Ari Goldman - The Late Starters Orchestra

“Isn’t there a lot of pressure on you to get it right?”

“No,” another musician, a violinist, chimed in. “At the concert, Doug brings in some pros who lead the way.”

“You mean he brings in ringers?”

“Well, we call them subs.”

“Who are they substituting for?”

“The rest of us.”

It sounded like a good thing. You bring in some real good players and that brings up everyone’s game. I asked if any of the “ringers” were at the rehearsal that night.

“They never come to rehearsals,” my new friend the double bassist told me. “They’re pros. They just show up the night of the concert. Now don’t worry. We have backup.”

After the break, I went back to playing with greater confidence. Performing with a safety net sounded perfect.

On the subway going home that night I ran into an older man bundled in a winter coat and carrying a violin case. “Excuse me,” I said, “weren’t you at the Downtown Symphony tonight?”

He was indeed and we introduced ourselves and spoke as we rode uptown. His name was Milt, a retired physician in his eighties, and his story was not atypical of late starters. Milt took up the violin as a young boy in New Jersey and played through high school and into college. “When I was nineteen, I was admitted to medical school and I put my violin away and never touched it again for fifty years,” he said. Medicine became his life. He finished medical school and opened what he described as a thriving family practice in his home state.

He worked out of his home office, later out of a private doctor’s office, and even later out of a clinic. He told me that he treated several generations in some families. “Grandparents, parents, children. They just kept coming. And then one day, I closed my practice. I went home, found my old violin in the attic and picked it up again,” he said. “And I haven’t put it down since.”

Milt said he had “to learn it all over again,” but that it came back, slowly, step by step. “Music is my life now. After retirement, there is nothing else.”

He and his wife sold their New Jersey home and moved to the Upper West Side of Manhattan in part because they wanted to be near Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. One of their favorite activities is attending the Philharmonic’s “open rehearsals,” where, for less than twenty dollars, you can hear great music and see how it is shaped by the conductor and the musicians. The open rehearsals begin at 9:45 in the morning. “You get to go for a fraction of the price of what people pay to go to the same concert in the evening,” Milt said. “And I love to watch how the sausage is made.”

I had not heard of the Philharmonic’s open rehearsals in decades and was surprised that they still existed. I remember going a few times in college. I called Richard Wandel, an archivist for the Philharmonic, who told me that these musical sessions were as old as the orchestra itself, which is pretty old since the New York Philharmonic, the oldest standing orchestra in the United States, played its first season well before the Civil War. Open rehearsals began in 1842 under the very first musical director, Ureli Corelli Hill. The sessions were at first intended to give the orchestra a chance to prepare before a live audience without the pressure of a formal performance. With time, they also became a way to involve people who otherwise might not attend the more expensive official programs.

For Milt, the open rehearsals are also a way to involve his wife, who is not a musician. Milt inspired me to check them out as well. On the winter morning I attended, the audience was made up of mostly older, retired folks. Who else can take off a morning for music, except perhaps for a professor, like me, or some students? The audience filled only about half the seats in the orchestra and the balconies were pretty much empty. I had paid $18 for my seat, a seat that would cost $115 if I had decided to go to the same program that evening.

The members of the Philharmonic, who play their concerts in formal wear, came straggling in as though they had just climbed out of bed, casually dressed in jeans, T-shirts, and sneakers. I was thinking that my fellow LSO musicians come better dressed. There wasn’t a tie or jacket on stage. I was trying to imagine Mr. J trundling onto the stage with his cello for an open rehearsal when he was in the Philharmonic in the 1950s. Given his penchant for eccentric dress, he would have shown up in a paisley shirt and plaid pants. And he would have fit right in.

Works by Mozart, Mahler, and a contemporary composer named Thomas Adès were on the program. No one on stage budged when Alan Gilbert, the Philharmonic’s youthful music director, appeared — at a proper performance all the musicians would stand — but the audience gave Gilbert a warm round of applause. Gilbert took a short bow and then acted as if we in the audience weren’t there. He stopped the orchestra when he felt it necessary and had them repeat passages that he was unhappy with. Sometimes he’d sing a few measures out loud to demonstrate what he was looking for. Gilbert, who took over the orchestra in 2009 at the age of forty-two, seemed decidedly at home. But that was no wonder since both his mother and father had careers as violinists with the Philharmonic. (His father, Michael Gilbert, retired in 2001, and his mother, Yoko Takebe, continues to perform with the orchestra.)

I was hoping to connect with Milt and his wife at the open rehearsal that morning, but we didn’t manage to meet. Aside from the mornings at Lincoln Center, Milt told me that he practices his violin every day and takes a lesson once a week with his teacher. He plays with the Downtown Symphony one night and with a chamber music group for seniors at the Mannes College one morning a week. “Truth is, I’m not all that good,” he lamented that night we met on the train. “I wish I knew what I forgot. My fingers aren’t that quick. But everyone tolerates me. And I love it.”

When we reached his stop near Lincoln Center, he said, “Hope I see you again next week, Ari. Good luck with the music.”

As it turned out, the Downtown Symphony was not the right fit for me. It met on Tuesday nights, which meant I was out of commission on the home front. That wasn’t really fair to Shira, whose public relations business, which she ran alone, seemed to take more and more of her time, often into the evenings. There were dinners to prepare and Judah’s homework — and cello playing — to supervise. But it was more than just a question of timing. The music was a real leap for me. It was well beyond what we were playing at LSO, where we were more likely to tackle four-part arrangements of chamber music than full-blown symphonies. I felt foolish after begging Doug for a place at the Downtown Symphony, but ultimately he was right. It wasn’t for me. I decided to focus on my own playing and on LSO.

After Judah gave the cello a kiss on the night I first showed it to him, I started asking around about cello teachers. I was advised not to look for a teacher, but for a method: Suzuki.

Suzuki is an extraordinary system of musical education for youngsters. It is based on the teachings of Shinichi Suzuki, a Japanese educator and violinist who died at the age of ninety-nine in 1998. Suzuki was committed to the idea that a child can learn music the same way that he or she learns language: through immersion, encouragement, repetition, and small steps. It is sometimes called the “mom-centric” method of music education because of the heavy parental involvement necessary to make it work, but dads are also welcome. From the time Judah turned six, I took him each week to a program near Lincoln Center.