A Sneak Peek Into The Future Of The University Musical Society's Past: 100 Years of Concert Programs And Photographs With UMS President Ken Fischer

Fri, 04/07/2006 - 1:26pm

When: March 14, 2010 at the Downtown Library: Multi-Purpose Room

Join Ann Arbor District Library staff and University Musical Society President Ken Fischer as AADL launches two new online collections celebrating UMS's concert history. You will see how to browse and search thousands of pages of historical concert programs from the first 100 seasons of the University Musical Society. They will also unveil a growing collection of images that include both performance and rare backstage photographs of celebrated UMS artists over the past century. Refreshments will be served at this kick-off event, which will include a demo of these new online resources (soon available at aadl.org) as well as a talk by UMS President Ken Fisher on the history of UMS and the future of its archives.

Transcript

• [00:00:01.11] [INTRODUCTORY MUSIC]
• [00:00:24.67] JOSIE PARKER: Good afternoon. Welcome to the Ann Arbor District Library. My name is Josie Parker, Director of the Library System. It's a pleasure and an honor to have you all with us today, for something that we consider an historic event commemorating history. I will be introducing staff from the library who will then in turn introduce Ken, so I won't be taking up a lot of time, but I'd like to say that my familiarity with this project is basic. Except that I was part of the conversations about four or five years ago here at the library, with staff-- some who are here, Richard LeSeur, who's in the back, back there, and many of you know Richard, who was on staff at the time. Then department head Jim Rust, and Amy was part of those conversations about digitizing programs from the University Musical Society. So the conversation about this has been going on for about five years, and it's a pleasure as a librarian to work in a library today. Because technology's evolved in a way that brings history forward into the-- into our present that was limited. Access was limited to only those people who could actually touch and see these programs, and now the world-- after today, the world will be able to know what happened at University Musical Society one hundred years ago. And it's a pleasure to be able to have people working with UMS and with the library to bring these things forward us all, today and into the future. And I just like to make a special-- I have to say something special about Ken. When you come into Ann Arbor in a position like library director, you take a responsibility on that you're not completely aware of how big it is, because people love the library. Ken understood that, because he knows exactly what that's like, because people love UMS. And he helped me, in those first years, make my way through right decisions and understanding how to be the director of an institution that people already love, and how to do that well, and I appreciate it very much. And I'd like to introduce now people who make my job easy in an institution that's loved by many many people. Andrew McLaren and Amy Cantu, librarians here.
• [00:02:50.63] AMY CANTU: Thank you so much for coming today. We would like to recognize a couple of people at UMS who have been instrumental in helping get this going, and then we're going to give a brief demonstration of the site that we've put together, and then Ken Fischer will speak. So without further ado, I would like to acknowledge Liz Stover at the University Musical Society, Ken Fischer of course, Michael Conjalka and Sarah Billman. We've had many meetings and discussions about this project, and I just want you know that what you see here is just the beginning. It's going to grow, and we're looking forward to many such part-- projects in the future. Andrew McLaren is now going to give a demonstration of the site, and walk you through a little bit of both the programs and the images.
• [00:03:45.86] ANDREW MCLAREN: I'm just going to very briefly go through what you have to look at here, but there's so much here that I'm not even going to graze the surface of this. Everyone needs to go home and take a look at what we have in here, because there's so much that we've been able to get into here. This is the University Musical Society: A History of Great Performances, and you can find that on our website. It's ums.aadl.org, and the first thing where we started, out we started out with programs. And we didn't want to start out with just a couple programs, so we put in the first hundred years worth of programs. And you can go into any of these-- let me pick one here, somewhere near the first May Festival-- So you can select any one of these, and when you go in there, you're going to see those pages. These are the pages that people saw over a hundred years ago, that they had in their hands. If you wanted to see it bigger than what you see here, you can click on that and then you can expand it, and it'll get just about as big as you could ever want. So you can see all that fine detail. You can also, if you wanted to download it to your computer, we also have the PDFs available of all these things. Which we're not going to bother to download, but rest assured it looks the same as this. But that's something that you can go ahead and put onto your own computer. The first May Fest, well, you can see, was a much smaller event than what we-- what we came to know and love as May Festivals. Aside from browsing all of these programs, there's also the opportunity to search them. So if you're curious about, say, Enrico Caruso when he may have come by, we can just do a search, and there we go. There was Enrico's appearance here at UMS. This-- we have all these things done for us. You can actually see this text that's getting searched down at the bottom, and as you can see, while there're a few mistakes here and there, especially with the Italian and the German, for the most part it's pretty good. So the search is pretty good on this, and hopefully you'll be able to find just about anything that you're looking for in these programs. The second part of this, after we did the programs, just really where we started, everyone started to get excited. And over at UMS, Michael and Michael and Liz said, you know, we also have a pretty fair number of images. We had no idea what they meant. We have-- we have begun to scan the images in the UMS collection. We've just barely begun, with nine hundred images. There will be many, many, many more to come. Some of them are images of performances. Here's Leontyne Price singing her very first Aida. We all-- we have these in very high resolution, so you can take a look at them and see what it was like to be there. We also-- you can search these as well. I'm just going to do a search [? use ?] for Mister Bernstein here. We have over fifty-six images of Leonard Bernstein. And a lot of these, you can see-- I'm going to go into one of these-- this is a contact sheet. A lot of these images have not only not been online before, most of these images have never been seen other than by maybe two or three people before. These images have been locked away for years, and everyone at UMS jumped at the chance to make them available, because they knew what a resource this was going to be for people. And this is going to be interesting to people not just here in Ann Arbor, not just people who are interested in UMS, but people who are interested in music all around the world, and we hope that by doing that, we can help bring UMS to the world and help show people this is what we're doing here. We're not the biggest city in the world, but we know how to put on a show. So now, I think it's time to introduce our speaker for the day. Mister Ken Fischer.
