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Finely tuned

Violinist Midori keeps a hectic schedule that includes concerts, practice, fundraisers, practice, music education, practice . . . and more practice.

By JOHN FLEMING
Published April 15, 2005

[AP photo (2001)]

Midori, left, joins pianist Emanuel Ax, center, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, second from right, and violinist Jaime Laredo in a performance of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Piano Quartet in E-flat Major in October 2001 during a tribute to the late Isaac Stern at Carnegie Hall in New York. The unidentified man second from left is the page-turner.

	Isaac Stern once called the young violinist Midori one of the greatest child prodigies since Mozart. Now in her 30s, she’s dedicated to helping young musicians. [Special to the Times]

After Midori's recital Saturday at Ruth Eckerd Hall, it would not be unusual for the violinist to return to the stage after everybody is gone and put in several hours of practice all by herself.

"When you're on the road, and you're spending five hours traveling to get to a place, and then you have a rehearsal and you have a concert, you have to specify to the management that they help me find a place where I can do my three hours, either after the concert or in the morning before I leave for the next town," Midori says from New York.

When she practices, one of the things Midori concentrates on is the timbre she draws from her violin. She plays on open strings, a G, D, A or E, "the most legato, the most beautiful sound that carries," she says. "It's like meditation partly."

Midori's description of her focused approach reinforces the impression made by her playing. Rather than the opulent tone common among modern-day concert violinists, she has a wiry, penetrating sound that gets to the essence of the music like a laser beam.

Asked what the point of her practice technique is, she answers with a single word: "Listening."

Midori turns 34 in October, which may come as a shock to people who remember the diminutive virtuoso who inspired Isaac Stern to call her one of the greatest child prodigies since Mozart. With her mother, Setsu Goto, who was her first violin teacher, she moved from Japan to New York City as a 10-year-old.

Four years later, in 1986, Midori gave a famous performance with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at the summertime Tanglewood Festival. She was playing Leonard Bernstein's Serenade with the composer on the podium, when she broke strings on not one but two violins and still finished the solo part faultlessly on the associate concertmaster's instrument. Bernstein got down on his knees and hugged her.

An account of the concert and Midori's picture landed on the front page of the New York Times, and a star was born.

Today, Midori (who uses only her first name, which means green in Japanese) has little to say about that legendary occasion more than half her lifetime ago. Interviewers invariably bring it up, and she downplays its importance. "I was pleased I played well," she says.

Interviewing Midori can be a laborious affair, though she is ultimately quite accessible. First, you send her a list of questions via e-mail, to which she replies with written answers a couple of weeks later, with the usual lack of spontaneity that comes from such a method. Then there are two phone conversations with her speaking from the living room of her apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side, one while her longtime collaborator, pianist Robert McDonald, plays away loudly in the background.

She is unfailingly pleasant, but rarely offers more than the bare minimum response to a question. On the subject of the 1734 Guarneri she plays, a priceless violin known as the "ex-Huberman," Midori speaks of "chemistry," an interesting term for her feel for the instrument. Asked to elaborate, she says, "It's a combination of everything and anything," followed by a long pause, which she doesn't fill.

In March, Midori participated in a blog on www.artsjournal.com about the state of the arts in the United States, a weeklong series of exchanges among an eclectic group, from former National Endowment for the Arts chairman Bill Ivey to Washington Post culture critic Phil Kennicott.

But when the violinist is asked if now is a tough time for the arts, she offers only that "people are certainly saying that."

At the same time, though, Midori can be surprisingly candid. The program she and McDonald are playing in Clearwater and elsewhere on tour was changed a few weeks ago, dropping a Schumann sonata and substituting Bach's solo Violin Sonata No. 2 in A minor. Asked why, she says it was to make the program a bit less taxing because she has been having some health problems, not the sort of thing most artists like to disclose.

"I've been having joint aches and dizziness and fatigue," she says. "My doctors and I are trying to get to the bottom of it. Basically, I took away the piece (the Schumann sonata) I haven't played in the last eight months."

Fatigue might be understandable given Midori's many activities. On the calendar of her Web site (www.gotomidori.com) nearly every day is taken up by an event, be it a performance or a speaking engagement or a fundraiser for one of her educational organizations. Her 2004-05 season includes some 90 concerts. Told that her schedule looks "awesome," she laughs.

"You think so? Okay! People around me mention that from time to time, but they also realize how much I enjoy everything I do and how everything feeds into each other."

Midori isn't exactly taking it easy with the Bach Sonata No. 2, which she has played since she was 6 or 7 years old. "Bach is always a big challenge, and I love it," she says. "They are such great works. There's so much to explore and to discover."

