My Musical Career | Part Twenty-Five

Goodbye, Evansville, Hello, Oslo!

In my previous post, I described my ten-week trial period with the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra, which took place between the end of November 1982 and the end of February 1983. It was an exciting experience and one that was very different from your usual audition, which involves at most a day or two for the preliminaries and second rounds, plus a day or so for final rounds, and possibly a week or two trial period in an orchestra.
Here, I had to leave the country and travel overseas to Oslo, Norway, a city and country which I had never before visited and whose culture was quite different from what I was used to. Then there was the ten week period, which took me away from my home and family for an extended period, which was also a first for me.

While I reveled in the experience and enjoyed playing with such an excellent ensemble on a level far higher than I had ever before experienced, I missed my family and the good old US of A!
Our reunion after the audition period ended was a sweet one, and as I reported in the last post, we spent three days with my folks and then flew back to Evansville, where we resumed our normal life, and I resumed my duties.
The Long Wait
While I was glad to be back with my colleagues and friends in Evansville, it was very difficult to get the intense musical experience out of my mind. I enjoyed my normal duties very much, and gave of my best, but at the same time, it wasn’t the same. I had had a taste of a fully professional situation, and while it was overseas, I guess I was smitten.
Intellectually, I knew that it would be a while before I heard anything from the orchestra, but emotionally, I wanted to hear as soon as possible. The wait was excruciating. However, that was not the Oslo Philharmonic’s fault. There were still two candidates that had to perform and be evaluated, and the committee had to meet as a whole and with Mariss Jansons before that evaluation could be completed. March stretched into April, April into May, and May into June. By that time, my wife and I had long since concluded that I’d best get on with my life and pretend that it was a nice hiatus, and plan for the fall. I had gone so far as to indicate to my orchestras and the university that I would be returning that fall. The Artist-In-Residence grant was not renewed, however, and this left a large gap in our finances. It was enough for me to consider taking computer courses in preparation for a career change. Things were so shaky financially that June that I worked a few days for my landlord gutting a series of rooms at the back of the first floor of the house where we lived so that we could meet our rent for that month.

Nonetheless, after putting the audition out of our minds, we experienced a period of mental and spiritual peace. We enjoyed our new daughter and taking care of her, and learned to appreciate the simpler things life, like taking a walk in the park, or along the river. Despite the uncertainty, life seemed sweet.

An Unusual Summons

It wasn’t until the first week in July 1983 that we heard anything from Oslo. And it was a most unusual summons, to say the least. I went to bed the night of July 6th and fell into a deep sleep. I remember dreaming that I was back

in Oslo, at the city’s premiere music store, Musik Huset on Karl Johan’s Gate (which I frequented on many occasions during my audition period) and I was listening to two customers discuss the results of the Oslo Philharmonic’s timpani audition. I heard one of them say “Do you know who won the audition?” And the reply: “Yes, it is a fellow named A. S.” That was it. No name. Just A. S. Now, as Alan Suttie and I had the same initials, I assumed it was him. Precisely at that instant (this was the morning of July 7th, and we were six hours behind Oslo time), my wife was awakened by the telephone ringing. I was still dead to the world, sawing logs! When she heard that it was Terje Mikkelsen on the line, from Oslo, she wasted no time in awakening me. “Andrew, wake up! It is the Oslo Philharmonic on the line!” I immediately came to my senses and answered the phone. “Hello, Andrew, this Terje Mikkelsen from the Oslo Philharmonic, and we’d like to invite you to become our next timpanist.” It was so freaky! I had (in my dream) assumed that they would go with Alan Suttie, never figuring that the A.S was actually me!Talk about coincidences!
I wasn’t so rattled that I wasted a minute giving my answer, which was a fairly resounding “Yes”, and Terje and I concluded a few preliminaries, and said that he would be in touch with me the following week to plan for my removal to Oslo.
Needless to say, my wife and I were delighted, but also struck by the unusual coincidence.