• [00:08:07.08] AMY CANTU: Ken is just about to take you on a personal tour of UMS history, and touch on some of the programs and photographs you'll find in these new collections. He's been with UMS since 1987, and has proven over the years to be a committed community partner and a true friend of the library. Again, as I mentioned earlier, this is one of many collaborations we've engaged in with the University Musical Society over the years, and we're looking forward to many more, including, eventually, a database that ties together the programs, the images, and other information that's on file. So without further ado, please give a warm welcome to Ken Fischer. KEN FISCHER: Well, it's just great to be here today. This has been a dream of the Musical Society, really, from the very beginning, to have this opportunity to make our archives available to the public. So I want to begin this afternoon by thanking Josie Parker and her fantastic team here for all the work that they've done with us to make this happen. When Amy Cantu and Andrew McLaren of the library came to us wanting to embark on this project we're launching today, they proved to be the perfect partner to us. Now, throughout our history, we've worked very closely with the Bentley Historical Library, which is going to turn seventy-five next year, and they've done a great job preserving our past. We owe our predecessors at UMS a great deal. For every season since 1879, the UMS staff and our volunteers have saved five copies of each program and brochure, they've made scrapbooks of photos and reviews, they've kept autographs which built the foundation for this rich archive. And now, at the end of each season, we prepare a huge box filled with all kinds of stuff. Everything that you may have seen in the papers. I don't know what we're going to do with all the online things from annarbor.com, whether we're going to reproduce those-- we're going to find some way to keep them, of course-- and all kinds of brochures and everything. We do that every year, and so you can imagine we want to have that be a part of our archive as well. So the Bentley has done a great job preserving these things, but just as the Musical Society has been from the very beginning an organization with a foot firmly in the door the University and firmly in the door of the community, it was Amy and Andrew at this library that are helping us realize that this is the place where we can meet, bring all of that archive, and make it accessible to the public. We're very excited to finally be able to share this history with you, and everybody that's been attending our concerts and following our programs over the past decade, and I can tell you there's interest worldwide in this archive, because rarely has an organization kept their materials for so long. We understood that, when Carnegie Hall, celebrating their centenary in 1991, had to get in touch with us, because their archive, we understand, hadn't begun until a little later in their history. And just so that you know, we're twelve years older than Carnegie Hall. We started in 1879, and they started in 1891 on May fifth. And so, what you're eventually going to be able to have access to are all of these things, plus eventually-- and this is really going to be amazing-- there is a card catalog at our office. Three by five cards, remember those? Well, we knew that someday we'd digitize it, but we said why don't we do the whole thing at one time? But you go into that card file, and it's what we use every day, we said, now, when was Michael Tilson Thomas last here? And what did he do when he was last here? And what was the rest of the program, and what were the archive-- what were the encores that were done? Well, all of that is in the body of this three by five card collection. And so, the library is helping us certainly with all of our programs for the first hundred years. We've got thirty-one more after that. They're doing all the photographs, and they said they're part way through that, and we know we've got thousands and thousands and thousands of photographs, and they haven't yet asked me for all the ones I've been taking for the last twenty-three years, which are actually pretty good, and I want to throw them in there. But when this card catalog also becomes available, I think you're going to find it really cool. We also want to urge you to visit something brand new for us. It's called the umslobby.org. umslobby.org. Because in addition to all of these materials, we're very eager to get what you think about what we're doing. And people more and more now are expressing themselves about that concert, you know. And one of the things that we're going to begin now, because there are these things called flip cams. Very easy to be carrying a flip cam around and go over here to Leon Cohan, and say, now, Leon, what is your most memorable experience with UMS? You can imagine somebody that's been coming to our concerts for maybe half a century, to ask him to be thinking about what are those really spectacular and very special events, we're eager to capture that. And so, don't be afraid if you say, Ken, let me tell you about the last time, and I say, can I pull out my camera and catch it? OK? This is really what's going to make this a robust and exciting-- an exciting site. So I too want to thank two groups of people, and just reinforce what Amy was saying. We've got this terrific staff, who've been dedicated for years to making sure that these records are being kept, and certainly Liz Stover and Sara Billman and Michael Canjoka are a current team that's been devoted to this, and Michael, for twenty-three years he's been here, certainly sees this connection to our history. Richard LeSeur, who's been with the library for years, has just been a tremendous resource. Richard, raise your hand in the back so folks know who you are. And then I also want to give a shout-out to our advisory committee. Now, our advisory committee is a group of volunteers, now ninety strong, who eleven years ago, two hundred and twenty of them, under the supervision of Cathy Arcure. Some of you may have remembered Cathy Arcure was not only the head of the Musical Society's development, but for thirty years was a food editor of the Ann Arbor News. What a better combination, to get your food editor together with Director of Development, and we sold over eleven thousand copies of the Bravo Cookbook, which includes not only special stories at the beginning of each chapter about our most historic events, but you can find in here Itzhak Perlman's bean sprout salad. Isaac Stern's hearty borscht. Chichilia La Bartoli's potato ne yoke. OK? And, if you participate today and you don't have one of these, you may leave with one in hand. So-- and Ann Glendon and Mary Ann Dane chaired that committee. Over two hundred and twenty of our volunteers were involved. So, what I'd like to do now is take you on a little adventure that I'm calling Behind the Green Room Door: Selected Highlights from UMS's First 131 Years. Now, you're going to see some images up here, and the person is not yet identified in the image, and I may just say, well, who do you think that is? And if you say, I know who that is! I'd like to see your hand first, but there's something here for you if you participate. You know what I mean? And there's some real smart and knowledgeable people here. So first, I want to acquaint you a little bit with UMS, so you know what it is. We're a university-related performing arts presenter, founded in 1879, so we're the oldest of the university presenters in the country, and one of the oldest altogether. Now, amazing! In 1879 to 1880, these four things happened. They all continue now. The Choral Union was formed when the church choirs got together to sing choruses from Handel's Messiah, then they formed the Choral Union series of concerts. They said, hey we sound pretty good singing choruses, but we're just a bunch of amateurs. Wouldn't it be great to bring some professionals in? So they started the Choral Union series. Folks, the Choral Union Choir is a hundred and thirty one years old, and the Choral Union series is a hundred and thirty one years old. Then we said, well, we need an umbrella for this, we'll call it UMS, University Musical Society. And then, what a lot of people don't know is the same organization founded the Ann Arbor School for Music. OK? And we ran it for sixty years, so the music school was run under our auspices for-- UMS auspices for sixty years. Then, in 1940, it was deemed appropriate for an academic institution to accept training in music, and the University said, OK. We'll take it over now. And so we gave the School of Music, lock, stock, and barrel, to the University of Michigan, and of course it's a very wonderful school of music theater and dance now. And what is our mission? Inspire individuals and enrich communities by connecting audiences and artists in uncommon and