The Lafayette Quartet performs Tuesday night
The Lafayette Quartet performs Tuesday night
By Ken Keuffel Jr.
The Arizona Daily Star
Arizona Friends Chamber of Music turns 50 this season - and has at least 50 reasons to celebrate.
``A lot of series don't make it,'' said pianist Tannis Gibson, whose husband Mark Rush, a University of Arizona violin professor, serves on the Friends' board. ``This series is not only old; it's aged so well.''
The facts support Gibson's contention.
For starters, the Friends, which Tuesday will present the Lafayette String Quartet at Leo Rich Theatre, offers not one but three series: seven concerts by the world's finest ensembles; three Piano and Friends concerts by emerging musicians; and an annual weeklong Tucson Winter Chamber Music Festival of four concerts devoted to unusual repertoire.
The main seven-concert series, in which the Lafayette is featured, has a daunting record in terms of attendance: 132 people are on a waiting list for 500 season tickets that have sold out for years, according to Frances Bernfeld, the Friends' new box office manager.
Moreover, while many presenters were shying away from new music, the Friends last year launched a program to commission one new work each season. It underwrites 20 annual performances by young local musicians in area schools and makes 12 tickets available to a select group of high school students and their chaperones.
``What they're doing is not singularly unique,'' said Dean Stein, executive director of the New York-based advocacy organization Chamber Music America. ``However, it's in the forefront of what the most interesting chamber-music presenters are doing.''
The Friends' success has roots in more humble, precarious beginnings.
Before 1948, a Tucsonan in search, say, of a top string quartet essentially had to travel to another city. And in fact, some of the Friends' first performers were recruited from ``Evenings on the Roof,'' a series given in a Los Angeles home.
``We couldn't afford to put them up,'' said Irving Coretz, one of the Friends' founding board members. ``They'd leave L.A. early in the morning and head for home right after the concert.''
A dreadfully hot Tucson Woman's Club auditorium and various UA halls hosted Friends concerts through 1990, the year the series moved into the Leo Rich Theatre.
Though the Friends did engage many top performers, it basically lived from concert to concert, with last-minute donations often keeping the organization solvent. Not surprisingly, by the late 1970s, board members say, a period of ``stagnation'' had set in, with slowly dwindling numbers of concertgoers hearing increasing numbers of lesser and less expensive performers.
The turning point came in 1981 following a meeting of the Friends' most loyal supporters. The Friends renewed its commitment to hiring the best musicians possible and reserved seating replaced the chaotic open seating sold on concert nights on a first-come, first-served basis.
Along the way, under strong volunteers such as Jean-Paul Bierny, the Friends' president since 1977, the Friends saw its endowment grow to $500,000 and came to receive annual donations from more than 50 percent of its patrons. The endowment, in particular, has been pivotal; with it, the Friends need not rely solely on ticket sales to defray the costs of concerts, some of which are as high as $17,000. They can also underwrite more experimental ventures, such as the Winter Festival and Piano and Friends, meant to increase the otherwise-paltry number of city piano performances.
All is not rosy. Like any chamber-music society, the Friends worries about building its future audience. Most patrons are over 50, and younger ones are not exactly clamoring to replace them.
``Fifteen years ago, there were no younger people in the audience,'' Bierny said. ``The situation is improving, but change has been very slow.''
Slow, indeed. Last year, for instance, only 153 students attended 14 Friends concerts, according to Bernfeld, despite the fact that full-time students were charged either $4 or $5 for performances. Presumably, general admission tickets, ranging from $10 to $15, are not keeping younger non-student patrons from attending Friends concerts, either.
Bernfeld believes the Friends suffers from a perception that no seats are available for its performances. While season-ticket seats sell out for the main seven-concert series, she said, at least 65 seats are available at the door for each performance. And there are still many seats for Piano and Friends and the Winter Festival.
To exist for 50 years is to leave behind a wealth of stories.
Coretz recalls the time a quartet's first violinist forgot the trousers to his tuxedo - and walked on stage in the far-smaller trousers of a UA professor.
Tucson audiences of the 1950s witnessed the last performance of the celebrated Paganini Quartet. That's because its violist died right after the performance, and the ensemble would only play with original personnel.
Bierny recalls a 1991 Brahms Piano Quintet by pianist Peter Orth and the Muir String Quartet in which a microphone recording the performance started falling in the direction of the Muir's violist. ``He simply got up and kept playing,'' Bierny said. ``He didn't miss a beat.''
Indefatigable musicianship, in other words. Like the Friends.
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