Profile: Left Coast Celebrates Its Two Cellists Leighton Fong & Tanya Tomkins

Leighton Fong, Michael Taddei, Tanya Tomkins

Tanya Tomkins was attracted to early music. Leighton Fong, to contemporary music.  Their paths never crossed until sixteen years ago when she heard him play at a Left Coast concert.

Yet they shared similar experiences (playing chamber music with members of their families, studying in Europe) and similar goals (neither was willing to specialize). Together they provide a breadth of music that gives Left Coast the freedom to program concerts spanning three centuries--from the late1600s to the early 2000s.

Leighton’s and Tanya’s families didn’t expect their children to become professional musicians. Leighton’s parents just thought playing music should be part of a child’s education. One of his two older sisters played the piano; the other, the clarinet and his brother, the clarinet and cello. When Leighton was nine, the public schools in Sacramento offered musical training to students in the fourth grade. He could have picked any instrument. He chose the cello because, “its sound resonated with him.”

Leighton and his sisters played chamber music together. It was “fun” and he “enjoyed playing with them.” He suspects that he might like playing chamber music as much as he does because it somehow “embodies his family’s spirit.” Of the four siblings, Leighton is the only one who became a professional musician. He never considered doing anything else.

Tanya’s mother played the piano and sang. Her father was a brilliant scientist and an accomplished jazz musician. He played classical music too. The clarinet, flute, saxophone and piano were his instruments. Like Leighton and his sisters, Tanya’s family played chamber music together. Tanya remembers, “always liking playing with other people. Chamber music is the most fun thing of all to do as a musician.”

The sound of the cello however, definitely didn’t “resonate” with Tanya. When she heard her older sister play the violin, she thought it was the “coolest thing she had ever seen or heard.” Her choice would have been the violin, but when she was eight she “succumbed to family pressure” and reluctantly completed the family’s chamber music ensemble by playing the cello.

Five years later Tanya’s father died unexpectedly. She was thirteen; her sister, seventeen. He never wanted his daughters to become professional musicians and instead had encouraged them to be, like he was, an amateur musician.   After he died though, music gradually became more and more important for Tanya and by the time she went to college, being a musician and playing the cello seemed the “natural track to take.” (Her sister became a professional violist.)

Tanya and Leighton both studied music in California and Europe.  Leighton attended the San Francisco Conservatory, the New England Conservatory, the Bern Conservatory in Switzerland, and the Royal Conservatory in Copenhagen, Denmark. Tanya attended the University of Southern California, the California Institute of Arts and the Royal Conservatory of Music in the Netherlands.

Leighton traveled to Europe for opportunity and adventure; Tanya, because she was determined to study with a particular teacher.  Leighton’s teachers in the conservatories played and regarded new and old music equally. Young musicians were not encouraged to specialize in one or the other. Old or new it was “all music-making.” Leighton’s primary goal has always been to “engage the audience by playing expressively and creatively.”

Tanya went to Amsterdam after she heard a recording of Anner Bylsma playing the Brahms Clarinet Trio. He was considered the world’s best baroque cellist, but she didn’t know that. She liked the sound of the cello when he played it. She wrote to him and sent him recordings. When he didn’t respond, she flew to Amsterdam. She knocked on his door. When his wife told Tanya he was teaching at a festival in northern Italy, Tanya took the train there. She played Bach for him. And, although “she played Bach in a very romantic way,” he accepted her and said he would be her teacher in exchange for her babysitting his children. She accepted. She learn to play Bach in the baroque style, she became fluent in Dutch (Bylsma’s children could not speak English) and learned firsthand by living with the Bylsmas what the life of busy professional musicians is like. (Anner’s wife, Vera Beths, is a violinist.)

Like Leighton’s teachers, Byslma encouraged his students not to specialize. And, in spite of being “the world’s best baroque cellist,” he stressed the importance of playing contemporary music. He thought it was important to interact with living composers and experience how much creative leeway they’re willing to give players.

In 1998, Tanya moved back home to the Bay Area.  She wasn’t sure if she would fit in with American chamber music groups after having played chamber music in Europe for so many years. Apparently, “American” chamber music playing can be louder and faster and is associated with excellent technique and “European” chamber music playing is more subtle and associated with greater nuance.    

