Fondest Memories
In Autumn of 69 or spring of 70, Paul Fye hosted a reception at Meteor House to welcome WHOI’s new hires. I was one, as was Jelle, and I was thrilled to meet him and Hilde there, given that they played flute and violin, respectively. I was equally delighted to see Peter and Marie Rhines, whom I had already known, and who played guitar and violin. Things were looking up musically. However, as neophyte scientists, we three were much too busy for serious musicmaking during that first decade of work in Woods Hole and not much came of it.
My fondest memories of Jelle came in the 80s and 90s, in three varieties. First were the dinners at #10, just the two of us, talking about far reaching and personal topics too numerous to recount. Second were our interactions about BUMP’s internal workings, a favorite topic for us both. Third, and the most fun by far, were our just-for-kicks chamber playing sessions at home, and our collaborations toward performances at the Woods Hole Library in winter, and the MBL Club and/or Meiggs Room in summer.
Wait! There were winter concerts at WH Library? Really?
In the late 70’s, Marianne Potter (violinist) and Bob Laurell (violist) retired to the Cape, and we three began playing string trios regularly. Aware of the Library’s need for supplementary funding, I volunteered our little trio for a winter fund-raiser, suggesting a home-like format - very informal, like a parlor party, but crammed into the then overcrowded reading room, with spoken rather than written programs, and finger foods and drinks beforehand included in the price of a ticket and provided by the Board. Given alcohol licensing restrictions, etc, the Board was compelled to resist.
Time soothed, Sue Volkmann led, and in late 80 or so, we got the go-ahead. The very first WHL concert, the Potter/Laurell/Simmons string trio, was a huge success and resulted in the sobering follow-up question: What’s next, Mr Impresario?
What indeed? That’s when Jelle rode in, and where his and the Library’s concert fame began to soar. Overall, there was enough local musical talent to support a small, off-season, concert series, but to top the charts, it needed a box-office star. That was clearly Jelle. His popularity was unrivalled, and our series rapidly climbed to the top of the social calendar where it remained for more than a decade. We played 3 to 6 Saturday-night concerts each season, October through May, with a focus on the coldest months.
Jelle was a box-office sensation. He was featured in one or two concerts each season, and they were consistently sell-outs. More than once, the fire rules had to be overlooked to squeeze everyone in. I remember marveling at the sight of his young fans perched hip-to-hip on the high windowsills in the main reading room. On two occasions, we had to announce, at the last-minute, a Sunday afternoon rerun to accommodate the crowds.
Jelle’s playing was always tops, but it peaked in aesthetic beauty in the Baroque literature, and I built a much-needed harpsichord to encourage him to perform it. His technical mastery and pyrotechnic displays would probably have been enough, but he brought a far more enchanting gift: his brilliant intuition and universally appealing charm as a performer. He was the most original, daring, and widely pleasing player I have ever known. Unencumbered by adherences to academic schools of musical thought, his main performance maxim was: Make nice sounds, sounds people will want to hear, sounds that will bring them back again. His tempi were never metronomic. He bent and deformed them to suit the music’s pace, shaped and phrased like a Shakespearean actor, took long pauses where none were indicated, explored the limits of dynamics, played fast movements quite fast, slow movements quite slow, and he knew instinctively when selected voices in the ensemble needed prominence and others subordination. His musical sense and concepts of ensemble were flawless, and his playing within our groups was consistently captivating: suave, graceful, elegant, sometimes humorous, whatever was called for, and always a delight. He never performed a work exactly the way we had rehearsed it. To him, a performance had to be fresh and new, and that led him to add musical twists and turns we hadn’t anticipated or heard before, which kept us on our toes. It could be unnerving for us as players, but it was always thrilling for audiences.
I spent more time rehearsing and performing with Jelle than any other musician I know and will always cherish the amazing times we spent together exploring new works, analyzing, experimenting, rehearsing, testing, making the sausage, so to speak, and performing (with others) in our decade of winter WHL and summer MBL collaborations.
Fortunately, I got to tell him these very things myself, privately, many times, years ago, during our one-on-one dinners, and that I thought he had fathered 6 absolutely marvelous kids, so he knew well exactly how very much I admired him and why.
I had been pondering the idea of one last WHL concert in the winter of 24-25, programming two extraordinary Telemann quartets we had uncovered with Frank Manheim’s help and had performed to great acclaim back in the day. Ah well. I miss him in so many ways.