Melinda bargreen classical seattle

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Melinda Bargreen

maestros,
impresarios,
virtuosi,
and other
music makers

A McLellan Book

university of washington press
Seattle and London


This book is published with the assistance of a grant
from the McLellan Endowed Series Fund, established
through the generosity of Martha McCleary McLellan
and Mary McLellan Williams.
This publication also was supported by a grant from
the 4Culture Heritage Special Projects program.
© 2016 by the University of Washington Press
Printed and bound in the United States of America
Design by Thomas Eykemans
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publisher.
university of washington press
www.washington.edu/uwpress
library of congress cataloging-in-publication data
Bargreen, Melinda, 1947–
Classical Seattle : maestros, impresarios, virtuosi, and other music makers /
Melinda Bargreen.
p.
cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-295-99512-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Musicians—Washington (State)—Seattle—Biography.
2. Composers—Washington (State)—Seattle—Biography.
3. Conductors (Music)—Washington (State)—Seattle—Biography.
4. Impresarios—Washington (State)—Seattle—Biography.
5. Music patrons—Washington (State)—Seattle—Biography. I. Title.
ml385.b297 2016
780.9797'772—dc23
2015016658
The paper used in this publication is acid-free and meets the minimum
requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—
Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48–1984. ∞


contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

THE MAESTROS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

Milton Katims
the toscanini protégé . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

Rainer Miedel and Cordelia Wikarski Miedel
the maestro and the maestra . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
Gerard Schwarz
the consummate music director . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61

Ludovic Morlot
the symphonic innovator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76

Peter Erős
the old-school maestro . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85

Vilem Sokol
the patron saint of the podium . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93


Stephen Stubbs
the early-music innovator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100

George Shangrow
the people’s maestro . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107

Resident Conductors
the vital links in the music community . . . . . . . 112

THE IMPRESARIOS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129

Glynn Ross
the bantam of the opera . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130

Speight Jenkins
the ring master . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141

Toby Saks
the impresaria . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153

Louis Richmond
the chamber orchestra pathfinder . . . . . . . . . . . 161

THE VIRTUOSI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171

Béla Siki
the elegant stylist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172

John Cerminaro
the man with the golden horn . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179

Randolph Hokanson
the old master . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185

Silvia Kind
the free spirit of the harpsichord . . . . . . . . . . . 193

Eva Heinitz
the greatest gambist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199

Robin McCabe
the keyboard diplomat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207

Ronald Phillips
the consummate clarinetist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213

Craig Sheppard
the classicist of the ivories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 218

THE COMPOSERS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231

Alan Hovhaness
the composer of the mountains . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232

William Bolcom
the compositional innovator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 240

Samuel Jones
the harmony seeker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249

THE POWER BROKERS AND PATRONS . . . . . . . . . . . . 259

William and Ruth Gerberding
the couple who made things happen . . . . . . . . . . 260

William Bain, Jr.
the architect of the boardroom . . . . . . . . . . . . 267

Hans Lehmann
the renaissance man . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273

Samuel N. Stroum
the mover and shaker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 281

Deborah (Card) Rutter
the power behind the podium

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 284

Sam and Gladys Rubinstein
the key advisors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 292


Buster and Nancy Alvord
the practical donors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 298

Jerry and Lenore Hanauer
the imaginative operaphiles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 301

John and Laurel Nesholm
the activists for the arts

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 305

Charles Simonyi
the genius philanthropist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 309

Jack and Becky Benaroya
the ultimate benefactors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 315

Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 327
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 331
Sources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 333
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 351



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INTRODUCTION

I

t was a time that transformed Seattle’s arts world. The half
century that followed the Seattle World’s Fair of 1962 saw a tremendous arts boom that gave the city not only several internationally recognized classical music institutions but also the great
halls to showcase their work and that of visiting artists.
The history of this period in Seattle’s music history is perhaps
best told not as a series of dates or timeline events but as a succession of great people who made the music possible. Brilliant,
quirky, inventive, idealistic, and sometimes egomaniacal, these
are the people whose artistry, imagination, vision, and hard work
made possible Seattle’s world of symphonic, operatic, and chamber music. Thanks to them, Seattle has an opera company and a
symphony orchestra, both of international prominence; thriving
summer and winter music festivals; a richly varied early-music
scene; venturesome new-music groups, and—despite some deep
budget cuts—several commendable music education programs.
The orchestral music is admirably showcased in Benaroya Hall, a
palace of a symphony hall that draws envious kudos from visiting orchestras from as far afield as London and Saint Petersburg.
In addition, Seattle has McCaw Hall, the innovative and colorful
3

