Jorja Fleezanis became the first female concertmaster of the Minnesota Orchestra 20 years ago and has been its longest tenured concertmaster, executing this integral role during the terms of the last three artistic directors: Edo de Waart, Eiji Oue and Osmo Vänskä. She is leaving the position, and Minnesota, following the final performance of the 2008-2009 subscription season, to become a Professor of Music at Indiana University's famed Jacobs School of Music.
Fleezanis played her last concert, fittingly entitled "A Fleezanis Farewell," as concertmaster with the orchestra on April 5, 2009 when she performed Szymanowski’s First Violin Concerto. During her career, she has had three major pieces commissioned for her, including Nicholas Maw’s Sonata for Solo Violin, commissioned for her by Minnesota Public Radio. It was broadcast on Public Radio International’s Saint Paul Sunday Morning in 1998, and it received its British premiere in 1999.
Fleezanis sat down with MPR's Kerri Miller "to talk about her career as the lead violinist [of the Minnesota Orchestra], and how an orchestra comes together on even the toughest pieces" on Midmorning, June 9. Joining Fleezanis was her longtime recital partner, Director of Boston Conservatory's Music Division Karl Paulnack. The two gave short performances interspersed throughout the conversation.
Listen to the conversation and recital here or on air on MPR at 10 CDT, and stay tuned to this post for a live summary of their conversation. Feel free to add comments, I'd love your input!
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Eliza Hartley
Digital Media Intern
Minnesota Public Radio
American Public Media
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Comments: 21
Midmorning theme music:
KM: coming up on the second hour of Midmorning, Jorja Fleezanis...leaving the Minnesota Orchestra for Indiana University, but before she does, she came by the Maud Moon Weyerhauser studio, for a private performance. You'll hear it when Midmorning continues. First the News
Fleezanis: "In a way, you are like a choreographer" love that quote
KM: hello and welcome to a special conversation...tonight were in the Maud moom weyerhauser studio, but tonight we've turned it into a private stage...June 11, she will perform for the last time...the curtain will come down on 20 years of her as concertmaster...Welcome Jorja, it's such a pleasure to have you here.
Tell me what you now know about music, about yourself...that you didn't know when you arrived here.
JF: ...good full question, a role in an ensemble it, encompasses all elements of an ensemble. Choosing the way each part will be played in the role of hte first violins, the bow direction in the works. I've never counted, and I never will, how many times we change our bows...In many ways, you're like a choreographer [decisions of bows filters down to cellos]. every concertmaster is a different choreographer.
KM: This is what you now know about music...what do you know about yourself?
JF: My leadership sense went from an exuberant wilfulness to bring everyone to where I felt the flame was at...if I continued that way, I would have burned out after three years. As a musician you have various climates...there's a physicality to the way you connect to music...I'm plugged in as an electric current, I'm very visceral. When I go to concerts I have a hard time sitting still. Pretty palpable....I had to temper myself, my movements..."you don't have to do it so much"
KM: What happens when the audience doesn't feel the electric current?
JF: Music is a very kinetic event. The conductor gives us an impulse, but we have to start this physical thing...by the time I'd been here for a number of years, people realized I wanted to get people infected with the right impulse. Thing about live music, we go out with our knowledge of music and each other...certain fearlessness has to be there...leader's responsibility to the group entering together...I can't even tell you how spontaneous some of this is.
KM: Planned spontaneity...oxymoron in some respects? How do you do that when you're riding the wave with 500 other people?
JF: To get into the orchestra, the level of expected responsibility is high, by the time the principal players are...the captains of hte ship become apparent...I'm not going to tell you we haven't had our moments on that stage, we have!
KM: ...
JF: [easier to play something well-known than something like what they played last week] We smell danger way before it happens...it smells bad...you see the music...once you understand the floorplan, it's just the difficult spots...you feel everyone as a storm system, a wind blows a section off, and everyone then rerights itself.
KM: That's such a great description...I can picture that.
JF: There is such a barametric pressure to the orchestra.
KM: You told a reporter years ago you were a maverick years ago, have been since day I got here. Is that maverickness only for hte few? [not whole orchestra of mavericks]
JF: If I were to trace all the stories about not being in a likely environment to become a musician...I still think of the unlikeliness of my career in music...I had no role models, except my mother, and one of us would become a musician...when she played little Greek tunes on her mandolin (by ear), she would go to another place...a folk chord inside of her. I think that way of making music is just as genuine as anything I'm doing...no interference.
KM: INterference?
JF: You don't feel loved enough...audience didn't applaud enough...etc. Your most important contract is with the composer. I will end my career with the Misa Solemnis. This is about a level of genius, creative exultation, through listening to a solemn mass. For him to do what he did, it's up to me to take the same depth to myself in the performance.
KM: Will you play?
This is by Alban Berg, it's from a set of early songs about the romantic views of life, about the nightingale, through which she embellishes the idea of springtime.
Eliza: Let's sit back and listen to this mournful piece.
