Breaking boundaries by playing a violin
On Saturday, Feb. 26, violinist Sanford Allen, a resident of Hillsdale, turned 84 years old. During a career that stretched across six decades, he performed in the highest echelon of classical music, was a contractor and session player for countless recordings of stars in jazz, pop and film, and for eight years served as artistic director of Clarion Concerts in Columbia County. He’s made great music and he also made history. In 1962 he was the first Black musician to become a member of the New York Philharmonic.
It’s a distinction but according to Allen it didn’t feel like much of a blessing at the time. Discrimination, in forms large and small, active and passive, confronted him on a regular basis. The door may have slipped open long enough for him to step through, but the field of classical music is still a long way from being welcoming and affirming to people of color. As an indication of how slow the progress has been, consider that the clarinetist Anthony McGill, who performed chamber music earlier this month in Schenectady, is today the only Black member of the Philharmonic.
During a recent and candid conversation, Allen discussed various aspects of his career, both the music and the culture surrounding it.
After studies at Juilliard and the Mannes School and a fellowship at Tanglewood (then called the Berkshire Music Center), Allen was selected for the debut roster of the newly formed Young Concert Artists in 1961. He wasn’t necessarily aspiring to join the ranks of a major orchestra. “Most candidates auditioning for the Philharmonic had been students of people already in the orchestra. So if you didn’t study with one of those teachers the opportunity did not arise,” he recalls.
A 1958 report from the Urban League addressed the prospects for Black musicians in Manhattan and noted that the Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera had never hired a person of color. That prompted an effort by the orchestra to find one. Allen says that a number of his peers were invited to audition but declined, reluctant to be seen as a token.
At his mother’s urging, the 20-year old Brooklynite agreed to perform for music director Leonard Bernstein. “Sort of against my better judgement,” he says.
Bernstein told him that his playing was beautiful but he lacked experience in a professional orchestra and suggested he play for a couple of years with a second tier ensemble. When Allen asked for some suggestions, the maestro rattled off some orchestras, all of them in the South.
“The one furthest to the north was in Washington D.C., which was still segregated,” recalls Allen. “I thought there’s only one thing harder than integrating an orchestra and that was integrating a community as well. I knew the steps in the North but not in the South. So I said to him, if that’s the requirement to play in the Philharmonic, then I’ll probably never play in the Philharmonic. I could tell he wasn’t pleased with my response and that introduced a tension in our relationship that never went away.”
Allen did go out and get some orchestra experience though. He performed for a couple of busy summer seasons with the resident orchestra at Lewisohn Stadium, which consisted almost entirely of Philharmonic players. After that, Allen performed for a season with the Philharmonic as a substitute for a violinist who went on long term medical leave. At the end of that year he met again with
the maestro.
“Bernstein asked quiet pointedly, ‘If there’s an opening next season will you audition?’ I said no and he said why not. I told him that I just spent a whole year playing. It should be fairly obvious if I can handle the job. On that basis I see no reason to re-audition. He said OK you’ve got the job. But a constant testing seemed to be going on,” recalls the violinist.
Allen’s debut season as a full member coincided with the orchestra’s relocation to the new hall at Lincoln Center and his tenure overlapped the leadership of two very different music directors. The flashy Bernstein left the Philharmonic in 1969 and was succeeded by the erudite Pierre Boulez.
“Bernstein was quiet charismatic, but I always felt the image he projected was not accurate and was created more for public consumption,” says Allen. “He was one of the most egocentric people I ever met. That contributed to his success of course yet there was ambivalence toward him by orchestra.”
As for Boulez, Allen says, “He was intelligent yet not obnoxious at all. He lived on a plane inhabited by very few people.” Allen recalls that Boulez, who was also a composer, conducted the early modernist work of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern with an ease and grace that wasn’t present in interpretations of the more popular romantics. “Those things took on a great deal of life and had a light in a way that the Brahms Third did not,” he says.
Asked if he was accepted by fellow members of the orchestra, Allen says that he was invited to social gatherings at members’ homes a total of six times over a tenure of 15 years. Upon his resignation in 1977 at age 38, he told the Times he was “simply tired of being a symbol.”
Economics also played a part in his decision to leave. Sometime during his first few years, he happened to get a glance of another man’s paycheck. The fellow had been with the Philharmonic for many years but was earning the same salary as Allen, the rookie.
“He didn’t make a penny more than I did. I found that extremely depressing, that they did not appreciate this man’s years of service,” says Allen, who acknowledges that labor negotiations eventually instituted some degree of pay seniority. “I was crushed by that discovery when I first saw it. They don’t value the humans here, only the principals,” he adds, referring to the leaders or first chair players of the different sections in the orchestra.
Allen’s last concerts as a member of the Philharmonic were in the spring of 1977. The following September he returned to Avery Fisher Hall, as it was then known, to perform as soloist in Roque Cordero’s Violin Concerto as part of a three-concert series dedicated to music by three centuries of Black composers. The all-contemporary program opened with “Celebration!” by Adolphus Hailstork, and also included George Walker’s Lyric for Strings and the Concerto for Piano with soloist Natalie Hinderas. Paul Freeman conducted.