showcase for opera and ballet, and Meany Theater at the University
of Washington, which visiting artists have extolled as their “favorite venue for a recital.” What has made all this music possible? Or,
more precisely, who has?
The answer: six interrelated categories of individuals whose colorful stories combined tell Seattle’s classical musical history.
THE MAESTROS: The conductors who have determined the direction

and the artistic development of not only the “majors”—the Seattle
Symphony and Seattle Opera—but also the University of Washington’s music program, the Seattle Youth Symphony, and the many
dozens of community orchestras and choruses in the region.
THE IMPRESARIOS: The visionaries who have originated and
directed the paths of musical organizations, created festivals, and
founded orchestras.
THE VIRTUOSI: The soloists and players, most of them teachers, who

have thrilled audiences and developed future generations of talent.
Every noteworthy musician can point to a great artist or teacher
who was the inspiration and the prod for his or her own attainment of excellence. Some stellar teachers in Seattle’s educational
institutions, as well as in its performing organizations, have made
that kind of a difference in the lives of others.
THE COMPOSERS: The musicians who have written the songs, sym-

phonies, and concertos that have enriched audiences and expanded
their musical horizons, and in many cases also guided the younger
generations who went on to emulate them.
The executives of the arts
world whose nuts-and-bolts savvy made the music possible—arts
activists, executive directors, and all the virtuosi of the boardroom.
Many of these people have devoted untold hours of volunteer time,

and they ensure the organizations’ survival by providing the funding that makes up the 50 percent gap between ticket income and
the total cost of presenting concerts and operas. Their intelligence
and experience have been vital elements in planning new directions for the arts.

THE POWER BROKERS AND PATRONS:

4

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I’ve been writing about Seattle’s classical music and opera since
1974, and one of the great advantages of a long life span in journalism is that I have had the chance to interview (sometimes frequently) and become well acquainted with the work of the prime
movers in the Seattle music community. My memories and extensive interview notes, as well as my resultant articles in the Seattle
Times and other publications, have been a great help in formulating
the profiles I include in this book.
This book is not a biographical dictionary or a comprehensive who’s who, and it’s not a footnote-heavy research tome. It is,
rather, a personal memoir of Seattle’s classical music scene, and
in it I present a cross section of people who have proved unforgettable and symbolize something important about their field,
or are emblematic in some way. A book listing every remarkable
figure in the past half century of Seattle’s music history would
be a vast, almost unpublishable undertaking, one that I have not
even attempted. And yet it hasn’t been easy to narrow the focus;
I had many sleepless nights considering, “How can I leave out
this person, or that one?” No doubt there will be disappointment
among some readers who do not find their favorite notables on
these pages. For this, I’m unhappy right along with you. But what
a privilege it has been to know, and write about, the people you
will meet here!

It All Started at Century 21
The contributions of the people profiled in this book unfolded
against the backdrop of broader late twentieth-century history and
Northwest social and economic trends, for which the 1962 World’s
Fair, known as Century 21, served as a symbolic overture. Century
21 was considerably more than the Space Needle, Belgian waffles,
and ten million eager visitors. It was a major landmark in the city’s
cultural history—and not just because of the long and impressive lineup of musical entertainment, from Elvis (Presley) to Igor
(Stravinsky), that dazzled visitors and Seattleites alike over the sixmonth duration of the exhibition.
introduction

5


Century 21 was the world’s fair that transformed a neglected
site just north of Seattle’s downtown into the handsomely landscaped and much visited seventy-four-acre Seattle Center campus,
stuffed with new performance venues that became the homes of
the city’s resident arts institutions. Most significant of these for
the music community, of course, was the new opera house, created
from the skeleton of the old, dumpy Seattle Civic Auditorium. (The
highly regarded New York Times music critic Harold C. Schonberg
called it the “flat-floored, unpleasant Civic Auditorium, which held
about everything except bullfights.”) But there were other facilities:
the remodeled Civic Arena (later the Mercer Arena); the rebuilt
Washington State Pavilion (which became the Coliseum, and then
KeyArena, home to sports events and large-scale concerts); and the
Plaza of the States (revamped as the Flag Pavilion and Plaza, and
later the Fisher Pavilion and Plaza). The Playhouse hosted not only
the nascent Seattle Repertory Theatre but also classical chamber
concerts and recitals. The Food Circus became the Center House,