Totally by chance, the very first concert Tanya attended after returning was a Left Coast concert. Left Coast’s pianist and her then new boyfriend Eric Zivian invited her. She heard “subtle, beautiful playing that reminded her of the European style. She thought, “Oh, this would be fun. I would like to do this.”

She was delighted when Leighton invited her to share the position. And, he was happy when she accepted. To him, it seemed like the “natural thing to do.” Playing all the Left Coast concerts in one season entailed a lot of work --- many hours of practicing and rehearsing. Having a second cellist in the group would free up some of his time to do other things like playing in orchestras and teaching.

Each of them appreciates having another cellist in the group---someone else who deeply understands the instrument’s complexities and can help find workable solutions. For most cellists that kind of interaction usually exists only in orchestras. It’s rare for a chamber ensemble to have two cellists.

It’s even more rare to feature them playing together in three pieces. In the final concert of Left Coast’s 20th season, Tanya and Leighton collaborate to play old and new pieces: the oldest is by J. S. Bach, the newest contains electronic music and is by a living composer, Matt Schumaker, and the third is an unusual string quartet (in terms of personnel) written by Arensky in 1894 in “Memory of Tchaikovsky.” It’s a typical Left Coast program, showcasing both old and new music and everything in between. Truly, it’s hard to imagine a better match than the one existing between the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble and its two cellists. 

Author: By Marilyn Zivian, Member, LCCE Board of Directors. Based on an interview with Tanya & Leighton in April 2013

2013 Composition Contest Winner Announced

On April 10, 2013, Michael-Thomas Foumai’s quintet Scat was announced as the winner of the 2013 Left Coast Composition Contest. Left Coast will perform the new work in the 2013-14 season. 

Scat is scored for a quintet comprised of flute, clarinet, violin, viola and cello. The work, which takes its title from scat singing,  is a seven-minute romp infused with a jazzy and bluesy subtext. The work combines several varied figures, similar to cuckoo calls, which are constantly passed around, mimicked and juggled around the ensemble. The Aspen Contemporary Ensemble gave the first performance during the summer of 2012.

Michael-Thomas Foumai (b.1987) has proven himself as “one of the most exciting new voices to emerge from the current generation of young American composers (Aspen Music Festival).” Michael holds a Bachelor in Music Composition from the University of Hawaii and a Masters in Music Composition from the University of Michigan where he is currently a doctoral fellow.

LCCE Artistic Director, Anna Presler commented on the judging process, “After many many hours of listening, and, it must be admitted, quite a few hours of dilatory snacking on delicious treats (mostly very healthy stuff, of course, like the doughnut holes that Jerry brought), Michael-Thomas Foumai’s Scat emerged as the winner.  It is a bright colorful piece with lots of fetching interplay among the strings and winds.  The musicians feel that it will be a lot of fun to perform and will also appeal to our audience. It seems like there is great potential to play around with the rhythm, exploiting the scat singing inspiration for the music.  

The runner-up was a quintet also, conincidentally, a piece with similar instrumentation; Matteo Giuliani submitted 28 Barbary Lane. Guilani is currently studying for his master’s degree in composition at the Milan Conservatory.”

Profile: Andrea Plesnarski and Tom Nugent (married pair of oboists)

Tom and Andrea met in 1985. She was 19; he, 26. Both had been accepted into the National Repertory Orchestra Summer Program in Breckenridge, Colorado, an eight-week, intensive fellowship and summer residency that prepares young musicians for orchestral and chamber music careers. Each year, more than 800 students from leading conservatories and music schools in the United States and Canada apply to the Summer Program; 89 are accepted.  Andrea and Tom were appointed co-principal oboe for the orchestra.

At the end of the eight weeks, she returned to the Curtis Institute of Music to complete her final year; he, to the San Francisco Conservatory. Three years later, in 1988, they were married. And four years after that, in 1992, they joined 13 other musicians to form what would become the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble. Kurt Rohde wrote a duet for them that they played on one of the group’s programs during the first or second year. This is the first program since then in which they’re playing together on a Left Coast Program---a special and unique addition to Left Coast’s 20th anniversary celebration.

"When two people live together and share something like playing the same instrument, there’s a built-in empathy, not just sympathy. The other person intimately understands the conflicts inherent with playing with that particular instrument and the process one must go through every day simply to get the job done." – Tom & Andrea

Both play regularly with orchestras: Andrea with the Oakland and Fremont Symphonies, Tom with the Sacramento Philharmonic Orchestra as principal oboe and with the Stockton and Fremont Symphonies. Tom also teaches oboe and chamber music at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, where he’s a member of the Pacific Arts Woodwind Quintet in residence.

