How Steven Dann fell for the viola’s ‘middle voice’
Among musicians, who are the best read, who make the best cooks, who are the most curious? Easy, says Steven Dann. Violists!
And in case you may be wondering, that is not just another viola joke. It is the belief of the first Canadian to make an international career playing what is sometimes known as the Cinderella of the string family.
The former principal violist of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra has travelled to Europe three times within the past five weeks and shortly after agreeing to an interview with the Star, he flew off yet again, this time to Brussels. He will be back home before long, however, since he’s scheduled to appear on the afternoon of April 7 on the stage of the University of Toronto’s Walter Hall under the auspices of the Women’s Musical Club.
The initial invitation was to have him give a recital. He counter-proposed what he calls, with his violist’s sense of humour, a Dannthology, involving four other members of his family as well as himself, with all five performing the premiere of a piece written specially for them through a Women’s Musical Club commission from the Canadian composer Zosha Di Castri.
None of the other “Danns” plays the viola. Eldest son Nico is a percussionist, married to a soprano, Ilana Zarankin, whose piano-playing parents, Boris Zarankin and Inna Perkis, run the innovative Off Centre salon series at Trinity-St. Paul’s Centre. Youngest son Lucas is studying jazz piano at the Amsterdam Conservatory. And daughter Robin is a University of Toronto classically trained singer specializing now in popular idioms.
With a little help from bassist Joel Quarrington and pianist James Parker the Danns will perform music ranging from Biber, Schumann and Brahms to Lieberson and Di Castri, with father Steven’s viola providing a connecting thread throughout.
Not that he intended to become a violist. Growing up in Vancouver he started by playing the violin, performing in youth ensembles led by the city’s guru of youth music, Harry Gomez, even winning himself a place in the National Youth Orchestra at the age of 15.
“But I found the atmosphere of competitiveness (among the violins) alarming and off-putting,” he recalls, returning home disillusioned and packing his instrument in its case.
Weeks later he received a call from Gomez saying, “I have a viola. Maybe that voice would suit you.” Three weeks later, he re-auditioned for the National Youth Orchestra as a violist and was accepted.
“I didn’t know it at the time,” he says, “but the viola is a catalyst, a middle voice that brings things together. I love the role. I still play the violin, but I find you have a more complete view of the music being in the middle.”
He acknowledges a violinist, the late Lorand Fenyves at the University of Toronto, as his mentor but he also studied at various times with some of the leading violists of the post-Second World War period, including William Primrose and Bruno Giuranna, as well as with members of the near-legendary Hungarian String Quartet.
As a measure of his own talent, Dann was hired immediately upon graduation as principal violist of Ottawa’s National Arts Centre Orchestra (which can be heard April 2 at Roy Thomson Hall), the first of a series of such posts which subsequently took him to the Tonhalle Orchestra of Zurich, the great Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam, the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, with whom he spent 13 seasons before finally deciding to give up orchestral playing.
“I still miss the big pieces, the Mahler, the Bruckner, the Brahms. But I never thought of myself primarily as an orchestral player. Even though I played in orchestras for 23 years I played chamber music at the same time. I founded a quartet in every place I had an orchestral job. I just thought of myself as a musician and a teacher.”
Indeed, Dann spends part of each season teaching at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto and at other schools internationally. This season he added McGill University’s Schulich School to the list.
That doesn’t account, of course, for the time he spends with his Zebra Trio in Europe or the Smithsonian Players in Washington, D.C., where he gets to use the Smithsonian’s Stradivarius viola, or the time he is spending editing a book of violist’s audition material for the British publisher Boosey & Hawkes.
“I do get tired,” he smiles, “but I don’t admit it to myself.”