engaging experiences. Each year we host about sixty to ninety performances, we have over a hundred educational events, and we're using, now, seven venues, and one of our most popular, of course, is Saint Francis of Asissi Catholic Church. You want reverberant space, but you also want a lot of parking and a friendly priest, and we found all of that. We look-- we looked at sixteen churches, and found that place to be remarkable. If you haven't been there to hear early music or vocal chamber music, be sure you do. And of course, the Museum of Art in that new Helmut Stern Auditorium is providing a really wonderful new space for us. Each year about 120,000 and 150,000 people are involved in both parts of our program, education and our performances, and we're very proud of the fact that 21% of our audience are university students, and we are the subsidizers of that. Lots of universities have student fee programs that they have, but this is something the University Musical Society, with the help of a lot of our supporters, have been able to help us support. So students have saved over $2.5 five million dollars over the last twenty years. We've commissioned fifty-five new works in dance theater and music, because we feel it's important. Just as our scientists at Michigan advance the art form, and our historians, we have a responsibility to make sure there's always new music theater and dance. Most of that we do, by the way, in partnership with other universities. A few years ago, we were named by musicalamerica.com, which is sort of the Bible of our industry, one of the five most influential presenters along with Lincoln Center, Kennedy Center, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and Cal Performances. And I think it's interesting that, after we had Bernstein here in 1988, the manager said, you like doing unusual and big things, don't you? The next big thing is Jimmy Levine is going to bring the Met Opera Orchestra out of the pit and onto the stage. Would you be interested? And we said, yeah, sure, but why don't you give us the debut performance of the inaugural tour of the Met Orchestra? And so that's what we did. I'll show you a little bit later. And then, of course, in October sixth of 2007, they came back and said, well hey, La Scala Orchestra hasn't been on tour, would you like to do that? And we said, yeah, why don't we do their debut performance on their inaugural tour? So that's what happened. And of course, we have this unique partnership with the Royal Shakespeare Company, they've been here three times for multi-week residencies, and people have come from up to thirty-nine states in five countries. And of course, we work in partnership with seventy academic units and about two hundred faculty members. These are deep connections that we use to animate and bring context to what we have on stage. Why would we ever want to just put the Kirov Orchestra conducting Shastakovich in three symphonies on stage with Gergiev conducting without asking, well, who is Shastakovich? Which what period was he writing? You know, what-- what could we learn by what was going on at that time? If you're at the University of Michigan, believe me, you ask those questions, ten people raise their hands and say, I can help you with that, because I'm a scholar in Russian literature, or in music, or language. How lucky we are, to be here with those kind of partners. And of course, a hundred community partners in the school systems, and other arts organizations, and Josie, the library, one of our most valued partners. I think it's interesting, too, because some people say, well, we-- Ken, we've just-- all those people, we've heard before. The fact is, every year, over 50% of our events include the debut of a new artist that we haven't had here, and over 50% of our presentations are with artists from outside the United States. And somebody made reference to this: artists love the UMS audiences. And boy, do they. They love your knowledgability, your passion, the fact that you're so appreciative, that it's a diverse audience, and you're the largest audience but almost always the smallest town on any international tour. And this is what happened when the Berlin Philharmonic came, and it was a nine-city tour. Moscow. Bonn. Paris. London. New York. Washington. Chicago. Boston. And? Say it louder! Ann Arbor! And the next morning, you know? I get an E-mail from the president of the of the Berlin Philharmonic. An E-mail from the president of the Berlin Philharmonic after they had completed that nine-city tour. And what did it say? It said, Ken, we love it here. And he gave all of these reasons why. And not only that, but you treated the conductor well, and I'll have a little story about that a little bit later. But what he said then was, what would you think if we brought eighteen of our members to Ann Arbor for two weeks to play chamber music with your students? Folks, this is the best orchestra in the world saying, could we bring eighteen people and play chamber music with your students? We said absolutely, then we checked the dates, and those are exact times that the RSC was going to be coming. But next year-- and as long as you don't tell anybody outside of this room-- it may not be exactly what that conversation was then, but members of the Berlin Philharmonic are going to be coming here and playing chamber music with our students next year. Now, everybody, would you raise your hand, put it on your heart, and say I'm not going to tell anybody. OK. I can't-- I can't give you too much. OK. And again, this partnership with the university is absolutely marvelous, because smart people a long time ago said, you know, we'd all be best off-- the community, the university, and UMS, if there was a measure of independence for you. And so, these folks established a relationship where we are independent, but proudly and deeply affiliated. OK folks, let's move on now. And you see, remember when we were founded? It was 1879, but there was actually a lot going on. We found this program from 1874 done at the University Hall This is the place where concerts were held prior to Hill Auditorium coming on in 1913. So you can see that the nature of the concert had a variety of different types of performances, but it was the Mendelssohn Quintet Club and they of Boston. Organized for twenty-five years, and these are the folks that came, so there was a different combination of things. We couldn't find exactly who was sponsoring it, which has been a bit of a mystery in the programs, and so this was a commencement concert in University Hall a few months later, and you can see the Oratorio Society perform, the Senior Glee Club, and Mrs. Darrow and Miss Avery, they performed in the 1975 Glee Club once again. So a commencement concert, look when commencement was. As late as June twenty-second of 1874. Now, we've been wondering about, you know, when was actually the first gig at the Musical Society? What we know is that these four church choirs were gathered to sing choruses from Messiah. Was it a rehearsal? Was it something that you actually paid people to come and hear? Hear you do? We don't know yet, but that's one of the remaining questions, and we're going to have an answer for you, so you've got to keep checking. But we do know that, in December of 1879, there was this concert-- also at University Hall-- with-- how do you say the fellow's name? Remenyi? Anyway, this was one of the great European violinists who brought a team of other artists with him. He brought Emma Thurston and Edmond De Celle and Julian Heinze, and this was their program, which had all kinds of-- what kinds of stuff. And then on the side, you'd have various reviews that were part of the program. Now we're going to get into UMS history, but does anybody know who that is? We've got-- you've got to speak up and raise your hand. Who is that guy? Pardon? That's not Charlie Sink, but that is-- Grace? That is Albert "Dad" Stanley. Now Grace, I already know you have a cookbook, but we're going to give you-- we're going to give you this little book, this little black book, that has images from Hill Auditorium, and we have a team of people that will deliver the gifts. Now do you understand? Here's how we do it. This is Albert Stanley. Albert Stanley was Founder of the May Festival and conductor of the Choral Union. OK? Very important man in our history. I'll have a little bit more to say about him a little bit later. So the first May Festival concert was the Verdi Requiem. And the Verdi Requiem plays an important part in our history. Whenever we were doing a big event, we wanted to do the Verdi Requiem. And so, this was the seventh concert of the Choral Union series, and the Choral Union series was blended into the May Festival. They weren't seen as separate events back then, so in May nineteenth of 1894, 7:30, you had the Manzoni or Verdi Requiem. And Albert Stanley was the conductor. Now, who is