Tom and Andrea became oboists seemingly by chance.  Andrea wanted to play in the high school band. All the flutes were spoken for, so the band director offered her the oboe. It turned out to be the “right fit.”  For her, playing the oboe is one of the “best, most soulful things to do in the orchestra.” She fell in love with the oboe.

Not the oboe, but the piano was Tom’s first instrument. He began playing it when he was six. At first, he enjoyed it. But, by the time he was eleven or twelve, playing the piano had become too lonely a pursuit. He wanted to play music with other people. He approached the director of the school band. Because Tom wore braces, he couldn’t play many of the band instruments, but braces didn’t interfere with playing the oboe. The band director pulled one out of a closet, dusted it off and handed it to Tom, saying, “This sounds kind of good.” At first, Tom was “horrified” by the “god-awful” sounds he made. He kept at it. He was determined to play with other people.  Later when he returned to the piano, he discovered it had ceased to be the instrument for him. Like Andrea, he “had fallen in love” with the oboe---its sound and the feeling of the vibrations created when playing the instrument.

The oboe’sbeautiful soulful sound comes at a cost however. The oboe is a double reed instrument. The reed is made of two precisely carved small pieces of cane bound at the base. It is inserted into the oboe and exposed (you can see it at the top of the oboe). The player places the reed between his or her lips and the reed vibrates when the player forces air between the two pieces of cane.  (It is thought that this way of producing sound originated in the middle to late Neolithic period and was discovered by observing wind blowing through a split rush.)

Carving the reeds“is really hard. It’s frustrating. And it doesn’t get better. It accounts for 80% of your success with the instrument and a corresponding 80% of the time you spend with the instrument. A reed may behave differently every time you play. Reeds are not reliable. A reed may change not only the way the oboe sounds, but the way in which the oboe responds to a player’s articulation and delicacy of sound-production around the reed.”

The reed’s function is similar to that of the human vocal cords. That’s what gives the oboe its unique and personal expression of sound.  And, for many players and listeners, that’s what makes its sound seem so magical---as magical as the sound produced when a singer opens his or her mouth and music pours out.

The three pieces featuring Left Coast’s married pair of oboists weave a network of intimacy, friendship, confessions of love and song. The Brahms Intermezzo, Opus 118, No. 2 in A major for piano was transcribed for oboe, English horn and piano by Jenny Sperry, a friend of Andrea’s. She transcribed the Brahms for a friend’s nuptials. Jenny and her husband are oboists.

Clara Schumann’s Three Romances, Opus 22, is one of her last and most successful compositions. She dedicated it “in deepest friendship to Joseph Joachim,” one of the most important violinists of the 19th century.

Joachim was a major supporter of Brahms, as were Robert and Clara Schumann. Joachim performed frequently with Clara Schumann and with Brahms, in private and in public. Many composers wrote for Joachim, but the most unusual and personal composition is the F-A-E Sonata, based upon the initials of Joachim’s personal motto, “frei aber einsam” (free but alone”). The sonata is a collaboration written by Robert Schumann, Brahms and Schumann’s pupil, Albert Dietrich.

Olli Kortekangas’ composition, Aveux, Hommages à Schumann for Oboe and String Quartet is based on Aveu one of a collection (Carnaval) of twenty-one short pieces written by Robert Schumann for solo piano. The pieces represent masked revelers, either Schumann himself, his friends and colleagues or characters from Italian comedy (commedia dell’arte). Aveu depicts a confession of love.

Kortekangas began as a choral singer and has written many successful pieces for singers, among them six operas and numerous a cappella choral works. Andrea heard one of his pieces for chorus. She met him. She listened to Aveux on his website. She liked what she heard. She liked him. And she chose to play Aveux because Kortekangas “makes the oboe sing, something it does best.”

Author: By Marilyn Zivian, Member, LCCE Board of Directors. Based on an interview with Tom Nugent and Andrea Plesnarski in February 2013.

Profile: Stacey Pelinka (flute)

Stacey Pelinka’s playing has been praised not only for its beautiful tone luscious, liquid and fluid, but also for its exquisitely focused and precise pacing, gracefulness and poise. -- San Francisco Classical Voice.

