Lee Actor

Lee Actor is an American violinist, composer, and conductor with an unfolding career as a very successful composer, a career which almost happened as a second thought.  He is also an electrical engineer and has worked for years in the Information Technology field as well as the video game industry.  The dual endeavors are not as far apart as many would imagine – not nearly.  Music and Science – especially mathematics – are intimately intertwined.  Actor’s engineering degrees are from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (1970-1975, Troy, New York, about 150 miles north of New York City), one of the top science schools in the country.  Simultaneously studying music and science, he chose to pursue science upon graduation and worked at GTE in Boston for several years.  One of his violin professors was Angelo Frascarelli.  Although he began violin studies at age 7, kept up his pursuit of music studies at Rensselaer, played violin and viola in the Albany (New York) Symphony for three years (1972-1975), Actor also devoted  time to composition.  While working full-time, he studied conducting privately with David Epstein at MIT (Boston, 1975-1978) and composition with Donald Sur.  Up until 1978, Actor was playing violin in various orchestras on a regular basis and was composing chamber music works in his spare time.  Three years later (1979), he found himself in Silicon Valley (California), working in the IT field but  taking advanced courses in music as well.  While there, Actor secured his Master’s degree in composition from San Jose State University (1982) and pursued further studies at the University of California at Berkeley.  In 1982, Actor went to work for a start-up video game company.  The industry was in its infancy.  That led to his starting his own video game development company in 1988.  In 1997, he was one of three founders of Universal Digital Arts, a subsidiary of Universal Studios.  Finally, in 2000, he went to work as Director of Engineering for yet another high-tech start-up and retired from the industry one year later.  All this time, music had never been far away.  It is interesting that several famous musicians in history have had other careers, almost simultaneously as they were playing or writing music – Jean-Marie Leclair, Charles Dancla, Pierre Baillot, Alexander Borodin, Modest Mussorgsky, Ignace Paderewski, Camille Saint Saens, Charles Ives, and Efrem Zimbalist come to mind.  In 2001, Actor was invited to fill the Assistant Conductor post with the Palo Alto Symphony.  However, Actor had already been conducting various orchestras since 1974.  He was later (2002) appointed Composer-in-Residence of the same orchestra and thus began to compose prolifically.  As far as I know, Actor does not devote much time to small-scale works.  Every review of his orchestral music consistently praises his skills, originality, and ingenuity as a composer.  Actor has mostly put the violin aside – as have Alan Gilbert, Lorin Maazel, David Zinman, Jap Van Zweden, and a few other violinists – in favor of other pursuits in music, composition and conductng.  English violinist Leonard Salzedo used to play violin in the Royal Philharmonic (UK) and actually continued playing in that orchestra for quite some time while devoting a lot of his spare time to composition – mostly ballet music.  That, however, is rare.  Other violinists who turned from playing to other endeavors include Theodore Thomas, Victor Young, Eddy Brown, Patricia Travers, Iso Briselli, Pierre Monteux, Joseph Achron, Eugene Ormandy, and Arthur Judson.  Actor has composed concertos for horn, alto saxophone, timpani, guitar, and violin, as well as various orchestral works, including two symphonies, and most of his works have already been recorded as well, by both European and American orchestras.  It is an enviable record for someone “new” to the composition scene, so to speak.  A typical comment from a critic reads: “[the work] is an incredible tour de force, written by an immensely talented composer.”  About his violin concerto, Pip Clarke (the English violinist for whom it was written), says “The music is exciting, passionate, and highly romantic,...filled with beautiful melodies and writing throughout.”  At a time when most music schools here and abroad shun melody, structure, and tonality, Actor is a true iconoclast.  A video of his Horn Concerto can be found here.  As Bronislaw Huberman always said, the true test of permanence in art has always been audience acceptance and Lee Actor has tons of it to spare.  It’s actually a very good thing that he turned from violin playing to composition.  One of my next blogs will focus on his violin concerto.  