Contrary to some reports, the Cordero concerto was not written for Allen, but he did perform and record the piece with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra a couple of years prior to the Philharmonic event. That recording was issued by Columbia in a series of nine LPs featuring black composers, curated and conducted by Freeman. Sony Classical reissued those recordings in a CD boxed set in 2019.
In learning the concerto Allen recalls struggling to find the right fingerings since the atonal writing went against the traditional patterns most violinists learn from classical etudes. “I had to abandon my training and start over at the beginning. It was exhausting but quite interesting, a 12-tone piece. His intention was to try and write romantically using that system and some sections were quite successful.”
Though Allen never left classical music aside completely, the next 25 years of his career were a whirlwind of projects in a variety of musical styles and forms. He was concertmaster for four Broadway shows in the ‘90s, and the website AllMusic.com cites him as violinist and sometimes conductor on 262 recordings issued between 1968 and 2019. The range of material is staggering, making him appear to be a musical Zelig, a versatile figure capable of adapting and reappearing as circumstances demand. The lead artists on the recordings include Don McLean, Lena Horne, Ron Carter, Phoebe Snow, Frank Sinatra, Aretha Franklin, Philip Glass, Arturo Sandoval, James Galway, Barbra Streisand, Britney Spears, Luther Vandross, and Beyonce.
“Working as a contractor I’d put together sessions, hire all the strings and then lead the session. One thing I liked was the situation kept changing. The problems we’d have to solve were unannounced and we’d have to deal with them at the time. I loved the variety of that, the different artists, studios, and situations,” says Allen.
It’s likely Allen could bring up a story or two about most of the entries in his discography. Here’s one sample: “That’s how I encountered Nina Simone. I didn’t know much about her at the time of session, other than the obvious stuff. But when there was a playback, her comments were so astute, I realized there’s much more to her musical background than I’d been aware of it.” The legendary soul singer, pianist and composer had a strong classical training in her youth.
Since 1969 Allen has been married to Madhur Jaffrey, the famous chef. A prolific cookbook author and host of cooking shows, she’s credited with bringing Indian cuisine to Western palates. Also an actress, she performed in five Merchant Ivory films and continues to make appearances in TV series. Most recently she played the mother of a character in “And Just Like That...,” the HBO reboot of “Sex and the City.”
In 1983 the couple bought a home in Hillsdale, while maintaining their place in Greenwich Village. In 1996 Allen put down more roots in Columbia County when he became artistic director of Clarion Concerts, which produced a short chamber music series every fall known as the Leaf Peeper Concerts. His predecessor was Clarion’s founder the late Newell Jenkins.
Jenkins was a baroque specialist and Clarion’s programming reflected that. Under Allen’s leadership the concerts were often focused on string trios from the classical and romantic eras, but he also commissioned chamber pieces from unexpected sources. Among them were film composer Richard Robbins, jazz pianist Kenny Barron, bassist Ron Carter and the Cuban American composer Tania Leon. Jenkins retired from Clarion in 2014.
Allen’s performing career recently came to an end due to the onset of Parkinson’s, which has affected his right side. “I discovered one day there were things I could not do anymore. Not being able to play the way I’d like to took the fun out of it,” he says. “I’ve reached the point that I have to talk more slowly, otherwise I can’t get the words out clearly. I’m speaking slower than I’m thinking and that leads to a traffic jam.”
Despite his condition, Allen still clearly communicated the frustrations he faced as a Black man in classical music. He began the interview by saying his relationship with the industry had been “fraught.” He’d like it if there didn’t have to be Black composer festivals and box sets and that Black artists just appeared in the normal course of things. Allen does see some improvement in the arts since Black Lives Matter, but the current political debates seem too familiar.
“My view is that the North did not win the Civil War. The Civil War stopped but the issues never got resolved. Here we are with the same issues being litigated and we’re talking about voting rights and registrations now. In the '60s we thought maybe those ideas got resolved, but clearly they did not.”
In early December last year, Clarion presented a recital of violinist Randall Goosby, who is 25 years old, of mixed race and fresh off the heels of a wellreceived recording debut. Allen was seated in the front row as an honored guest at the occasion. Goosby’s program included “Blue/s Forms,” a fourmovement work for solo violin that Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson wrote for Allen in 1972.
Allen recalls how he and his younger colleague discussed the piece and both saw in it shades of Bach’s G minor Sonata. He laments that Goosby’s disc, which is titled “Roots” and includes the Perkinson, was partially framed around race. “A little bit in the same box” is how he puts it, before adding, “At least he got to do one and it’s on a reputable label and it exists, which I do view as progress.”
He chuckles a bit as he remembers how hard he had to push his friend to finish the piece so he could learn it in time for the concert. “That piece was the nicest gift I ever got,” he says.