A Mountain of Things to Do, and Not Much Time…

We only had a day to revel in the news that we would be moving to Oslo that fall, when my wife received a phone call the next day from her mother, with the sad news that Joy’s grandmother – Joy’s mother’s mother – had passed away and the funeral would be held in Morris, Illinois in two days. This meant a quick trip up to Morris (eight hours drive from Evansville) and back, then there was only a week left before I had to leave for Glens Falls, NY for what was to be my final summer with the Lake George Opera. We had a lot of planning to do, and much of it was done on the drive up to Morris.
It would be a lie to state that everything in that week went by in a blur, but the fact is that while things moved fast, I remember most of the details as if they were yesterday. The first thing we had to get accomplished was the trip up to Illinois for the funeral of Joy’s grandmother, which we were able to undertake with a minimum of complications, considering we had our nine-month old daughter to consider. We took her with and she proved to be an excellent traveler, a quality she still has all these years later. As a matter of fact, she always loved to travel, for which we were grateful, as we were to a lot of it in the coming weeks and months. Once we had visited Joy’s family in Illinois, we returned to Evansville to begin to disestablish our happy home of nearly two years and prepare for the jump across the “pond”.
We spent a couple of days in discussions with the OPO about when I would actually begin my service with the orchestra and when I would actually arrive in Oslo. I still had the summer season of Lake George Opera to complete, and that was set to begin in about a week’s time and last for about four weeks until the middle of August. The Oslo Philharmonic began its season on August 1st of each year, and it was obvious that I would not be able to begin until much later. After much discussion, it was mutually decided that I would begin my tenure with the orchestra the week of September 8th. This would give me time to complete my service with the Lake George Opera and get our affairs in order so that we would be ready to depart for Oslo at the end of August and be in the city in time for my first rehearsal in early September.
Due to the fact that I would be playing my last season at Lake George Opera, the burden of closing the house and driving east fell to my wife, who performed yeomen work in that regard. Prior to my departure for Lake George Opera, our friends from our church ward and university gave me a royal send off at the house of Fred and Mary Alice Rapp, who were two of our best friends (and they were just that). It was a memorable and emotional experience for me. The next day, I was off to the East, and after a train trip to New York, spent a couple of days with my parents, and took a train to Glens Falls, where I stayed at the home of Cecil Taber during the Festival. He was most generous in hosting me and was a cordial host. My stay was fairly comfortable, and it would have been better if I had not been allergic to his three cats. I had a couple of bad reactions, but Cecil was most supportive, and I was able to get the shots I needed which alleviated my allergy to a large extent. It also helped that Cecil allowed me to have Joy and our daughter Maureen stay with me for the last week. He had a large house and plenty of room, and he was only too glad to help out. That last week in Glens Falls was glorious! One of the productions of that final season was

actually performed at the Little Theater at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center in Saratoga, about 25 miles south of Glens Falls. It was a production of Glen Paxton’s “The Adventures of Friar Tuck’. With Tim Nolen in the title role. Paulette Haupt-Nolen conducted, and the orchestra was actually backstage behind a thin gauze curtain. It was a fun production – different from the normal productions we did at the Queensbury High School in Glens Falls. My cousins from Long Island came up and saw the production and spent some time with us, which we found most memorable. Apparently they had heard that we were heading to Norway after the summer opera season ended, and wanted to see us before we left off, as none of us knew how long it would be before we saw each other again.

Off to Oslo….Again

The opera season ended triumphantly, and Joy and I headed downstate to my parent’s house, where we were to spend a few days before flying to Oslo. Joy had driven out from the Midwest in our Chevy Citation, and we had it with us during the last week of the opera season. We had a nice visit with the folks, and soon the day of departure was upon us. We left our car with my parents, and gave them the authority to sell it for us, which they did. My parents took us to the airport, and waited with us until the flight was called. We said our good-byes, and were soon off to Oslo – for Joy and our daughter, this was a first – for me, it was my second time around.
The flight was comfortable, and our daughter handled it well. We took very little with us other than what we needed as far as clothing, plus my bag of timpani mallets. We arrived at Gardemoen early on the morning of the Saturday before before US Labor Day; this gave us Saturday and Sunday to rest up before I started on that first Monday in September.
Arrangements had been made to load our luggage into a taxi (after clearing customs), and we were whisked to Bygdøy Alle 39, the same building where I stayed during my audition period. The only difference was that the apartment this time around was on the fifth floor instead of the third. The orchestra allowed us to rent it for a month until we were able to find an apartment of our own to rent. It was pretty much the same situation as before, except now I had my family with me, which was a lot better than batching it. The thing is, from the day we arrived, we were starting from square one, in a foreign country, far away from our loved ones.

First Week On The Job…..

I started officially on the first Monday in September 1983. The orchestra had a guest conductor that week, Karsten Andersen (1920-1998), who was at the time the music director of the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra. The soloist was Krystian Zimmerman. The program was made up of two works: Harald Sæverud’s Symphony No. 8, called the “Minnesota Symphony, and this was to be followed by the First Piano Concerto of Johannes Brahms. It was a good way to get started. The Sæverud symphony was a well written, tonal work, and of course the Brahms has a challenging timpani part.

The orchestra members greeted me warmly and congratulated me on my appointment. The rehearsals went very well, as did the concert. I found Karsten Andersen to be an excellent musician, and while his beat was not the clearest, he was a superb accompanist. The collaboration between him and Zimmerman was of the highest order. He was to return to conduct us on many occasions.
That first week was also spent on getting paper work done as I had yet to procure a work permit from the Norwegian government as well as permission for my family to live with me in Norway. This took a couple of weeks to obtain, and on top of that, Joy and I had to find our own accommodations, as we were only allowed to use the orchestra’s apartment at Bygdøy alle 39 for a month at most. On top of all this, there was a six-month trial period to get through. Of all this, more later.