Theodore Thomas

Theodore Thomas (Theodore Christian Friedrich Thomas) was an American violinist, conductor, and arranger born (in Esens, Germany – not to be confused with Essen, Germany) on October 11, 1835 (Brahms was 2 years old.)  Today, he is hardly remembered as a violinist though he made his living as one for the first 20 years of his musical life, which began at age 6.  However, what is well-known is that he founded the Chicago Symphony and conducted it from 1891 to 1905, although he also conducted other orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic.  Thomas exemplifies the quintessential entrepreneur.  His father (Johan), a professional provincial musician, seems to have been his only teacher in violin.  By age 7 he had played for the King of Hanover. Thomas was by age ten performing (in his home town) at social events and in taverns as well.  Thomas never attended a conservatory or a university.  The family came to the U.S. (New York City) in 1845.  Thomas played in the Navy Band and pit orchestras in the surrounding areas of New York City until about 1849.  He then toured briefly as a recitalist, giving concerts as far South as Mississippi.  He was fourteen years old and traveled alone.  In 1850, back in New York, he took conducting lessons from Karl Eckert while playing in various orchestras which toured the U.S. widely, accompanying major artists of the day, including Jenny Lind, Henrietta Sontag, and Sigismond Thalberg.  It has been said that his approach to violin sound changed upon hearing these two singers (Lind and Sontag.)  He joined the first violin section of the New York Philharmonic in 1854.  In 1855, he organized a musical series of piano quintet concerts called the Mason-Thomas concerts, featuring himself as first violinist and William Mason as pianist.  The series lasted for 14 years.  After a concert in 1859, he was called "America's most accomplished violinist" by a Chicago newspaper.  Thomas unexpectedly made his conducting debut in New York in 1859, filling in for an ill opera conductor - as Toscanini also did later.  He then founded the Theodore Thomas Orchestra in 1862 with which he toured the Northeast (New York to Chicago) and initially made his great reputation as a conductor.  He was 27 years old.  The orchestra actually made its debut on December 14, 1864.  I don’t know if Thomas ever regularly played the violin in public again after that.  However, as late as October of 1870, he played Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata at a concert in Boston.  His accompanist was a Miss Anna Mehlig, a noted concert pianist of the day.  From 1877, Thomas also simultaneously conducted the New York Philharmonic (founded in 1842) until about 1891, in addition to other regional orchestras.  He became the highest paid conductor of the time.  It must be noted, lest present-day readers imagine an impossible amount of work, that seasons in those days consisted of about six or eight pairs of concerts.  Nevertheless, his own orchestra played - during tours -  as many as 62 concerts in the span of four months.  In 1888, due to financial difficulties, the orchestra (the one bearing his name) was disbanded.  Thomas was by then 53 years old.  In 1889, a Chicago businessman, meeting Thomas by chance in New York, invited him to come to Chicago to form a permanent orchestra there.  Thomas is supposed to have uttered a memorable response.  Whether any of that is true is anyone's guess.  However, in the summer of 1890. Thomas married that businessman's sister.  By December of 1890, Thomas had signed a contract to direct a permanent orchestra in Chicago.  In October of 1891, the Chicago Symphony presented its first concert under Thomas.  The orchestra consisted mainly of former members of his old orchestra, several former members of the New York Philharmonic, and some musicians brought in from Europe.  Sources vary widely as to how many came from each group.  The season consisted of twenty pairs of concerts presented over twenty weeks.  During his tenure (of thirteen and one half years), he conducted 112 U.S. premieres with the orchestra - more than any conductor since then (of any U.S. orchestra) could ever come close to.  Not bad for a guy who never attended a conservatory.  Theodore Thomas died (in Chicago) on January 4, 1905, at age 69. 