this? Jan Barney Newman. Who did you say it was before? This is Charlie Sink. Now, Charlie Sink is a very important person in our history, because Charlie was with the Musical Society from 1904 to 1968. That's sixty-four years. Charlie started, and he was the Director of the School of Music, the administrator, the secretary of the Musical Society. He was also a politician. One amazing guy. And isn't that interesting? He had the two Fritz Kreislers between him. This little short Charlie Sink with these two big Fritz Kreislers, the violinist on the right and our famous athletics director on the left. So why did I put Charlie Sink up here? Because Charlie-- this is Hill Auditorium right at 1913 when it opened. Now, Charlie had been-- he had been on board for nine years when they-- when this was built, and it was he who influenced the way that building would be thought about. Because Carnegie Hall existed, built in 1891, and people were saying, well, why don't we just do another Carnegie Hall? And he said no, no, no, no, you want a hall large enough that the entire student body can sit there, and the president could be heard speaking un-amplified from the center of the stage. And you want to have great acoustics in it. So Charlie really made his opinion known to the president. So what's interesting is that one hundred years ago, right around this time, Charlie Sink from UMS and the president of the university were the people that designed and raised the funds for Hill Auditorium. We got Mr. Hill-- who had died by this time, but he was a regent, a lumberman from Saginaw-- he had left a will, and left $200,000 towards the construction of Hill Auditorium. Charlie went up to the senate, where he was a member, and pulled another $150,000 out of the stat, state of Michigan, and there were a few other dollars exchanged in there, but one hundred years ago, UMS and the University built Hill Auditorium. You think it would be a good if a hundred years later, if Hill needs a few other things, that the same organizations might work together to put on an Education Center at Hill Auditorium? OK, more about that later. OK. Because its centenary is going to be in 2013. OK, folks. This is an historic photo. This is the first audience at Hill Auditorium, it's May fourteenth, 1913, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and does anybody know who the conductor was? Back then, Chicago Symphony Orchestra-- did you say Stock? Yeah, Frederick Stock. Do we have-- do you have a Bravo? You do? Then you're going to get a May Festival hundred year history, because you identified who conducted at the first one. OK. Thank you for participating. This is what the audience looked like, and this is what was on stage doing the Manzoni Requiem. Isn't that a great shot? Yup. Now, we were doing four concerts back then, May fourteen through seventeen, this is what the cover looked like, and then these are the four programs. They jammed four programs into one page. You can see Wednesday evening, the opening concert, this soloists, who the soloists were, but they didn't have the exact pieces, and the Requiem on the fifteenth, and then an evening of the orchestra and Ernestine Schumann-Heink and then Saturday evening was Wagner night, where they did Lohengrin and The Meistersinger. What we also know of history at that time, this was a big deal. People were coming in on trains from all over the region, because this was something new. We had engaged the Boston Symphony Orchestra to come, but they canceled. So Charlie Sink and Albert Stanley-- I think Albert Stanley said, now, we can't let it go, and why bring an orchestra out for one night? Oh, let's go hire the Boston Festival Orchestra and have them come out for four days. And that's how the May Festival started, not with the Boston Symphony, but the Boston Festival Orchestra, because the Boston Symphony cancelled on us. So, for the next ten years, we had the Boston Festival Orchestra come. And then, in 1919, this guy came. Now, who is this? You all know that that's Caruso, I'm not going to give any prizes for that because we actually talked about him, but this is a wonderful story. You bet. That's Enrico Caruso with the welcoming party at the train station. Now this is an interesting story, because Hill was built in 1913, then what happened from 1914 to 1918? You had the war, and what did the war mean? It meant people weren't coming to concerts. So you built this new hall, fabulous new hall, you have a great opening, and then nobody comes. But the war ends in 1918, so what does Charlie do? He says, we've got to get people back in the house. And the most famous singer in the world was Caruso. His recordings were well known, but he wasn't getting around the country that much. Charlie Sink got on this, got on the train, went to New York, and he had made advance arrangements with Caruso's manager, and Caruso's manager was not happy about his coming, because he said, first of all, pal, where in the hell is Ann Arbor, I know we won't want to go there, and secondly, you can't afford him. And Charlie said, can I just come and talk to him? So he let-- the manager let Charlie Sink have a few minutes with Caruso, but said, don't talk about money. So Charlie had a private moment with Caruso, they came out arm in arm, and Caruso says, I like it in Ann Arbor, I want to go there. They're going to have the keys to the city for me, they're going to have the band meet me, and they got this nice big hall, and then he left and the manager said, now pal, you've got a real problem. He actually wants to go to where the hell is it, Ann Arbor? You can't afford him. And Charlie said, how much is it? And the guy said $13,850. And Charlie said, give me a week. Charlie came back to the Musical Society, convened the board, and they came up with this scheme. Brilliant. I have a good board now, I would hope they be capable of this same brilliance. OK? But here's what the Musical Society board said. What is our objective? Get people back into the house. So they said, to be eligible to buy a ticket to the Caruso concert, you have to order the Choral Union series for the 1919, 1920, and 1921 seasons in advance. Isn't that brilliant? Because everybody wanted to hear Caruso, it absolutely worked. Now, what do we know? We know that Caruso was scheduled to come in October, but it had to be postponed, and the concert actually happened on March third. And so this was Caruso with his supporting cast of Nina Morgana and Elias Breeskin, and it actually then occurred on March third, and this is the program, and if you have the Bravo Cookbook, this is one of the stories that's in there, and this same program is in there. So, we go now from 1919 to 19-- anybody know who that is on the podium? This is Ennis-- you're wrong. No, not Dr. Rubenstein, but who preceded-- who said Stakovsky? Richard LeSeur, you know too much history. Richard, is there a cookbook you'd like to give to one of your friends? You're given so many. OK. But isn't this great? This is Hill Auditorium, that's Leopold Stakovsky, 1936 is when the Philadelphia came for the first time. Then, Eugene Ormondy was conductor then in 1937 and remained the conductor almost until the orchestra no longer came. Their last one was in 1984. So that's Stakovsky, and then here was the official program of that May Festival, which was the forty-third. This was the Wednesday night performance of Bach's Tocata and Fugue, and then a bunch of Wagner pieces, and then these are the principles who participated in the Festival, and I think that that's how they used to do it. They'd say, here are the principles on one page, so you know who you're going to be hearing. And Giovanni Martinelli, Lily Pons, they were all part of that 1936 May Festival. Efrem Zimbalist was playing the [UNINTELLIGIBLE] Now remember, all of this is now available to you. You can just click in Stakovsky, and you're going to be able to get this now. And who is that? You got-- you've got to-- yeah, that's Leontyne Price. Now, not only was the May Festival of 1957 her first concert Aida, it's the first time she did the Verdi Requiem. So this is an historic event for her, and you may know the last time she sang at the Met, what did she choose to sing? Aida. So this, she connected us always with that place, that provided that first opportunity. Now what's interesting here is that Thor Johnson was conducting the Choral Union and the Philadelphia Orchestra, but does anybody see who the baritone was there? Robert McFerrin. That's Bobby McFerrin's father, who was the first African American baritone soloist at the Met, and does anybody know who the first tenor soloist at the Met was, because he's in our own community. George Shirley. George Shirley. Do you have the cookbook? Did you have the cookbook? Cookbook for this man, because that is very good. George Shirley, who is the Joseph E. Maddy Professor of Music here, had a wonderful career