which for several years housed the offices of such major nonprofits
as the Seattle Symphony and the Seattle Opera, as well as many
restaurants and community events.
Century 21 was an enormous boost to Seattle’s cultural organizations. Was it perhaps too much of a boost? David Brewster, an
arts watcher and pundit who was a founder of the Seattle Weekly,
the Crosscut.com news site, and Town Hall Seattle, thought so,
telling the Puget Sound Business Journal, “Seattle got too big too
fast. Cultural institutions had to appeal broadly. Over-large audiences can be a problem—finicky, unadventuresome. That produced
the kind of safe commercial programming that we have.” International fans of Seattle Opera’s imaginative Der Ring des Nibelungen productions, Seattle Symphony’s groundbreaking recordings
of previously obscure Americana, and the consistently inventive
Seattle theater and ballet presentations might disagree.
When the last notes of Century 21 had died away, what did
Seattle’s classical music world look like? The big game in town, of
course, was the Seattle Symphony Orchestra (SSO), flush with success (though certainly not with cash) from its World’s Fair production of Aida and concert with Igor Stravinsky, and ensconced
6

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now in its newly remodeled home at the Seattle Opera House. (The
opera house wasn’t all glitz and chandeliers, though. Few Seattleites realized that the thirty-six horses of the Royal Canadian
Mounted Police were stabled in the basement during their tenure
at Century 21.)
The Seattle Symphony’s music director was the very popular Milton Katims; only a few years later, Katims’s profile would
adorn the cover of the Seattle telephone directory. He increased
the size of the orchestra, the length of the season, and the variety of the presentations, fighting budgetary constraints all the way.
The rather venturesome menu for the orchestra’s 1962–63 season
included the premiere of the Seattle composer and University of
Washington professor Gerald Kechley’s oratorio Daedalus and the
Minotaur, with the soloists Donald Gramm, Dorothy Cole, and

Nancy Cronburg. The orchestra was also kept busy with eleven
school concerts under the baton of the concertmaster Henry
Siegl, as well as evenings featuring the pianists Van Cliburn and
Arthur Rubinstein, and also Lockrem Johnson, the director of the
music program at what is now the Cornish College of the Arts. The
Seattle Symphony performed with the likes of Henryk Szeryng,
Leon Fleisher, Gina Bachauer, Claudio Arrau, and the conductorcomposers Leon Kirchner and Carlos Chávez. Among the season’s
galas were evenings with the Royal Ballet and the prima ballerina
Margot Fonteyn. The symphony also presented Verdi’s La Traviata
with the diva Mary Costa (and staging by Glynn Ross, who soon
after became the founding general director of Seattle Opera).
Reviewers were enthusiastic about many of the Seattle Symphony programs in that 1962–63 season. The future best-selling
novelist Tom Robbins, then a critic for the Seattle Times, wrote of
one 1963 concert, “It was a night of passion, pleasure and paradox; a
stunning kaleidoscopic pattern that, after this evening, may never
be duplicated.” All symphony events were financed partly by gala
parties, such as the long-running Symphoneve fall fund-raising
party, and by the new mainstay of Seattle’s arts groups, the mighty
PONCHO (Patrons of Northwest Civic, Cultural, and Charitable
Organizations), which was founded in 1962 by Paul Friedlander,
Kayla Skinner, and Ruth Blethen Clayburgh. The 1963 PONCHO
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7


auction must have witnessed some frenzied bidding for a framed
letter written by President James Madison, a live burro and cart,
a hydroplane, a house in Somerset, England, and a trip for two
to Samoa. (Both the Symphoneve and PONCHO galas are now