Patricia Travers

Patricia Travers was an American violinist and actress born (in Clifton, New Jersey) on December 5, 1927.  She is known for having given up her professional career entirely and dropping from sight in 1951, still in her early twenties.  She is also known for having owned the Tom Taylor Stradivarius (1732), the violin Joshua Bell used to play.  That violin was sold to a collector in 1954, three years after she retired.  It is now being played by Mark Steinberg, first violinist of the Brentano Quartet.  She also played a 1733 Guarneri violin.  Travers died only recently.  She began studying the violin before the age of 4.  Her teachers were Jacques Gordon (concertmaster of the Chicago Symphony for almost a decade and teacher at the Eastman School of Music) and Hans Letz (pupil of Joseph Joachim and concertmaster of the Theodore Thomas Orchestra for a time.  Letz believed, as did Bronislaw Huberman and Frans Bruggen, that Rhythm was the most important element in music.  He also taught at Juilliard.)  A single source says that Travers also attended the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia.  Her first public performance was at age 6.  She gave her first Carnegie Hall recital in 1938, at age 9.  She appeared with the New York Philharmonic on July 6, 1939, playing Lalo’s Symphonie Espagnol.  She was 11 years old.  Two years later, she appeared in the movie There’s Magic In Music (1941.)  Here is a YouTube video showing her playing in the movie.  Finnish violinist Heimo Haitto also took part in that movie - he was 18 years old at the time.  Travers had a very promising and active career going and played with most major American and European orchestras from age 10 onward, including the orchestras of Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Boston, London and Berlin.  She also recorded several discs, one of them being the first recording of Charles Ives’ second violin sonata.  Joan Field had been the first to record the first Ives violin sonata.  People have taken wild guesses as to why Travers suddenly stopped playing.  She did not suffer a nervous breakdown as did Josef Hassid.  It is not an easy thing to stop doing something one truly enjoys.  If she had felt fulfilled, successful, or happy as a performer, she would not have stopped playing.  Approval from her audiences and critics would have been enough to keep her going.  An early article (1939) in a music journal stated the following: “We feel sure that the prophecy that Patricia Travers is to become known as one of the great women violinists will be fully realized.”  Toward the end, after a performance in Boston (1951), a critic wrote “…she is not yet either a brilliant technician or a compelling interpreter.”   What may have contributed to her decision to stop was that the economic motive to keep working was not there – she came from a well-to-do family.  It’s the old push-pull theory at work - in order for a person to move forward, there must be a push from within and a pull from without.  Some sources say she devoted the last six decades of her life to helping run her family’s business interests – similar to what Iso Briselli did, except he stopped playing much later in life.  As far as I know, she never had any students.  Patricia Travers died on February 9, 2010, at age 82. 

Victor Young

Victor Young was an American violinist, composer, arranger, and conductor, born (in Chicago) on August 8, 1899 (two years before Heifetz was born.)  He is an example of instrumentalists who gravitate from concertizing to other endeavors – in his case, composing, arranging, and conducting for films and records.  Violinists Iso Briselli, Pierre Monteux, Jaap Van Zweden, Eddy Brown, and Joseph Achron are five others who more-or-less switched careers as other things drew their attention.  Young is remembered as having been nominated for an Academy Award 22 times (an all-time record) and never actually winning – in any case, not while he was alive.  He began violin studies with Isidor Lotto (pupil of Joseph Lambert Massart and teacher of Bronislaw Huberman) at the Warsaw Conservatory at age 10 and later studied piano with Isidor Philipp (pupil of Camille Saint Saens) at the Paris Conservatory.  Being highly gifted, at age 13, he made his debut with the Warsaw Philharmonic.  He toured Europe as a soloist for a while, but with the outbreak of World War One in 1914, his grandparents, who had been raising him since his arrival in Europe, sent him back to the U.S.  Young then embarked on a career as an orchestral violinist with popular and classical orchestras, often serving as concertmaster or conductor in theatre and radio orchestras, all the while teaching himself the art of arranging popular music.  He was barely 16 years old.  These activities were mostly centered in Chicago.  He played in the Isham Jones and Ted Fiorito orchestras during this time - other members of the Jones orchestra were Woody Herman and Benny Goodman, both of whom would become more famous than Young.  He participated in early recordings with Bing Crosby and radio programs with Betty Grable too.  In New York, where he moved in 1931, Young recorded with Tommy Dorsey, Joe Venuti, Eddie Lang, Al Jolson, and Lee Wiley (his girlfriend), among many others.  In 1933, he started writing music for films, his first one being Murder at the Vanities (a rather obscure but notorious film.  Some sources say his first movie score was Wells Fargo – a film about the stage coach company, not the bank.)  In 1934, Young signed a contract with Decca Records and stayed with them for the rest of his life.  In 1936, he moved to Hollywood, initially writing music for Paramount Pictures and leading the orchestra at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre.  In Hollywood, he eventually wrote soundtracks for movies and television and recorded with many legendary stars, Judy Garland among them.  His scores include Golden Boy, Around the World in Eighty Days, Shane, Samson and Delilah, Scaramouche, Rio Grande, The Quiet Man, and For Whom the Bell Tolls.  It is known that Young was a workaholic.  In fact, he died while working on a movie score (China Gate), on November 10, 1956, at age 57.  By then, he had worked on over 350 movies and had spent almost 90 percent of his professional life in the popular music sphere.  It had been a long way from the Warsaw Philharmonic to the Hollywood sound studios.  Brandeis University (Boston) has  a collection containing more than one hundred scores and recordings of Young's music.  About Victor Young, Henry Mancini has been quoted as saying “All he had to do was sit down at the piano and the melodies fell out of his sleeves.” 