with the Met. OK. Let's continue now. This is one of the next historic events. When you think-- you got it, Stravinsky. Right. You got a cookbook, pal. But you're going to get Leon Cohan in the front row, Leon we're going to give you-- now, what this is, when Hill reopened after the restoration and renovation, Michael Canjoka and his staff looked at four thousand images of the way in which artists and audiences connected with Hill Auditorium, and reduced it to forty, put them in this little black book, and you see Glenn Gould playing in the basement of-- rehearsing there. You see a member of the Philadelphia Orchestra poking his head outside his locker, because the only place he could change his clothes was on the back of the semi trailer, because we don't have any backstage rooms. So there's a photo of this guy, and a little kid's looking at him. Must be his own child, and the guy's, you know, inside the locker changing his clothes. We hope that with an addition at Hill we might have a proper place with the Philadelphia and the Berlin to change their clothes. So, in any case, yes. Yes, this is Stravinsky. And when you think of the great artists of the twentieth century, and Picasso, Martha Graham, and you think of Stravinsky, he was here in 1964 conducting Persephone, and I'm-- and this, you know, this is what our friends from the library-- remember, this was from a contact sheet. And because the resolution is so good, I think we're going to be able to blow those up and you'll be able to see. But you see how he wore two sets of glasses? OK. That's Stravinsky here 1964, and here's Stravinsky conducting Stravinsky, and some of you may remember John McCollum from our faculty here, a tenor, he was the tenor soloist back there in 1964. Who is that? That's Rubenstein. I'm going to make this a short story, because it can get long. But Rubenstein, there was a young man who was interested in his daughter Eva, who was dancing on the Broadway stage, and this fellow got to meet Eva and he went to-- he eventually went to Union Theological Seminary to study being a Presbyterian minister, and he fell in love with Eva and said, I've got to go speak to your father and ask for your hand in marriage, and she says, oh, Bill, not only are you studying to be a, you know, not only are you a Protestant, you're studying to be a Presbyterian minister, my father the good Jew that he is, is going to have something to say about that. So William Sloane Coffin, Jr.-- Bill Coffin, who studied with Boulanger, played a recital every year at Yale, good pianist-- he went to the top of the penthouse apartment of Mr. Rubenstein and knocked on the door. And Rubenstein said, Bill. Come in, sit down, what is it? Well, if you knew Coffin, he wasn't a guy to beat around the bush. And he went right over to Rubenstein and said, Mr. Rubenstein, I want to marry your daughter Eva. Then he went and sat down. Rubenstein waited forty-five seconds, then he stood up and walked over and said, do you expect me to let my daughter marry some kind of a Billy Graham? Then he turned around and sat down. Coffin waited forty-five seconds, went over and said, well, do you think I want Liberace for my father-in-law? True story. That's a true story told me by Bill Coffin in 1965. So that's Rostropovich. Now, the story about him. So, my wife Penny was secretary to my predecessor Gail Rector when we were graduate students here between 1966 and 1968. May Festival, 1967, Galina Vishnevskaya his wife was singing that night with Mildred Miller. Was anybody there? 1960-- there you go. You know that that was dramatic. Well, our instructions from Gail Rector was, as soon as that concert's over, you hop in your car and go over and pick up Mr. Rostropovich at the airport. Well, Penny and I had this junk heap graduate student car, my dad had a big Mercury over in Plymouth, so we borrowed the Mercury, we went on down to pick up Rostropovich, and my brother's a pro-- my brother's a cellist, this was going to be a big thrill. And we'd heard that Rostropovich was one of these big bear-hugging kind of guys, you know? We said, this is going to be wonderful. So Penny and I get to the airport, and remember there's not the kind of security you have now, you could actually go to the gate to meet somebody-- and everybody is coming off the plane, and Penny and I are waiting for Rostropovich, and there's nobody comes off. And we're getting concerned, and just as we're about to go to check, out bounces this guy with his cello, and he has a smile on his face, and we approach him, but he puts the cello right between us and him. He said, before we greet, I have question. What's your question, Mr. Rostropovich? Did my wife get standing ovation tonight or not? Well, Penny and I looked at him, and I don't know if you remember back then, but you weren't standing very much. And we said, well, Mr. Rostropovich, let us explain here in Ann Arbor that the audience-- Did she or didn't she? Plain and simple. We thought it needed further explanation, and he said, did she or didn't she? Mr. Rostropovich, two people stood. Ooh! Her manager and her publicist in the front row. And he got this big smile and he said, tomorrow night I play Dvorak. He has to get standing ovation. Then he moved the cello aside and gave us big bear hugs, and of course, we honored him posthumously at the Ford Honors Program a couple of years ago, so we love him. But you know, we've had an interesting time with other cellist. Now, who is this? Ah-ha! Piatigorsky. Have you gotten something yet? Do you have a cookbook? Cookbook for this man, because that's good. Now, can anybody else tell me the connection-- do we have another cookbook? Are we giving them away? Come on up. Can anybody tell me the real story about Piatigorsky in Ann Arbor? OK. He got married-- he married Jacqueline de Rothschild at the home of Alva Gordon Sink and Charlie Sink in January of 1937, so Piatigorsky, another great cellist. And of course, we've got to talk about Yo-Yo. Another great cellist. And of course, we're going to be morphing into artists that you will have more familiarity with in this part, because I want it to be reminding you that we're going to be interested in your stories about your events, and of course this Yo-Yo. And the story here, I don't know if you remember this concert. You know, he comes with orchestra some of the time, and then he comes with a pianist, but this is one where he was playing alone on stage. Three Bach suites and a George Crumb sonata. OK? Now, the guy on the left, does anybody know who that is? That's Bob Phillips, the guy who founded the Saline Fiddlers. Great educator. Great educator, we loved working with this guy, because he worked in the school system, he was bringing all kinds of kids into music, and six months before this concert, he said to me, Ken, I'd love to bring some kids to the Yo-Yo Ma concert, is there any chance, you know, they might be able to meet him? And I said, well, it really helps, Bob, if you send me a message and let me know how many kids are going to be coming, so that we can make arrangements. OK? He didn't do it. It's intermission of the concert, and Bob comes down from the balcony and he kind of sheepish and he says, Ken? He's not looking at me. I said, yeah Bob, what is it? He said, remember about six months ago, I asked you if we could have my kids meet Yo-Yo? And he was nervous, and I said, yeah, but I don't think I ever heard from you, and he said, no, you didn't. But they're here, and I'd love to have them meet Yo-Yo. And I said, well, how many kids are we talking about? And he said, three hundred and forty. And-- OK, so you're in my position. You've been encouraging kids to come to concerts, you've been encouraging teachers to bring them, and Bob Phillips who's the poster child of great teachers connecting their kids, is saying, can my three hundred forty kids meet Yo-Yo? So I go backstage, there's a few minutes left, and I say, Yo-Yo, I've got good news and bad news. Good news is, you won't believe how many kids are in the audience tonight. The bad news is that every one of them is intending to meet you after the concert. And he had played this exhausting performance. But Yo-Yo is the kind of guy who says, OK, well let's look and see. So he looked out the window, you know, the little peephole, and he saw the stage, and he said, how about if we do this? How about if I go out and sit at the lip of the stage? Then I'm not in the crowd of kids, where it could get really unruly, but we could actually organize the kids, and if I could have a few seconds with each kid, I can look them in the eye and I can sign some stuff. So that's exactly he did. And this next picture, I think, says it all. You know, because he could have eye contact with every kid, he could sign programs, so he's very special to us. And of course, here he is in his most recent visit, and here's a youngster who had painted a photo? Yeah.
