Norman Nelson
I believe I first heard Norman Nelson and his brainchild, the Sooke Philharmonic Orchestra, performing at the beginning of their second season, in 1999.
Any lingering condescension I may have had at the mere notion of quality music-making in Sooke dissipated within the first few bars of their performance.
For Norman Nelson was not only a fine musician, indeed one of the finest it has ever been my privilege to know, he was also an inspired conductor who could summon from his orchestra playing of which they had not realised they were capable.
Born in Dublin, Norman studied at the Royal College of Music in London and had a more than distinguished career long before he arrived in Sooke. He joined the London Philharmonic Orchestra in 1951 and would later be its Deputy Leader (that's Assistant Concertmaster in North American); he would also serve in the same position with the London Symphony and BBC Symphony Orchestras and was a founder member of the Academy of St.-Martin-in-the-Fields.
In 1965 Norman came to Vancouver to assume the post of Concertmaster of the Vancouver Symphony, along with two English colleagues, Michael Bowie and Robert Meyer, who became Principal Viola and Principal Doublebass respectively (Bob was also to become a member of the Sooke Philharmonic in his retirement); while in Vancouver he was also Concertmaster of the Baroque Strings of Vancouver and founded the Purcell String Quartet, one of this country's two great quartets, with whom he played for over a decade.
In 1979 Norman moved to the University of Alberta, becoming Professor of Violin and Chamber Music, first violin with the UofA String Quartet and later Concertmaster of the Alberta Baroque Ensemble.
When Norman retired to Sooke, at a time of life when many people would feel perfectly justified in resting on their laurels (and Norman had more laurels than most of us to rest on), he decided that what his new home needed more than anything else was its own orchestra.
Given the received image of Sooke this might have been seen a an act of monumental hubris or perhaps merely folly, but Norman, of course, had the last laugh.
Over the course of almost two decades Norman would mould his orchestra from a chamber group that, by their own admission, found Beethoven's Symphony No.1 fairly challenging, to a full-sized orchestra capable of taking on Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra, written to showcase the virtuosity of the "Aristocrat of Orchestras", the Boston Symphony, and doing it more than justice.
In 2007 this dedication was rewarded when Norman was the recipient of Orchestra Canada's prestigious Betty Webster Award, which is given for "outstanding contributions to the Canadian orchestral community".
Norman's musicians, to a person, admired, revered and, yes, loved him: I was told on more than one occasion that a Sooke Philharmonic rehearsal was more like a three-hour music lesson (and a highly enjoyable one at that) than work.
Something else that I was told more than once, usually immediately after a performance, was "he didn't take it that fast in rehearsal"; whenever I mentioned this to Norman he would either smile knowingly or laugh out loud. He knew his musicians and what they were capable of, perhaps better than they knew themselves.
It was pure delight to observe the steady and seemingly inevitable improvement of the orchestra under Norman's tutelage. Each of my earlier reviews seems to have noted an improvement from my previous encounter.
But there was one aspect which did not change and that was Norman's skills as an interpreter. He never, in my experience, not once, "pulled his punches" interpretively in order to make the music easier to perform. His attitude seemed to be that he would rather there were a few wrong notes and hiccups in ensemble than turn in a bland performance. A position with which I am in total accord.
And while Norman's sympathy with earlier music was never in any doubt — and I'm not just referring to those Baroque ensembles he played with, but also the repertoire that the Sooke Chamber Players performed: I particularly recall one concert featuring Vivaldi, Marcello and a rarely-heard Haydn symphony (number fifty-seven) — it was for his approach to the Romantic repertoire that I will truly treasure my memories.
In an age when many conductors seem almost apologetic about music which wears its heart on its sleeve, Norman's conducting seemed to hark back to an earlier era.
Looking back over my reviews, I see that I compared his performances to those of some of the greatest (in my opinion) conductors of the Twentieth Century, including Wilhelm Furtwängler and Willem Mengelberg.
For some this style is "old-fashioned"; I prefer to think of it as truly authentic and in glorious contrast to the kind of desiccated, etiolated performances one so often hears today. Indeed, Norman's performances were frequently so viscerally exciting that I could feel my heart-rate accelerating and suspected that if I were ever to succumb to a coronary mid-performance, Norman's would be the hand holding the baton.
This ability was not just limited to the overtly Romantic repertoire, I can still recall a monumental and tremendously exciting Brahms First which literally had me on the edge of my seat, which is not necessarily the expected reaction to dear old Johannes.
But perhaps Norman's most extraordinary ability was to reveal aspects of works which I thought I knew well — or had even, as in the case of Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony, played in myself (however incompetently). Not only the aforementioned Tchaikovsky symphony, but also the Eighth and "New World" of Antonín Dvořák, the Fourth of Tchaikovsky and the Second of Sibelius. For example I don't believe that I have ever heard the largo of the "New World" taken as slowly as Norman did on the second occasion I heard him conduct it. But it worked and worked magnificently. Sometimes (as, once again, with the Tchaikovsky Fifth and, when my colleague Martin Monkman heard the orchestra, Dvořák's Seventh) the performance was such as to cause one to revise one's opinion of the music itself.
To say that this is a rare ability is to understate the case.
But perhaps the performance which I shall treasure the most, was of the work which is the fons et origo of the notion of the Symphony as Significant Public Statement and of which I have made a particular study: Beethoven's "Eroica". I was, as I said at the time, almost breathless by the final chords of his 2008 account and still regard it as one of the finest performances of the music I have ever heard. Unfortunately and to my eternal regret ill-health kept me from his final performance of the symphony, in October 2014, however Norman kindly gave me a recording of that one, which immediately joined the 300-plus on my hard drive.
Norman was also a first-rate accompanist, as I'm sure any of the winners of the orchestra's Don Chrysler Concerto Competition could attest. His willingness to "go the extra mile" was evidenced by the effort that had to be put into the score of Khachaturian's Violin Concerto in order to make it actually legible, much less playable. And all because the competition winner chose it to play.
On a more personal level, Norman was always a delight and pleasure to spend time with, even though it was difficult to get him to acknowledge his own stature: he would always be complimentary about his musicians and was far more eager to speak of them than of himself. When I once had lunch with him — we had, quite by chance, bumped into each other at an Indian buffet (we shared a fondness for hot curries) and he invited me to join him — I mentioned that I had recently discovered that he had studied with the legendary Albert Sammons, probably the greatest ever English violinist: he made the first recordings (both cut and complete) of Elgar's Violin Concerto, Delius wrote his Violin Concerto for him and Sammons participated in the premieres of many important English chamber works, notably those of Elgar and Delius. Far from basking in the reflected glory, Norman could not really understand why I was impressed, or even interested.
He could also be wonderfully iconoclastic, as on the occasion when, after a performance of Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No.1, I expressed my dislike of the work. Norman agreed in terms that were refreshingly and cheerfully scatological.
I shall miss Norman for so many reasons, but I am sure that Sooke and his musicians will miss him even more.