defunct: times, tastes, and enthusiasms change over the decades.)
By spring 1963, despite the season’s many highlights and successes—and initiating a pattern that would unhappily repeat many
times to come—the Seattle Symphony management and musicians,
who had been negotiating since the previous November, were sufficiently deadlocked over salary issues that only a last-minute accord
averted cancellation of the 1963–64 season.
At the conclusion of the 1962 World’s Fair, there was as yet
no Seattle Opera, nor was there a resident chamber orchestra or
chamber music festival. There was, however, the venerable Ladies
Musical Club, founded on March 24, 1891, by a group of twenty-two
professional musicians. Before 1962, the LMC was responsible for
an international concert series that had already brought to Seattle
such luminaries as Rachmaninoff, Kreisler, Schnabel, SchumannHeink, de Larrocha, Paderewski, Casals, and Heifetz, as well as the
orchestras of New York and Chicago. (The club is still in existence
at this writing, though its focus has changed to a more local one,
presenting many concerts by its members and bringing music education to underserved Seattle elementary schools.)
Classical concerts were also in the mix presented by Northwest Releasing, a leading booker of theatrical shows, musical performances, and closed-circuit broadcasts of athletic events. The
agency, founded by the entertainment promoter Zollie Volchok
(1916–2012), who was later president and general manager of the
Seattle Supersonics basketball team, brought to Seattle road productions of My Fair Lady and concerts by Harry Belafonte, Lena
Horne, Elvis Presley, and the Beatles—but also recitals by such artists as Segovia, Menuhin, and the Vienna Boys’ Choir.
One of the major sources of concert activity in those first postFair years was the University of Washington School of Music,
whose faculty and students produced and performed a vast repertoire. On one end of the repertoire could be found the devotees
of historically informed performances of early music (many of
8

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them in the Collegium Musicum ensemble), whose efforts spurred
a growing movement that had started with the Seattle Recorder

Society (still extant, with some one hundred members) and came
to fruition with the founding of Seattle’s Early Music Guild in 1977.
On the other end were the bastions of the avant-garde, chiefly the
UW’s Contemporary Group and some venturesome faculty composers at UW and Cornish College of the Arts, who were certainly
“avant” of anything Seattle had heard or seen. Positioned in the
middle was a coterie of devoted and experienced professors, who
worked to prepare their students for a mainstream musical life in
symphony orchestras, opera companies, concert halls, churches,
and schools as the performers and teachers of the next generations.

Socioeconomic Changes in the Region
At the culmination of the World’s Fair, Seattle’s population hovered
around the half million mark, a figure that has held fairly stable at
this writing, though the suburban communities have experienced
explosive growth. Despite the optimism engendered by Century 21,
the city soon after struggled during the global energy crisis and the
Boeing Company slump of the 1970s. In 1971, two real-estate agents
put up a famous billboard notice near Sea-Tac International Airport, “Will the last person leaving seattle—Turn out the lights.”
Even during the recession, though, the city undertook such
projects as the renewal of the historic Pioneer Square district
and gave new life to the iconic Pike Place Market. Thanks to the
political clout of longtime Senators Henry M. Jackson and Warren G. Magnuson, the University of Washington experienced great
growth as a research institution, and along with that the campus
became a center for social change: the rise not only of new and ethnic musics but also of the counterculture of the 1960s, the nascent
environmentalist movement, and growing demand for equal rights
for women and ethnic minorities.
By the late 1970s, when Microsoft arrived in the suburb of Redmond, a new technology culture was under way, ushered in by an
influx of millionaires—early Microsoft employees and backers—
introduction

9


and an atmosphere conducive to the founding of other startups.
Seattle changed as these new companies took hold, and some tech
leaders, including the Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, took the
lead in promoting civic projects such as a new football stadium and
the venturesome Experience Music Project, which was originally
conceived as a Jimi Hendrix museum. The 1970s also saw the rise
of Seattle-based Starbucks, Tully’s, and a constellation of smaller
coffee companies that made the rainy city the caffeine capital of
the country.
Commercial growth also changed Seattle’s arts climate, though
tech companies and their leaders have tended to favor social and
sports causes above symphonies and opera houses for their philanthropy. A notable exception is the McCaw family, four cellularphone pioneers who in 2003 honored their opera-loving mother,
Marion Oliver McCaw, with a naming gift of Seattle’s rebuilt opera
house, now McCaw Hall.