That’s not surprising.  Movement and music are both important for Stacey.  

For as long as she can remember, Stacey was interested in the arts, all of them.  She read children’s books about the arts and became captivated by those about ballet dancers. Just like the girls in the books, she imagined herself wearing beautiful ballet shoes, having a successful career and growing up to be independent and self-supporting.

Stacey lived in Sunnyvale, went to public school in Cupertino, and rode the train to San Mateo (doing her homework en route) in order to take ballet lessons from a former Joffrey dancer in a small but professional ballet school. She went as far as she could, but apparently Stacey didn’t have the “right” kind of body. When she was about 15 years old, she was told, “It was not really going to happen.”

Luckily, she had been playing the piano and flute since she was 9 years old.  From the very beginning she could make a note on the flute.  She knew that was impressive, but somehow it didn’t impress her.  She describes herself as having been a dilettante, one who did everything and took nothing seriously.

After high school, still unsure about what she wanted to do; she decided to try something completely different.  Maybe she could be an academic. When she discovered that the music library at Cornell had letters written in Polish, by Chopin no less, off she went, across the country to Ithaca.  She was pretty homesick the first year, but it got better even though it became apparent that academia and she were not the right fit.

By chance, Stacey was the only flute player in the department. Whenever a flutist was needed, she was it.  Soon she found herself playing the flute all the time. She wasn’t sure about her technique and knew she would have some catching up to do if she wanted to play the flute professionally, but that didn’t deter her.  She was sure that playing the flute was what she wanted to do. She didn’t even weigh the pros and cons of being a professional musician. She knew it was her vocation. To her, it seemed that music and the flute had chosen her.

After returning to California, Stacey met Lisa Byrnes, another flutist.  They played together in orchestras and became good friends. Lisa was one of the founding members of Left Coast, and Stacey attended a Left Coast concert to hear her friend play. She came away impressed by the musicianship of the group and its programming. She liked that the pieces in Left Coast’s concerts were organized around a theme.   When Lisa left for Salt Lake City to join the Utah Symphony Orchestra, Stacy started playing with Left Coast.

Quite soon after she began playing with Left Coast, Stacey played two of the pieces she’s playing on tonight’s program ---Takemitsu’s Toward the Sea and Crumb’s Voice of the Whale. She likes them both. “Each is very beautiful in its way. The Takemitsu is gentle, evocative and perhaps the more serious of the two.” She describes the Crumb as being quirky. “It requires extended techniques: the players sing; play harmonics that evoke sounds from long-ago eons; wear black masks; and are immersed in blue light”---as if they were whales themselves. ”The score is filled with extensive notes for the players and is, itself, graphic and beautiful. Each page of the score could be a work of art.”

A page from Crumb’s Vox Balaenae (Voice of the Whale) score

Source: http://blogs.houstonpress.com/rocks/2011/10/george_crumb_a_gallery_of_biza.php?page=2

When Stacey began studying the Feldenkrais Method in 1994, movement re-entered her life.  The goal of the method is to help people become more aware of themselves by teaching them how to focus on the ways they move. In 2005, she became a professional Feldenkrais teacher. On her Feldenkrais website site, she writes, “Everyone – from a small child with cerebral palsy to a master musician – has the potential to change and improve…. A Feldenkrais lesson is not a passive experience….The practitioner [creates} an environment in which the student actively learns…. Learning takes place at both intellectual and sensory levels, much as it does for an athlete and musician.” Moshe Feldenkrais, a physicist, engineer, cartographer, inventor, and black belt in Judo developed the method to help him recover from a jiu jitsu injury.  He is often quoted, and apparently he once proclaimed, “Movement is life.” Below is an anecdote about Stacey’s playing that, in a sense, supports that claim.

A reviewer described a piece for solo flute played by Stacey as one without “much music to wring from an eight-minute series of unpitched blowing, with occasional microtonal bending, or tones that land somewhere in the nether realms between the 12 pitches in the chromatic scale piece. It is an abuse of an audience’s patience. Either you work hard to stay with it or you zone out, or meditate.” But, it “does have a nearly imperceptible pulse” that was made “abundantly clear by Stacey Pelinka’s control of pacing. “The result was revealing. The on/off alternations …became salient…and the windy non-tones infused the gentle waves of sounds and silence…. The pulse that emerged…transcended the flute altogether and became a metaphor for life.” (Jeff Rosenfeld, San Francisco Classical Voice)

Author: By Marilyn Zivian, Member, LCCE Board of Directors. Based on an interview with Stacey Pelinka in December 2012.

