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Volunteer virtuoso

Once a world-class professional musician, Halina Bobrow now gives her time and expertise to the Tampa Bay Symphony, a community orchestra.

By JOHN FLEMING
Published November 2, 2004

[Times photos: Bob Croslin]

The orchestra takes a breather while rehearsing Stravinsky's Firebird. "I meet an awful lot of nice people," Bobrow says of playing in the community orchestra.

	Concertmaster Halina Bobrow rehearses with the Tampa Bay Symphony for its upcoming performances. Some of her colleagues in the community orchestra, she admits, aren't so finely tuned. "But somehow when it comes to the concerts, it sounds good," she says.
	Symphony conductor Jack Heller is Bobrow's biggest fan. "I'm just so lucky to have her," he says.
	Bobrow, the daughter of a professional musician, has been playing since age 9.

ST. PETERSBURG - How in the world did violinist Halina Bobrow wind up in the Tampa Bay Symphony?

Bobrow has played under some of the most renowned symphony orchestra conductors, including Seiji Ozawa, Lorin Maazel, Pierre Boulez and, her favorite of all, George Szell. As a young woman, she was accompanied in a recital by legendary pianist Glenn Gould. For more than a decade, she was in the violin sections of the Toronto and Cleveland orchestras.

Yet despite these lofty musical credentials, Bobrow can be found every Tuesday night in an auditorium at the VA Medical Center at Bay Pines, rehearsing with the Tampa Bay Symphony, a community orchestra made up of volunteer musicians, many of whose playing careers peaked in high school. Since 1986, she has been the orchestra's concertmaster under conductor Jack Heller.

Bobrow, interviewed one afternoon at her St. Petersburg bungalow, speaks of her time with the 90-member amateur orchestra with a kind of fond amusement.

"I meet an awful lot of nice people," she says. "There are quite a few doctors, teachers, all walks of life. Some are really competent musicians. And some are pretty terrible. But somehow when it comes to the concerts, it sounds good."

Bobrow is the soloist in the orchestra's season-opening concerts, playing Lalo's brilliant Symphonie Espagnole. The program also includes, in a typically resourceful mix by Heller, Schubert's Rosamunde overture, Stravinsky's Firebird and the overture to Das Liebesverbot, an early Wagner opera.

Probably Bobrow's biggest fan is Heller, who relies on the concertmaster for her leadership. She instructs other orchestra members by example, sometimes demonstrating how certain passages ought to be played.

"I'm just so lucky to have her," says Heller, a music professor at the University of South Florida. "She's very loyal, and I'm grateful. She's a very good player, solid as a rock. She shrugs things off. She just does what has to be done. She just loves to play."

The violinist's life has been a remarkable odyssey, starting with the uprooting that happened to millions of people in World War II. She was born of Ukrainian parents in 1936 in Krakow, Poland. After the Nazi invasion, she and her parents spent the war literally fleeing bombs, living, she says, in cattle cars all over Europe.

After the war, Bobrow and her family moved to Paris. She began studying violin at 9 and was one of the two youngest pupils at the Paris Conservatory. Three years later, she and her family immigrated to Toronto. There her father, a double bass player, got a job with the Toronto Symphony and groomed his daughter to follow in his footsteps as a musician.

"To be a professional violinist, you have to practice five, six hours every day," she says. "At 12, 13, I was playing little concerts in Toronto, and getting paid, and as soon as I hit 16 and got my union card, I was working. You have to be a good sight reader. On a radio show, you just sit down and play the music."

In 1959, she got into the Toronto Symphony. She was in the first violin section across the stage from the bass section, where her father played. Toronto's music director was Walter Susskind and then Ozawa, later to go on to stardom as music director in San Francisco, Boston and now Vienna.

It was in Toronto that Bobrow played with Gould, a notorious eccentric whose phobias were legion. At the end of his career, he would no longer play live performances. He sat on a piano bench that was very low to the ground.

"He accompanied me at one recital, and my mother saved the program," she says. "I have no recollection. I do have a recollection of him later playing with the Cleveland Orchestra on his tiny little stool with bedraggled innards coming out. He was a character. But in those days, he was young and his peculiarities were not apparent."

After eight years with Toronto, Bobrow set out to get into a better-paying orchestra, and she won an audition for the Cleveland Orchestra. In 1967, she was hired by the music director, Szell, a Hungarian who had built Cleveland into one of the top five U.S. orchestras.

"The Cleveland Orchestra standard was of clarity - every instrument could be heard - and precision," she says. "From the very first rehearsal, I could hear everything crystal clear all around me."