• [00:47:01.51] AUDIENCE:
• [00:47:10.25] KEN FISCHER: Oh yeah? This kid?
• [00:47:12.99] AUDIENCE: No, Yo-Yo.
• [00:47:13.20] KEN FISCHER: Yo-Yo. OK. And I don't know if any of you get your alterations done in the Ingalls Mall, but this is the tailor that's in there, and these kids are from China, and Yo-Yo's a real inspiration. So we got them backstage. Helmut Stern, and there's Yo-Yo with him and his wife. Now, of course, I think we all know who this is. Who has a real special connection: he thought Hill was one of the great halls, and here he is in 1987. He was conducting back to back concerts of the Vienna Philharmonic, the very first concerts that I had when I was here. So this following photo is-- I was really nervous, because we were-- we wanted to invite him to come the following year, when it would be the seventy-fifth anniversary of Hill, and hit seventieth birthday tour, and thirty cities were putting their oars in to want to get Bernstein, because this would be a very special concert. So I got down on my knee here and said-- because my mentor had come out here, and I said, why don't you come with me, it'd make it a lot easier, he said, no, man, you're on your own. So I got down on my knee, and I looked at him, and I said, Mr. Bernstein, we'd love to have you come back. Or something feeble like that. And he looked at me and he said these very words. Ken, I love this town, I love the people of this town, and I love this hall. We'll be back. And about two weeks later, Bernstein and the Vienna Philharmonic chose Ann Arbor, Washington, New York, and Toronto for that historic tour, which ended up being his last one. And we wanted to do something special with that one, so we set aside five hundred and fifty tickets just for students, and sold them at our Burton Tower ticket office, and they came fourteen hours in advance. These were the first kids in line, and they were mostly freshman, first year students. And Bernstein was notorious for not going to the post concert party, because he'd find something he'd rather do, but this was very important to us, because Jim Duderstadt had just become the president of the University of Michigan. And I had gone to Jim and Ann and I'd said, Jim and Ann, your first event could be hosting Leonard Bernstein and the Vienna Philharmonic in your home, in the president's home, and I can tell you, that would be the dream invitation for every development person I know on campus. I mean, you could invite any of your major donors, and I must say, Jim and Ann said, Ken, that's a good idea, can we think about it? And what they came up with, I thought was absolutely brilliant, and they came back and said, as good as that would be, what if our guests were thirty students, who were young conductors and pianists and composers, doing at 18 and 19 what Bernstein was doing back then? What do you think of that? Well. I said to Jim and Ann, what a wonderful idea. And so, this woman up in the right, how do you get Bernstein to say yes to coming to a post-concert event? Well, we started a clipboard-- because, you know, if it looked official, no students would be interested-- so we started a clipboard, and students-- remember, they're in line for fourteen hours-- so this was at 6:00 o'clock in the morning when our staff came, offered coffee and so on. We started a clipboard at the front of the line and a clipboard at the back of the line. And all it said was, send a message to Lenny. And these creative Michigan students wrote, Dear Mr. Bernstein, if I'm not in this line, my ass is grass. My parents said I had to be here because they fell in love listening to West Side Story and I'm the product. Eddie, class of 1991. Hey Lenny, I'm a sax major at the University of Michigan. You've written concertos for everybody else, how about me? You know. We got one hundred of these wonderful notes from Michigan students, and we took all these photos of the students standing in line and bundled up, and we sent them to four people. To Bernstein's manager, to the head of the Vienna Philharmonic, to the tour manager, and to his publicist, Maggie Carson. And on top of the letter was, Mr. Bernstein, this is the next generation. Standing in line, spending the night in twenty-nine degree weather, to hear and see you. What would you think about coming to the president's house afterwards and meeting these kids? OK. Two days later, he said, absolutely. I'll be there. But do understand that I always give first priority to anybody that wants come to visit me backstage. You've got to understand that that's the first priority. And if that takes an hour, if that takes two hours, that's the way it is. So the president needs to understand that. And sure enough, at midnight, Leonard Bernstein comes with his cape, and that's Jim and Ann Duderstadt, and my wife Penny and me greeting him. And this was just the most wonderful opportunity for these students, two-thirds of whom were freshmen, and he held court with them-- I mean, do you think these kids would be wearing tuxes? Howard.
