Violinist bowing out after 45 years
If you’re planning to attend the San Francisco Symphony’s opening gala concert this week, be sure to take note of the second stand of violins, where Mark Volkert, the orchestra’s longtime assistant concertmaster, will be playing.
From one perspective, Volkert’s appearance on the stage of Davies Symphony Hall isn’t that newsworthy — after all, he’s been a stalwart presence since joining the Symphony’s ranks in 1972, as a Stanford undergraduate. But on the other hand, this is a final opportunity to see Volkert in action, because after this week’s concerts, at 66, he’s going to hang up his rosin and bow and step into retirement.
Volkert is walking away in an altogether characteristic fashion, too — without fanfare, and before anyone starts nudging him off the stage.
“I want to retire while I can still play the violin,” he said during a recent interview. “I’ve seen too many athletes who stick around to the point where they’re just a shadow of their former selves. They start getting thrown out trying to
steal second, and then you have to try to remember them the way they once were.
“I’d rather be like Ted Williams, who hit a home run in his last at-bat, and then just ran into the dugout. He didn’t even doff his cap.”
Volkert’s role in the orchestra isn’t that of a star power hitter — when there’s a flashy violin solo to be delivered, it falls more often to concertmaster Alexander Barantschik — but his contributions to the Bay Area’s musical life have been broad and deep-rooted.
Together with his colleagues Nadya Tichman and Jeremy Constant, he’s a key factor in shaping the sound and texture of the first violin section, which in turn has an effect on the orchestra as a whole. When he does take a turn in the spotlight, his playing is invariably elegant and expressive, in a way that seems almost improbably effortless.
And Volkert’s sideline as a composer has enriched the Symphony’s repertoire on several occasions. His arrangement for string orchestra of Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and Cello made available a significant (and too little known) work of chamber music; more recently, the 2012 premiere of his “Pandora,” also for string orchestra, introduced a work of abundant imagination and wit.
But if you’re hoping to get Volkert to acknowledge or assess his own part in the Symphony’s internal workings — well, best of luck. He speaks of the process without false modesty, but with a certain hard-edged realism about what it takes to make more than 100 highly trained musicians perform as one.
“My role is no different from that of any other orchestra member,” he says with a faint whiff of impatience. “Unless you’re sitting in the concertmaster’s chair for a particularly concert, you need to just pipe down and play along with everyone else.
“Some people like to chime in with their own suggestions, but to me that’s a waste of time. I think you have to sublimate your own musical conceptions to that of the section principal and the conductor. The trick of being a good orchestra player is to play with commitment and verve the way they want you to do it, even if it’s not the way you want to do it.”
Volkert’s 45 years with the Symphony give him a strong claim to being its longeststanding member (keyboardist Robin Sutherland has a possible counterclaim, depending how you count membership), so he’s seen plenty of conductors come and go. And by his reckoning, the orchestra is in peak form these days.
“I began here when Seiji Ozawa was the music director. We all had our long hair and muttonchops; we were hepcats. And we had some great individual players, including (concertmaster) Stuart Canin and (principal oboist) Marc Lifschey, but player for player, they were nowhere near as great as today.
“When we played ‘The Rite of Spring,’ it was always an adventure. You never knew if it was going to go smoothly. Now we can read right through the piece, no problem.”
Ozawa, says Volkert, enjoyed the “poetry of conducting” more than the nuts and bolts of getting the orchestra to play together and in tune. It fell to his successors, Edo de Waart and Herbert Blomstedt, to raise the level of technical proficiency, and to Michael Tilson Thomas to infuse a jolt of spontaneity.
“With Blomstedt, you knew that the concert was going to be just like the rehearsal, because that’s how he liked to package it. But Michael added his own very imaginative personality, which is the way I like to work as well. You leave room for some freedom and surprises.”
Volkert and his wife, Jan, a cellist he met while performing with the Carmel Bach Festival, divide their time between homes in Oakland and Grass Valley. One of the things he’s looking forward to in retirement, he says, is not having to practice the violin; in fact, he’s not sure how much playing he’ll do at all.
“If you don’t have concerts to practice for, it’s hard to take the fiddle out of the case. I didn’t practice this whole month of August, and I didn’t miss it.
“I like the feeling of not being tied umbilically to the violin. Some people, like Stuart Canin, just love it, but I never loved it that much. I love music much more than I ever cared about playing the violin.”
In retirement, he says, he plans to keep composing as the spirit moves him — he just completed a setting from the Gospel of Mark for baritone and piano — and scouring YouTube for unknown musical repertoire; among his recent finds are obscurities by Rimsky-Korsakov, Balakirev and the German Romantic composer Carl Reinecke. Also, he’s an amateur magician and an avid reader of history.
“Not having to set the alarm to get up for rehearsal — that’s very appealing to me. I don’t think I’ll be bored.”