’Brien: Her Experiences with the New York Philharmonic and Beyond

Orin’s Background

Our Conversation

Orin, how are you doing?

Nervous? I’m nervous talking to you!

I’m so appreciative of you taking the time to chat. It’s going to be super fun. Chris and I got together in Prague about a year ago for this.

Funny you should mention that. I have a really good friend of mine who plays in the Lyric Opera of Chicago, Greg Sarchet…

I did!

I love that you have seen that! Guess who is filming that? Me!

He is such a talent.

And then Ira Gold. I know that you and Ira have known each other.

Who?

Really? Wow.

It has been fun to watch Ira continue to grow and develop as a player. I played with him in a chamber orchestra in Memphis, Tennessee, 12 or 13 years ago.

You’re very eloquent. It’s not surprising that they would have used you for that.

That’d be great.

That’s a pretty good list!

Let’s take a piece as an example, one that everybody knows: the recitatives from Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9. Should we start “up bow down bow” or “down bow down bow”?

I’m sure you’ve lost track of how many times you’ve heard Beethoven 9 recitatives played in an audition.

It’s just one that people seem to take to such extremes or make it eccentric.

One of my main teachers was Michael Hovnanian, who played in the Chicago Symphony for many years.

I remember him saying exactly what you said to me. He said he realized when he started doing well on auditions he just decided to play exactly what was on the page and not worry about anything else.

Yeah. That was the moment that all of a sudden, he started advancing and started being in the finals.

What a tremendous perch to take in decades of bass players coming out. What makes people sit up and take notice versus, “Next, thank you very much.”

What a revolutionary teacher. What a fantastic experience it must’ve been to study with him. I’ve had A Contemporary Concept of Bowing Technique on my music stand since I was a teenager.

What was that whole transition like? Talk about a total revolution in how people were taught and even string height.

You’ve talked a lot about joining the Philharmonic and that sort of thing. Obviously, a bunch of people asked me to ask you about the experience of being the first woman in the orchestra outside of the harpist that they would hire.

You shared a story that I just got such a kick out of.

It was the one with the wardrobe cases.

I love it. You were in the Philharmonic with Homer Mensch, right?

It’s fascinating to me, looking back, that someone like Homer would leave the Philharmonic and go play jingles and sessions, right?

The nuances of being a principal of a section in an orchestra. I think that’s interesting to think about. There are musical skills and social skills that you need for that job.

It taps into that sort of “bass spirit.” Like what you’re describing, they’re such simple things, but it means so much.

Wow. That’s a great visual. I like that. Leave the driving to us. I love that.

There’s something about experiencing the orchestra from the periphery and taking in the whole thing versus being in the middle of the first or second violins and caught up in that.

One of the things that Chris mentioned what about about all the remarkable performances that you remember.

What is it about Muti that attracted the Philharmonic members to him?

Yeah, exactly.

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