• [00:52:27.46] AUDIENCE: [UNINTELLIGIBLE]
• [00:52:56.17] KEN FISCHER: That's terrific. Well, that's Howard Bondan's wife, they've been great friends of the Musical Society, and what he was just saying was that both Erin Copeland and Bernstein were here, lots of people in Bernstein dressing room, but not too many. That often happens with a composer. And-- but anyway, this was such a great evening, here's Lenny. Notice the cape. And then I want to have you see this. This is a friend of his, now see all these kids around there? And see the kids right next to Bernstein on his left? We're going to focus on this a little bit more. Because these were kids in line. And what we had done was, when president Duderstadt and his wife had said, Ken, how about thirty students, Paul Boylan, who was dean of the School of Music and I then said, why don't we find out who-- why don't we pick the kids? And so Paul picked these twenty young composers and so on, and I said, I'd like the first ten kids in line. That's a real demonstration of-- and these were some of the first kids in line. We were able to capture all their names, so we could invite them, they came backstage, and then they went to the president's home, and what I want you to know about this is that Bernstein, at 1:30 I had whispered to him, I said, you know, we probably need to be moving on. And he said, I don't think so. And he went-- and that's the way he was. And he went over the piano and started playing songs from West Side Story. OK. I want you to imagine: you're a freshman at the University of Michigan, you've been the campus for about fifteen minutes, OK? You've just been invited by the president of the University to come to a home, to his home, to meet Leonard Bernstein, you're hanging out with Bernstein, and then you're hearing West Side Story played on the piano by the guy who wrote it, who then, ten minutes later, says, OK. I hear you, Ken. And he said, everybody gather in. And he gathered all the students, and he said, now, where's that place you said we can go that's going to remain open? I said, it's called the Full Moon, it's down on Main Street, and we'd already called ahead and they said they'd be happy to stay open. And then he asked how many were upper classmen? And some of them raised their hands. He said, you guys take your car. Who isn't? Because most of these kids were freshmen. You hop in the limo with me. And he took about twenty kids in the limo, all jammed them up, and spent until 4:30 in the morning on October thirtieth, 1988, and that was one of the great, great events. Now, remember I told-- pardon me? That's Jimmy Levine, for sure. And remember what I said? The guy that brought us the Vienna Phil for that seventy-fifth anniversary of Hill concert, and Bernstein seventieth, was the guy who also said, then the next big thing is the Met. And so, they indeed, they were the debut performance on the inaugural tour of the Met Orchestra after a hundred and seven years. That's Levine signing autographs, and if you were there, you remember who that is. That's right, that's Jessye Norman, she was the soloist, OK? And if there's time afterwards, and if you're interested, I'll tell you a little inside story about this event. OK, then, you know the Duderstadts, but do you know who that is in the center?
• [00:56:09.08] AUDIENCE:
• [00:56:10.55] KEN FISCHER: Yes, his name is Mehta, but is that Zubin or Zarin? That's Zubin. That's Zubin Mehta, the conductor of the Israel Philharmonic, former conductor of the New York-- but that woman next to him is a woman from Flint, her name is Nancy, and she lived in the building in which this photo was taken, and that building is Martha Cook. You got it. And so, when the Israel Philharmonic came, we'd often host them there at the Martha Cook Residence. That on the left is Isaac Stern. Now, does anybody know who that is on the right? Aaron Dworkin, somebody we all should be very proud of. Aaron as a graduate student at Michigan in the mid-nineties founded the Sphinx Organization, which is seeking to make sure that there are more African American and Latino string players in American orchestras. He's having a great success. And I've just got to tell you a little bit about this photo. Aaron, you know, he wasn't thinking about photographing his first competition. He was so focus-- he'd raised a $140,000 as a graduate student, he was so focused on the thing, they said, well, who's going to take photos? And he said, I don't know, can you? So I took this photo. People Magazine photo credit for me, when Aaron was identified as one of the heroes of People Magazine, and he needed a photo, he threw-- I was surprised that he chose this one. But anyway, I got a nice photo credit for that. Isaac Stern and Aaron Dworkin. And we know that's Jessye Norman on the left, but Kurt Masur on the right. Now, in 1987, they got honorary degrees, they loved it, they had a great time as you can see, and I hadn't yet started on the job, but I was going to come on in a few months later, and Kurt Masur told me, he said, this was so fabulous. I would love to get my orchestra to have this experience. And sure enough, two years or four years later, 1991, President George H. W. Bush was the speaker, the orchestra was here, we got passes for all of them into the commencement, and you can imagine what it meant to a group of East Europeans just beginning to realize their freedom for the first time, to go into Michigan stadium where you have George H. W. Bush speaking, we're in the midst of the Gulf War, and that it was OK to protest, you did it peacefully and you didn't disrupt, but they could see all around it that we in this country were able to express ourselves about the leader of our country. It had a huge impact on the members of his orchestra. And-- so this is now 1989, and we organized an opportunity for Jim Duderstadt and Kurt Masur to get together, and we had suggested, well, maybe you could provide a gift for each other. And Jim Duderstadt, of course, gave what happened in 1989 to the Michigan basketball team. National champions autographed basketball for Kurt Masur, and he knew that was a big deal, and he had to think, and what did he give to Jim Duderstadt? Something quite wonderful. It was a report card of Albert Stanley, who graduated from the Leipzig Conservatory. And Kurt Masur translated the grades. Albert Stanley was, at best, mediocre student at the Leipzig Conservatory. And that is now framed and hangs in the School of Music as inspiration to everybody there, that even though you might not do, you could be OK eventually. And we need to get-- we need to get a photo of that for the archives. So that's Kurt Masur. Now, I throw this in here because, of course, the restoration and renovation of Hill took place. It's a glorious place, and we just wanted to be able to put up here another historic event, which is, of course, how we opened that in a joint project of the Musical Society and the University's School of Music Theater and Dance, and that's with William Bolcom, Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Take a look again at how packed that stage was. Four hundred and fifty performers, including our Grammy Award-winning Choral Union. How many Choral Union members, past, present, do we have in the room? We can be very proud of this Grammy Award-winning Choral Union. But here's Bill, and it was just a great evening. Leonard Slatkin, who's now the conductor in Detroit, was who conducted this, and it was a great event. And then, we had a Grammy party afterwards, and that's what a Grammy looks like, and that's Bill and Joni on the left. Jerry Blackstone is the conductor, on the left, excuse me, Joni and Bill on the right. We know that that's Wynton Marsalis, and I just put him up here because he's another one of these great musicians, like Yo-Yo, always experimenting, always doing something new, but never has forgotten the role model that he can be for kids. And we have him come every year, not only because he does a great show, but because we know he'll meet kids afterwards. And this is Kelsey Snyder, who started coming to see him backstage when she was fourteen, and she brought her trumpet and he signed it, you know, with a magic marker, and then said, could you play something for me? Well, she was too scared to do that, but I've been there with kids who say, well, Mr. Marsalis, I play the trumpet, and he said, well, I'd love to hear you play but I don't have my trumpet. Here's mine. And he gives the kid the trumpet and they play. And he's given lessons behind stage, so we love this guy. And