Her voice takes on a passionate fervor when talking about Bach. As for interpretation of the work, she says, "It changes according to time, and according to the stage you're in. It's very much intertwined with your own development. How I hear it changes. And, of course, how I play it changes."

Saturday's program also includes sonatas by Mozart and Ravel, Szymanowski's Notturno e Tarantella and Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara's Dithyrambos, composed in 1970.

Midori has been playing more contemporary music lately. Last season, she added John Adams' violin concerto to her repertoire and has performed it with several orchestras. She recently premiered her first major commission, The Wreckage of Flowers, a violin-piano work by Michael Hersch inspired by poetry and prose of the late Czeslaw Milosz. She has commissioned a work from Rautavaara.

In January, Midori played an all-contemporary program of works by Alexander Goehr, Judith Weir, Witold Lutoslawski, Gyorgy Kurtag and Isang Yung in several Japanese cities. Her audience was carefully prepared for the largely unfamiliar music.

"There were many opportunities given them when they could explore the music before the concert," she says. "There were lectures, there were master classes; I did a DVD that was distributed beforehand to all the ticket holders who requested it. It had interviews with the composers and sound samples."

And the audience response? "They were very interested. They were very attentive. They were very appreciative. Everyone had a very different take. There was not one particular piece that was a favorite. Everyone liked different pieces for different reasons."

As for Midori, she liked it all. "When I perform, I like everything that I play, and I don't mark any one particular piece as a favorite," she says.

Midori is frequently asked to compare the climate for classical music in the United States and Japan. She is reluctant to generalize but does venture to say, "I do know that there is a greater emphasis on music in Japanese homes, so it is natural and familiar to children who often begin to love music very early on."

The violinist has made music education a priority through Midori & Friends, her foundation that fosters music programs for New York City public schoolchildren. Founded in 1992, it was the first of several youth outreach programs she has established. In May, her Orchestra Residencies Program will take her to Duluth, Minn., to spend a day rehearsing and performing with string students there, as well as playing the Beethoven Violin Concerto with the Duluth Superior Symphony Orchestra.

Ten years ago, Midori surprised many people when she took time from her thriving concert career to go to college. "I kept deferring it year after year, but it was always in the back of my mind that I would go to college," she says.

She earned a bachelor's degree in psychology and gender studies from New York University and now is close to finishing her master's thesis on what seems an unusual topic, pain.

"The topic has to be unusual, otherwise you don't get your proposal approved! That's the nature of university life!" she says emphatically over the phone without explaining if the topic has any personal meaning to her.

Instead of a dry academic paper, however, Midori's thesis has taken the form of a children's book. "What I want to impart is that pain is an everyday experience, a subjective experience that is part of the survival mechanism."

At one point, she actually considered pursuing a career in clinical psychology, but music won out in the end.

Midori also has a literary bent. Her extensive, meticulously maintained Web site includes program notes she has written on works in her repertoire and entries on everything from the tradition of encores to the Northeast's blizzard of 2005 to her recipe for whiskey chicken breasts. She recently wrote an article for the American String Teacher journal. Her beloved dog Willa, a West Highland terrier that died at 13 in November, was named after novelist Willa Cather.

In September, Midori's autobiography was released in Germany as Einfach Midori (Simply Midori). It has not been published in English.

"My writing got better as I did it," she says. "It got smoother, it was more fluent. When I finished everything, I went back to the beginning and rewrote it. I loved doing it."

Now she's started on her next book, about a traditional Japanese musician named Sawai Kazue, who plays the koto, a stringed instrument that Midori says is "like a big fingerboard (of the violin). When I first heard her play it about three years ago, I was completely bowled over."

But for all her diverse interests, Midori was obviously born to play the violin. As she has grown from prodigy into mature artist, she has become more aware of how to cultivate her musical gift.

"The most important thing is to be aware of the physical needs," she says, continuing on the subject of practicing. "It's almost like an athlete where you warm up according to how your body is that day. You check in with your body. It's not just by practicing hours and hours. It has a lot to do with relaxing.

"You know how your body changes, depending on how you travel, like sitting in a car for six hours? You have to warm up accordingly. You have to readjust your muscles so that you're in the most comfortable state when you play the violin. That's the only way you get the good sound."

PREVIEW: Violinist Midori, with pianist Robert McDonald, plays a recital at 8 p.m. Saturday at Ruth Eckerd Hall. $30-$45. 727 791-7400; www.rutheckerdhall.com

[Last modified April 14, 2005, 10:05:03]