Changing Roles for Women
All it took was a screen—and some chutzpah. By the 1970s, the
Seattle Symphony had adopted a new nationwide policy of “blind”
orchestra auditions, in which players auditioned behind a screen
that allowed the evaluators to hear, but not see, the applicant. (In
Seattle, even the flooring was changed so that the telltale tapping
of women’s high-heeled shoes could not be heard.) Nationwide,
including in Seattle, the proportion of women hired in orchestras
increased between 30 and 55 percent. In 2014, the percentage of
women players in major US orchestras hovered around 44 percent. At this writing, the Seattle Symphony players’ membership
is approximately 40 percent female. When the Seattle Symphony
went on tour of three European countries in 1980, almost every

concert review commented wonderingly on the number of women
in the orchestra; one critic wrote that “even the double bass is
bowed by the tender hand.”
“Tender hands” had also gripped a Seattle baton or two by then.
Already in April 1921, the conductor Mary Davenport-Engberg had
10

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founded the Seattle Civic Symphony, at a time when the Seattle Symphony was flagging; its 1921–22 season was cancelled in October 1921.
Davenport-Engberg’s concerts received enthusiastic notices, lauded
for demonstrating “a surprisingly high level of excellence,” and she
remained on the podium through 1924, when the orchestra folded.
Davenport-Engberg is sometimes listed in the chronology of Seattle
Symphony conductors, but this is inaccurate, though her sixty-twomember players’ roster for 1924 did include twenty-one ex-SSO players. The Seattle Symphony was not revived until 1926.
Over time, many other women have conducted in Seattle, as
elsewhere, but commentators continue to be mystified about the
small number of “chicks with sticks.” Change will probably remain
slow in coming as long as opinion is determined by such commentators as the venerable Russian maestro Yuri Temirkanov,
who declared as recently as 2013, “The essence of the conductor’s
profession is strength. The essence of a woman is weakness.” In
Seattle, women instrumentalists weren’t allowed to audition for
the University of Washington marching band until 1974.
But women were making a mark in other areas of Seattle’s cultural scene. One of the most powerful of Seattle’s philanthropists
was Dorothy Priscilla Bullitt (“Patsy”) Collins, a lover of the arts
and a strong advocate of conservation and arts education. Collins
had experienced tragedy when her young fiancé, Larry Norman,
died in World War II; in his memory—though she did not publicize the reason—she funded Benaroya Hall’s Garden of Remembrance in 1998 to honor Washington State’s war dead. Collins was
not only the granddaughter of the timber baron and Klondike Gold

Rush millionaire Charles D. Stimson but also the daughter of the
formidable Seattle legend Dorothy Bullitt, the founder of KING
Broadcasting, which sold in 1991 for about three hundred million
dollars. Classical KING FM is among the longest-running classical
radio stations in the United States, and it is consistently ranked as
one of the top five American classical radio stations. Patsy Collins
and her sister, Harriet, took an active interest in Seattle’s arts and
music organizations, particularly the Seattle Symphony, Seattle
Opera, and the Corporate Council for the Arts (later called ArtsFund), and Patsy contributed largely to Seattle Symphony’s eduintroduction

11


cation programs and the city’s libraries to ensure classical music
opportunities for the region’s youth. Collins preferred to stay out
of the spotlight while using her inheritance for often unheralded
philanthropy, but during her last decade she gave away about one
hundred million dollars to a wide variety of arts, environmental,
and educational causes.
When Patsy Collins died in 2003, Seattle Opera’s general director, Speight Jenkins, said, “She did more good in her life to more
people than anyone I have ever known.” Among the many posthumous tributes this farsighted and generous activist received was
Seattle Opera’s dedication of its inaugural season (2003–4) in the
new Marion Oliver McCaw Hall to her memory.
Women composers gained increasing recognition during the
period following the World’s Fair. The New York composer Joan
Franks Williams arrived in Seattle in 1962, after the Boeing Company hired her husband, and she decided to see if her idea for a
contemporary music group might fly in this new environment.
Starting in 1963, her New Dimensions in Music concerts, which
mixed electronic and recorded sounds with live instruments, did
indeed draw curious and enthusiastic crowds. The 1974 opening