Applause:
KM: I think everyone was starstruck, they didn't know what to do. That was Jorja Fleezanis, accompanied by Karl Paulnack. I can't help noticing the pictures in your violin case.
JF: This is the mother I was referring to...this is my parents on their honeymoon
Eliza: Sorry everyone, some technical difficulties
KM: The most important concert you'd ever given, was at a nursing home in Fargo, ND. (To Paulnack)
KP: This guy had such a reaction to a piece we played by Copland. Copland captured something in that piece, something that connects us, so we can communicate what we feel.
KP: It's interesting, we leave in a particularly noisy time, the person sifting through their program during a performance. It's very hard to sift out the person who's sifting, balling during hte slow movement, because I want to connect with that person, but I want to leave that person alone. 50 years ago, there was a glass wall between the performer and the audience, as it would diminish the glamour of hte musician...it gets lonely without the contact.
JF: To not be aware of what goes on in the audience...we're fusing with everyone in that audience, because they've come to listen to that performance that night. The inert and quiet listener...we're lifting them out of the daily tumult. My attention is so wrapped into wrapping them and me into the musical experience. You have to get the point of where the listener truly is....
KM: To Audience-who would like to ask the first question?
Male: Jorja, we'll miss you. You were talking about your music earlier, and I think you're going to be a great instructor.
JF: That would be a good vote right now, cuz it's getting harder to leave!....not many young people doing this right now...I just had good instruction, took it to heart...I could be selfish, stay here [MN] for another 15 years, or I could look into those blank faces and say, "Listen to what I have to tell you"...conversation with Edo de Waard years ago, when making decision...they told me they need me at Indiana...it's about taking this first hand experience and turning it into a workshop...handbook would be an interesting way to put down career as musician...what allowed me to bypass the demons could undermine you
Female: What legacy do you hope to leave in terms of the sound the MN Orchestra makes?
JF: Personalness to what has always been part of the orchestra's temperment...to be intimate with the music making. Also to be exuberant when it requires you to be exuberant....Beethoven recordings have shown a level of intricacy paramount to that style of music...everyone has to be playing as though each hand is the weight of a feather, but each movement has to be delicate and precise. It's like a Rembrandt....there has to be a certain level of comfortableness...tony Ross is the most physical player you could have on cello....leaving new principal in second violin...she's italian, great to leave mediterranean there as part of my legacy?
JF: That chair is a very specific rudder, it'll be interesting to see how it changes based on who fills it. Who knew how I would change it? I was a dark horse, and a maverick on top of it!...there is a sense of giving that I hope that remains
KM: Sense of intimacy, you were nodding Karl, why?
KP: Difficult to get up in front of large numbers of people and make yourself vulnerable.
Male: Yahho (sp?) piece last week. That was mind-boggling, can't imagine doing that 20 years ago.
JF: There's a veteranship that has to do with our sense of esprit...our veteranship...there's a sense, sometimes that the podium is just letting the orchestra be. musicians don't talk much during the rehearsal, but sometimes I know things he doesn't know. Taht's why he has principals. How have I instilled my values into the section to make sure that we are all one? Importance of everyone to making the stew, broth, really tasty. In a way, through auditions, I have brought in 2/3 of the section. 2/3 now new, I had to vote. You're training a new group, it's a huge part of my time withe orchestra...enhance the quality of the orchestra
KM: Would you rather someone who is a unique genius, with sheer talent, or a disciplinarian, the person with more dedication?
JF: Ideally, both...that candidate that has wild-eyed sense of what's possible in the music. In a sense, you pick the musical examples that will be able to display the disciplined, precise, coolness, to the passage that requires madness....that'll be the main thing I teach the young people to prepare for in auditions...from perfect, classical, porcelain, to a Mahler Symphony where your guts are just hanging out. It's a very specific frenzy, it's not an American frenzy, it's a German frenzy. Lining up the timing, so it fits in exactly from quiet to...soliloquys
KM: Leonard Bernstein quote: "Music can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable." What do you think?
KP: Can communicate without words. We can play in such a way that people know exactly what it is that we're saying. We can put so many fine shades of meanings on things that we say we couldn't even begin to approach in words.
JF: You're going from somewhere in your unknowable, and communicating that with your audience.
KM: Well, it's been an honor being a part of the Fleezanis Farewell. Will you play something in closing?
JF: I will 3 movements from set of songs by Emmanualle Popalaya (played one as encore in final concert).
Eliza: Thanks for checking out this live-blog of Jorja Fleezanis' conversation with Kerri Miller, which aired on June 9, 2009 at 10 a.m. CDT as part of Midmorning. Be sure to check out the audio online at mpr.org.
We'll miss you, Jorja!
Here's an interesting link to a biography of Fleezanis, through the Minnesota Orchestra website.
Fleezanis, her husband Michael Steinberg, and accompanist Karl Paulnack will perform as part of the 2009 White Pine Festival, Friday June 19 at Trinity Lutheran Church in Stillwater. The festival lasts from June 17-21 and features many musicians from throughout the region. Here's a link to the website. Tickets are on sale now, $25/event, $18 for students.