Returning to Carnegie Hall: Grand Rapids Symphony members recall their first performance on the international stage
Before their return to Carnegie Hall, though, the local community has a chance to see a preview of the concert right here at home.
In 2005, when Grand Rapids Symphony violinist Diane Helle stepped onto the stage at Carnegie Hall for the first time, she was wearing a diamond watch. Her great-aunt had given it to her back in high school.
“She had imagined me ‘wearing it onstage someday in the future,’” Helle says. In the audience were Helle’s parents. “The trip was my thank you to them for making my career as a musician possible.”
Also in the audience, not that she knew it, was her future husband, one of a large group of audience members who’d made the trip from Grand Rapids.
Now, on Friday, April 20, the Symphony will return to Carnegie Hall. Helle’s husband will be present. Her parents, who have since died, will be present, too. And on her wrist will be the diamond watch given with such hopefulness to a promising young girl.
Before the musicians head off to Carnegie Hall, some like Helle for a second time, though, they’ll be performing a preview concert right here in Grand Rapids, this Friday and Saturday.
Carnegie Hall, named Music Hall when it opened in 1891, has been host to various authors and orators, Mark Twain and Booker T. Washington among them. But it remains best known as a musical venue, as culturally central a venue as exists.
“To play Carnegie is to play on the international stage,” explains composer and oboist Alexander Miller, who was there with Helle for the Grand Rapids Symphony’s 2005 performance. “[It] meant a great deal,” an important part of putting the Symphony on the map.
The weight of the opportunity instilled not anxiety but excitement, at least for Helle.
“In any live performance, you get just one opportunity to make the magic happen,” she says, “and this gives a heightened sense to the moment.”
Backstage before the concert, Miller studied memorabilia posted to the walls (The Beatles!).
“Backstage was kinda crazy,” says Suzy Bratton, clarinetist. “Much smaller than I had imagined and quite labyrinthine.” Soon enough, they were onstage.
“I remember the first note we played there,” Miller adds: G-natural. “It occurred to me right after the first note that it would always be our first note at Carnegie.”
Helle recalls thinking of all the work it had taken to get there: all the practices, all the performances. All those hours.
“I remember feeling really blessed.”
Writing in The New York Times, Bernard Holland praised the orchestra, in particular its string sound and brass section.
“The orchestra is what it ought to be,” said the critic, a high compliment.
Miller found the opportunity to perform there, and to be reviewed in The Times, validating—but the performance held an even deeper personal meaning. It was the last time his mother saw him perform.
“Shortly after that, doctors discovered her aggressive brain cancer,” he says. “She was gone in a few months.”
Thirteen years is a long time. Since that 2005 performance, the Symphony has only grown in prominence, earning both a Grammy nomination (for its CD “Invention & Alchemy”) and membership in the prestigious International Conference of Symphony and Opera Musicians.
The upcoming performance is not a sign that the Grand Rapids Symphony has made it; that has already been established. It was established prior to that first Carnegie Hall performance; established here in Grand Rapids, by people you have walked by knowingly or unknowingly; established through consistent excellence; established through the effort that sprouts somehow, magically and with a lot of hard work, into beauty.
Bernard Holland had it right.
“I hope [Grand Rapids Symphony’s] supporters understand,” he wrote, “that its achievement is not in playing Carnegie Hall but in playing Grand Rapids.”
Doubtless, a sizable portion of the audience at Carnegie Hall will be friends, family, and local supporters of the Symphony. Good: they will feel pride, and it is right that they do.
Those back home should take pride, too, in attending one of two preview performances in Grand Rapids (April 13-April 14 at DeVos Performance Hall). There, our Symphony, worthy of any stage, will do what it does so often: it will honor its hometown.
Grand Rapids Symphony Preview — Bolero Encore
Friday and Saturday, April 13 and 14
DeVos Performance Hall
Grand Rapids, Michigan
Tickets available here.
Grand Rapids Symphony at Carnegie Hall—Bolero Encore
Friday, April 20
Carnegie Hall
New York, New York
Tickets available here.