Bobrow doesn't recall her salary exactly but figures it was more than $10,000. "That doesn't sound like a lot, but it kept going up afterwards," she says.

Under Szell, the orchestra made many recordings, and that provided musicians with supplemental income. Even now Bobrow receives royalty checks when recordings she played on are reissued.

"I'm still getting checks from way back. Whatever I was in, it's prorated and a check is sent. Anywhere from $100-something to over $1,000 over the years."

Szell recordings with Cleveland of the standard repertoire, such as symphonies and concertos by Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms, continue to sell.

"In recordings that were made for other orchestras, in my experience, they would splice, they would stop, they would go back over things," Bobrow says. "Szell never liked to do that. He would prepare the piece for a concert, then record it, and we'd go right through. He liked to just play from beginning to end. It was just like a concert performance."

Defining what made Szell such a great conductor is a bit elusive.

"His stick technique wasn't great," Bobrow says. "And he had the hardest time to start a piece. He would agonize to start it in the right style and the right tempo. However, everything fell into place. I think it was his concept."

His concept? Is that a matter of tempo?

"It's a matter of a lot of things. Phrasing, dynamics, tempo. It has to sound convincing. Everything he did sounded convincing. And what he didn't like, he didn't play. He was very choosy about repertoire. He stuck to standards because he did not like contemporary music."

Some of Szell's contemporaries, such as Arturo Toscanini with the New York Philharmonic and Fritz Reiner with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, were famous for their tyrannical manner. Bobrow experienced none of that from Szell.

"On the stand, he was always mannerly," she says. "He did not raise his voice, did not scream. He could be quite acid-tongued at times, and he required complete attention, but he would not offend anybody on the stage."

Orchestra musicians can be scathing about the person on the podium, and Bobrow has some choice words about famous conductors she has played under.

Maazel, successor to Szell in Cleveland and now music director of the New York Philharmonic, "tortured music," she says. "He pulled things out of shape. Just painful."

She reserves her harshest criticism for Ozawa. "I cannot believe his career. I thought he was an inferior conductor. He had no real understanding of the classics. You give him a Beethoven, a Mozart symphony, he did not understand the style. That's a big failure."

Bobrow played in Cleveland for five years, until her second marriage, to another violinist in the orchestra, came to an end. She decided to get out of being a professional musician and began to pursue a new career as a nurse. Her parents spent winters in Florida, and she liked what she saw when she visited them.

With two daughters from her first marriage, she moved to St. Petersburg and earned a bachelor's degree in nursing from the University of South Florida. For 25 years, she held a variety of positions, from cardiological nursing to making home visits to Medicare patients.

"It was very new to me, a totally unrelated field, which was what I was interested in," she says. "I like learning, and this was a good chance to learn."

Bobrow, who became a U.S. citizen in 1979, never gave up music. She formed a trio that plays for weddings, conventions and other occasions. She freelances for groups such as Spanish Lyric Theatre. And she plays chamber music, pushing aside the furniture in her wood-floored living room for regular sessions with musician friends, including several from the Florida Orchestra.

"This is just for our pleasure," she says. "We're all good sight readers and we just go through the repertoire, tackle anything. Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn quartets."

Bobrow sometimes wonders what might have happened if she had remained a professional orchestra player. "I would have made a lot more money if I had stayed in Cleveland," she says, noting that the musicians' base pay there has risen to more than $100,000 a year.

"But I didn't like Cleveland. Too cold. I'm glad I landed here. I like the climate. I like the relaxed atmosphere of St. Pete."

She also appreciates having had a range of possibilities for employment, rather than competing with hundreds of other violinists for scarce positions in symphony orchestras.

As a nurse, Bobrow says, "You can walk across the road from one hospital to another hospital and get hired. In the music world, if you get into a symphony, you hold on for dear life. Today, there are so many fine young players. Where are they going to play? It's scary."

- John Fleming can be reached at 727 893-8716 or fleming@sptimes.com

The Tampa Bay Symphony, Jack Heller conducting, plays at 8 p.m. Thursday at Ruth Eckerd Hall in Clearwater, 8 p.m. Friday at the Mahaffey Theater in St. Petersburg and 4 p.m. Sunday at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center in Tampa. Violinist Halina Bobrow is the soloist in Lalo's Symphonie Espagnole. $12. 727 319-8383 or (727) 442-3696; www.tampabaysymphony.com

[Last modified November 1, 2004, 14:18:11]