night of the Northwest Chamber Orchestra concert premiered
Williams’s Frogs, an atonal work that included croaking frogs, sung
haikus, and traditional instruments.
Another prominent woman composer, Janice Giteck, who was
born in New York and studied with Darius Milhaud and Olivier
Messiaen, began teaching at Cornish College of the Arts in 1979.
Since then she has produced a substantial body of inventive work,
variously influenced by the music and culture of Native Americans
and her studies of world music, including the Indonesian gamelan.
Among Giteck’s works are scores for several films and the awardwinning compositions “Breathing Songs from a Turning Sky” and
“Thunder, Like a White Bear Dancing.” In 2004, a particularly successful collaboration with the Seattle Chamber Players resulted in
the evocative multimedia work Ishi, based on the life of the last
Yahi Indian.
Other Seattle-based composers—among them Diane Thome
and Giselle Wyers, both at the University of Washington; Karen P.
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Thomas, also director of Seattle Pro Musica; and Carol Sams, a
Darius Milhaud protégée whose opera The Pied Piper of Hamelin was premiered at Tacoma Opera—have also made substantial
contributions to Northwest music in nearly all genres, including
chamber, orchestral, choral, and solo. Keeping a weather eye on all
this activity for several decades was another remarkable woman,
the critic and editor Maxine Cushing Gray (1909–1987), whose
fortnightly journal Northwest Arts skewered the humdrum and
applauded the revolutionary on the dance and music scene. Popularly known as the “Tweed Hornet,” Maxine was famous for her
pointed observations and watchdog attention to arts grants and
expenditures. Fans of the avant-garde could count on seeing her in

the audience at every premiere.

Transformation at the University of Washington
It would be hard to overstate the University of Washington’s importance in Seattle’s classical milieu. Its artist faculty members enrich
the region’s concert activity, enticing students (many of them from
Asia) to the campus, where the 1,200-seat Meany Theater shines
as one of the region’s finest music venues. UW provides training
for the musicians who go on to play (and sing) in orchestras, choruses, churches, schools, and chamber ensembles and in their turn
become teachers.
In the months after the World’s Fair, the University of Washington stirred to new artistic life, in large part because of the UW
School of Music’s ambitious new director, the composer and innovator William Bergsma (1921–1994). Bergsma was determined to
make the school the vanguard of new music in the region, and
if his oft-quoted aim to turn the UW School of Music into “the
Juilliard of the West” was not fully realized, that certainly was no
fault of his. He arrived in Seattle in 1963 and secured a Rockefeller
grant that allowed him to add to the faculty the Soni Ventorum
Wind Quintet, the composer-clarinetist William O. Smith, the
trombonist Stuart Dempster, and the composer Robert Suderburg.
These new hires joined the composers George Frederick McKay
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13


(who taught John Cage and was soon to retire), John Verrall, Gerald Kechley, James Beale, and Paul Tufts. For one year, 1965–66,
William Bolcom, a future Pulitzer Prize–winning student of both
McKay and Verrall, briefly joined the UW faculty to teach composition, before heading off first to New York and then to the University of Michigan.
A particularly prominent faculty member was Bergsma’s immediate predecessor as director, Dr. Stanley Chapple, an enthusiastic
and messianic conductor who espoused new music but particularly
loved opera. Some admirers thought Chapple’s highly entertaining

UW lectures, long on anecdotes and personal musical memories
and delivered in a posh British accent, outpaced his conducting
abilities. He was a regular figure on the Seattle Symphony podium,
too, during an interregnum period in the early 1950s, but as Hans
Lehmann recounts in his memoir, Out of the Cultural Dustbin,
Chapple didn’t get the nod as symphony music director because
of his UW responsibilities—and because the musicians didn’t like
the “distracting grimaces of his face” during concerts. Later, when
age forced his retirement from the UW, the indefatigable Chapple
founded an orchestra, Musicians Emeritus, for senior players.
On the piano faculty when Bergsma arrived in Seattle were the
distinguished Hungarian-born concert artist Béla Siki, John T.
(Terry) Moore, Else Geissmar, Berthe Poncy Jacobson, and Randolph Hokanson (who in 2011, at the age of ninety-seven, wrote a
highly readable memoir, With Head to the Music Bent). Walter Welke,
who taught many of the region’s leading young brass players, conducted the marching band and the concert band. A respected pedagogue in the voice department was the venerable August Werner,
a Norwegian-born singer and choral director who also appeared in
UW opera productions. In 1964, the eminent basso Leon Lishner,
who portrayed deities and devils on major opera stages for more
than sixty years, came to the faculty; in 1969, he was joined by the
former Metropolitan Opera regular Mary Curtis Verna. Still later,
the department was augmented by such stars as the baritone Frank
Guarrera, the tenor Augusto Paglialunga, and the great Julian Patrick, who could apparently do everything from Broadway shows,
new operas, period operas, and the pivotal Wagnerian Ring role of
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Alberich to groundbreaking music theater pieces such as Jake Heggie’s For a Look or a Touch.
Three string players of international eminence—Eva Heinitz