Eugene Fodor and Fate

Eugene Fodor died young, at age sixty, on a Saturday in late February, 2011.  Perhaps he wanted it this way – the end of what was to have been a great life, from beginning to end.  Eugene Fodor was a great violinist who somehow lost control of himself and his career.  You can read about it here among many other places.  With his credentials, he could have gone anywhere and he did, but only for a time.  Many doors were closed on him for reasons which are not completely understandable – was he black-listed, did his agents let him down, did he antagonize conductors or orchestra managers, did composers not want him playing their works, or was he just simply irresponsible and difficult and not able to cope with the pressures of concert life?  Only those close to him know.  Ever so slowly, though his playing remained brilliant, his engagements got less frequent and less sparkling.  Margalit Fox, in her magnificent New York Times obituary, quotes Susan Davis (Fodor’s widow): “Last year, in despair over his career, he stopped playing the violin entirely.  It was too painful for him.  He felt like his career had been ripped from him, and he didn’t have the great venues to play in anymore. and it just crushed him.”  Ripped from him by whom?  Fate?  The same Fate that brought Mozart, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Bizet, Van Gogh, Franz Clement, Joseph Hassid, Guila Bustabo, Toscha Seidel, and Michael Rabin down?  Mozart would have to be the prime example of someone whose unimaginable genius and earthly rewards were as far apart as could be, whose economic status did not come even a little close to matching what he gave the world.  His must have been a frustration beyond imagining.  It’s as if Fate says “this far and no farther.”  Did Fodor have enemies?  Why were the big, important orchestras not calling him?  Only those closest to him know the answer.  Fodor had drug and alcohol addiction problems on and off.  Apparently, even close friends and family could not intervene for his benefit.  Should they blame themselves for not doing more?  Why?  There have been other concert violinists with the same problems and they did not just give up.  Their careers did not suffer.  Henryk Szeryng comes to mind – it is common knowledge that he drank quite heavily, even right before concerts.  It is rumored that Nigel Kennedy has had drug problems, too, and he seems to be doing just fine.  Other concert artists have gone into decline, accepted it, and just moved on, playing music festivals far and wide, founding chamber orchestras, taking up conducting, taking up full-time teaching, starting private academies and so on.  (They are too numerous to mention.  It happens, even in the natural course of getting old.)  For some reason, Fodor could not bring himself to do any of those things.  Only those closest to him know why.  According to some sources, he got ill last summer and seemingly, just decided to die. 

Nahan Franko

Nahan Franko was an American violinist, conductor, and concert promoter born (in New Orleans) on July 23, 1861 (Brahms was 28 years old.) He made his New York debut in 1869, at age eight, and then went on to study with Joseph Joachim and August Wilhelmj in Europe. Instead of embarking on a solo career, he played in professional orchestras most of his life. He became the concertmaster of the Metropolitan Orchestra in 1883, at age 22, and stayed until 1907. On November 30, 1904, at age 33, he conducted Mozart's Marriage of Figaro, thus becoming the first American conductor to conduct at the Met. He subsequently conducted there more than sixty times, though not all of his performances were opera productions. As an assistant conductor and concertmaster he was being paid what would be about $96,000 in today’s dollars. (Today’s concertmasters earn about $350,000.) In 1908, he was one of the first to present open air concerts in New York City. An interesting piece of trivia about him is that he was (briefly), the brother-in-law of the owner of the New York Yankees (Jacob Ruppert.) Franko died on June 7, 1930, at age 68.

Royal orchestras

I know you’ve been wondering which Symphony Orchestras are the best in the world. I can help you with that. This is my own order of preference: Vienna Philharmonic, London Philharmonic, Berlin Philharmonic, Royal Concertgebouw, New York Philharmonic, Pittsburgh Symphony, Chicago Symphony, Paris Conservatoire, San Francisco Symphony, Boston Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Czech Philharmonic, Detroit Symphony, and the Cleveland Orchestra. I cannot go into why I chose these but I can tell you I gave the list some thought – about two minutes’ worth. When you’re an expert at something, you don’t need to re-think your biases too much, no? That, by the way, is the best concert hall in the world, too. Take my word.