Profile: Michael Goldberg (guitar)

“Left Coast’s Michael Goldberg is an outstanding musician with a flair for unusual repertoire.”-- San Francisco Classical Voice

Michael Goldberg’s path to becoming a musician was a long and circuitous process.  No one else in his family showed any interest in classical music.  Michael was initially drawn to the guitar at age 8 when he found that his older brother had gotten a guitar.  He pleaded with his mother to buy him one and to get him some lessons.  He studied for six months and then lost interest.  But at age 13, he started playing again and has never stopped.  Initially interested in folk, blues, ragtime and popular music, Michael later got interested in classical and jazz.

His first teacher, Joe Breeze, was the staff guitarist for the Ed Sullivan Show.  As a teen, Michael studied with Del Staton, a left-handed guitarist and wonderful teacher who had played with Billie Holiday, Doris Day, and the Mills Brothers.   Michael says, "Learning from Del was sometimes mystifying since he was left-handed and simply turned the guitar around, playing it with the strings upside down."

Michael did not initially commit to being a professional musician, going to college and working an unusually disparate variety of jobs.  But he “kept gravitating back to music,” playing with jazz bands, accompanying singers, playing solo classical guitar and studying privately.   Finally, in his late 20s, he studied with David Tanenbaum, and eventually enrolled in the graduate program at the San Francisco Conservatory.

Michael began to play with Left Coast in the mid 1990's along with his then- girlfriend -- and later wife -- Phyllis Kamrin (viola/violin).   He had already been touring and recording with Phyllis as part of the Alma Duo and was excited to have the chance to play contemporary music with a larger group of musicians which offered a greater instrumental spectrum of colors and textures.

For Michael, Left Coast’s adventurous programming is particularly attractive, “I’m always excited to discover something that I like.  One doesn’t know what to expect from a contemporary piece of music.  Not only as a performer, but also as a concertgoer, I find it exciting to hear new music that ventures into unexplored territory and has something to say.  I think Left Coast does a particularly good job of choosing pieces that have something important to express."

In addition to chamber music, Michael also loves playing music for solo guitar. This year, he has played solo recitals at UC Davis, UC Berkeley and CSU Sacramento. His solo performances have recently featured works by Narvaez, Dowland, Bach, Walton, Turina, Ponce, Albeniz and Rodrigo.  Over the years, he has been involved in a great variety of projects, ranging from performing with symphonies and in operas, playing on stage in long theatrical runs, for ballet and modern dance performances, with choirs, hosting his own radio show, recording various CDs, and most recently, touring with the Philharmonia Orchestra of London.

In Left Coast’s upcoming concert (Night Music, Dec. 9 & 10), Michael is playing Nocturnal, a monumental solo piece by Benjamin Britten based on the song Come, Heavy Sleepe by John Dowland, an English Renaissance composer, singer and lutenist.  Britten uses a familiar form, theme and variations, but in reverse: the seven variations each create a psychological portrait of different aspects of dreaming ranging from gentle and sweet to terrifying and intense, culminating in the beauty of Dowland's original song which does not end but grows more and more quiet, slipping into silence.

Melancholy music was fashionable during the Renaissance and Dowland’s music fit right in. But Dowland wasn’t just being fashionable; the complaints and bitterness expressed in many of his comments suggest that the melancholy in his music reflected his own unhappiness. Converting to Catholicism in the early 1580s in Protestant England and possibly bitter that he couldn't find employment as a court musician in England, Dowland spent most of his career employed at the royal court in Denmark.

Michael suggests that Dowland’s Come, Heavy Sleepe implores sleep to come in order to be released from the cares and troubles of the waking day.  In contrast, Britten seems to imply that waking brings relief from the disturbed thoughts of dreams. 

Michael's next project with Left Coast will team him up with Stacey Pelinka on the third concert of the LCCE season (Jan. 31 and Feb. 4) in a premiere performance of a new work by American composer Ramteen Sazegari as well as Toru Takemitsu's Toward the Sea, a beautifully evocative work about the mysteries and tales of the water world. 

Author: By Marilyn Zivian, Member, LCCE Board of Directors. Based on an interview with Michael Goldberg in October 2012.