(cello and viola da gamba), Vilem Sokol (viola and conducting), and
Emanuel Zetlin (violin)—predated Bergsma’s arrival and presided
over the string program in the 1960s and beyond. Then, in 1987, Steven Staryk came to Seattle to head UW’s string division. Dubbed
the “King of Concertmasters,” Staryk had been concertmaster of
four of the world’s major orchestras—the Royal Philharmonic of
London, the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, the Chicago Symphony,
and the Toronto Symphony. Staryk eventually won UW’s 1995 Distinguished Teaching Award. One doctoral student said of Staryk: “I
have not come across a more competent, challenging and thoughtprovoking mentor in all my years of study, neither in any other subject nor at any other institution.”
A tireless innovator, Bergsma lured the Philadelphia String
Quartet (PSQ)—initially composed of the four Philadelphia
Orchestra members Veda Reynolds, Irwin Eisenberg, Alan Iglitzin,
and Charles Brennand—to Seattle in 1966. Starved for first-rate
chamber music, Seattle music lovers and students queued for tickets, which were invariably difficult to obtain. The PSQ launched
more than two decades of glory years of sold-out Seattle concerts,
Beethoven quartet cycles, tours, recordings, and other adornments
to the region’s music scene, before the budgetary axe fell and their
UW residency ended. There was a happy coda, however, because
the Olympic Music Festival, which the PSQ’s violist Alan Iglitzin
founded in 1984 as a summer home for the quartet, became a highly
successful new chamber music venue for Northwest audiences.
In the mid- and late 1960s, and with the help of a few key grants
(primarily from the Rockefeller Foundation, but also from state
and federal funding sources), Bergsma put his new faculty hires—
dubbed the Contemporary Group—to work in concerts that made
the campus a beehive of creativity. The visionary trombonistcomposer Dempster expanded the universe of recorded sound
with groundbreaking recordings in the Cistern Chapel (an echo
chamber in an underground cistern at Fort Casey, Washington)
and the abbey of Pope Clement VI in France (where Dempster
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performed in the sonorous acoustics with trombone, didgeridoo,
and plastic sewer pipes). Joining Dempster was the highly inventive clarinetist-composer William O. Smith, whose stylistic range
extended from improvisational jazz to composed works whose
scores scrolled by the players on computer screens; Smith’s system for his Illuminated Manuscripts worked in much the way that
twenty-first-century musicians, more than twenty-five years later,
now use iPads in concerts.
Bergsma was also responsible for the move to the UW of the
woodwind quintet Soni Ventorum. This group, which had earlier
antecedents as a student quintet at the Curtis Institute of Music,
the American Wind Ensemble of Vienna, and the US Seventh Army
Symphony Woodwind Quintet, officially formed in 1962 in Puerto
Rico, where the success of the Casals Festival had led to the formation of a conservatory. The clarinetist William McColl, who had
come to teach and perform in Puerto Rico, persuaded friends who
had taken up teaching positions at the conservatory to join him
in what they called the Soni Ventorum Wind Quintet. Initially,
the group consisted of Robert Bonnevie (French horn player, and
later the longtime principal horn of the Seattle Symphony), Arthur
Grossman (bassoon), Felix Skowronek (flute), and James Caldwell
(oboe). In the summer of 1965, Laila Storch—the first woman oboist to graduate from the Curtis Institute and later the biographer
of the oboe legend Marcel Tabuteau—became the quintet’s oboist.
In 1968, hearing that the UW was looking for a faculty woodwind quintet, Skowronek, a Seattle native who had been principal flute in the Seattle Symphony for two seasons, approached
Bergsma about considering the Soni Ventorum. By this time, the
quintet had replaced Robert Bonnevie with Christopher Leuba,
the distinguished principal horn of the Chicago Symphony under
Fritz Reiner, 1960–62. Skowronek’s suggestion came with a letter
of recommendation from the flutist Samuel Baron, whose quintet
had premiered a Bergsma work, which may have paved the way

for Bergsma’s approval. Soni Ventorum became not only a noted
Seattle performance group but also the core of UW’s woodwind
faculty. The group’s thirty-three-year Seattle residency of teaching,
performances, touring, and recording lasted until 2001.
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