here he is again, signing for one of Kelsey's friends. And the Blue Nile restaurant is a great partner of ours, and last year held a party for the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, and all the kids from Neutral Zone who are jazz players. He had a chance to see Lloyd Carr, and then, before he went down to the Blue Nile, he held court with kids in the lower lobby. And then, as I left the Blue Nile at 2:30, he said, oh, I don't think I'm quite ready to go, and at 4:00 o'clock he went back to the hotel and drove to New York City. Because he doesn't like to fly. And he wasn't doing all the driving himself. And of course-- yeah. Chichilia Bartoli, we have a special relationship with her, and here she is at her first concert in 1993, we've had her, I think, three or four times subsequently. That's Martin Katz with her, but I think everybody knows she's got a relationship with another group in town, and that's the Dascola Barber Shop, where they've loved her since the beginning. Well, it-- this all happened when Bob Dascola, the guy in the beard, was cutting my hair and this was a year and a half before she was going to actually perform, and I said, Bobby, I'm going to tell you something as a good Italian, but I don't want you to tell a soul. Do you understand? And he stepped in front of the chair, and he crossed his, you know, like this, and said, you can count on me. Then I whispered, Chichilia Bartoli is coming. Now that name is Chichilia, say it, but not loudly, Chichilia. I said, everybody needs to say it right, Chichilia Bartoli's coming in a year and a half, but don't tell a soul. Of course, he told everybody, which is exactly what I wanted him to do. And this guy sold all kinds of tickets out of his office, and there's a-- yeah, there's a shrine, here's Chichilia, the last time she was here they had a big party for the Italian community up at the barber shop, and then here she is with Bobby, and over there, over his left shoulder, is the shrine to Chichilia. And if you can see, right here, that's a lock of her hair. And one day I was getting my hair cut, and the eight-- it used to be, you know, on Liberty Street-- and the eight barbers gathered around my chair, and they weren't saying anything. I said, oh God, what does this have to do? Is this about Chichilia? And they said yes. I said, what's this about? And they said, well, no self-respecting Italian barber can really be in love with a woman without having a lock of her hair. I said, you want me to get a lock of Chichilia's hair? And they said, precisely. Well, it was right at that time we needed a recipe for the cookbook, so I actually flew to New York where she was giving a house concert. Her mother was there. I said, Chichilia, before I leave, I need a recipe and a lock of your hair, and I left with both. So she's been a great friend. And of course I think one of the finest hours of UMS is when Chichilia actually, two days before what would have been one of the highest grossing concerts in our history in the sense that it had been completely sold out, she had to cancel. That's Ewa Podles. Ewa Podles, a woman that Michael Conjoka had heard had just performed, and when I had suggested, what about Denise Gray? She's available, she's Chichilia-esque, she just did the-- she just did Carmen at the Met, what do you think of that? He said, well, I think it's a good idea, but I think we should go with Ewa. She's from Central Europe, she's got a fabulous voice, she deserves the break, and ours is the kind of audience that would say yes to that. And you know what? You did. We, with help-- is Sarah here? Sarah Billman?-- Sarah Billman, our marketing director, as soon as we heard about the Chichilia cancellation, she put her head together and she said, what we need to do is call every single ticket purchaser. So on Friday morning, our whole team dropped everything it was doing and by Saturday noon, we had called every single person who'd purchased a ticket from where ever in the world they happened to be, and left a message, OK? So we were pretty confident that nobody would be coming that night, expecting Chichilia. And what did we say in that? We said that this is something you ought to have the opportunity to do, is hear this great artist. We didn't offer a refund. We said, you really should come or you can give you a donation certificate. Some people insisted on it, and, you know, we would do it in that case. But when I came out on the stage, 3,600 people who wanted to be there were there sitting in their seats, and they gave her the most wonderful opening applause. And then at the end, you know, we're just crazy about her. And within a year and a half, she had her both her Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall debuts in the same period of time, and she always says to us, thanks to you, the door was opened for me. And that's the kind of thing we like to do. So you notice, when Julia Fisher has just said, I'm sorry, I can't do my two, we fought real hard to get two artists that we think you ought to hear. Pieter Wispelwey and Jennifer Cohen are going to be playing with us. OK, so that's Ewa. We're going to continue here, that's Claudio Abbado, Claudio Abbado, we love this guy, and here he is. He's been conducting the Berlin Philharmonic, or at least he brought them when he was last here. And this is a graduate student intern with us, back in 1999, his name is Steven Jarvi, and here are these two guys. Now, what's Jarvi got-- or what's Abbado got in his left hand? It's a cigar. Here's the story there, it's kind of cool. Abbado, who was suffering from cancer at this time, pulled me backstage beforehand and said, now Ken, I know how important that president reception is with Mr. Bollinger, and he said, I'm happy to go if you'll do the following. As soon as I arrive, have the speeches, but keep them short. Secondly, put a plate of food in my hands and deliver me to, like, a corner of the living room someplace. And if you can have Shirley Verrett come and spend five minutes with me, that faculty member of yours, I would love it, because I dearly love her and we've worked together. And then that young man, that redhead kid from Michigan, have him come and take me back to the hotel. I said, Mr. Abbado, we'll do all of that. And we did. And then Steven Jarvi, five minutes after Shirley Verrett had been there, he came and said, well, Mr. Abbado, I'm here to take you back to the airport-- or back to the hotel, but first, I have a question. Can I ask you a question? Well, instead of Abbado's leaping out and saying, let's talk about it in the car, he sat back down in the chair and said, what's your question? Well, this young conducting student, little Steven Jarvi-- not related Yarvy, he's a kid from west Michigan-- got into a long discussion about conducting that night. The last people to leave were Abbado, Steven Jarvi, the nine members of the orchestra committee, and me. That they knew, Ma, this is kind of cool. Abbado invites Steven Jarvi to come to Salzburg and study with him that summer. Six years later, I'm reading a review in the New York Times about how Kurt Masur shared the stage at Tanglewood with the Seiji Ozawa conducting fellow at Tanglewood, with little Steven Jarvi from Michigan, and now he's the assistant conductor in Kansas City, and if any of you were at the concert where the Berlin was, it was Steve Jarvi that wrote about the meaning of that particular event and how that launched it for him. Now, and you get-- you get the full prize if you can tell me who this is. In his community, this guy is like Horowitz would be for us. His name is Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, an artist we presented at the Rackham Auditorium, with help from the Indo-Pakistani community. First concert that year to sell out, and was a great experience for us as we were diversifying our program, to have an artist where the people from the community said, by the way, Ken, at 8:00 o'clock when the concert starts, none of our community will be there. I said, well, why that is that? He said, well, that's just not the way we do things. We come within the first half hour-- and by the way, you will have someone with money at the door, to make a change for our people. And I said, well, tell me more about this. He said, well, it would be our custom, as we reach a level of spiritual ecstasy, to show our proper respect to Mr. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, and we do that by moving to the stage and throwing money to the stage and the artists. I said, thank you for letting us know. And surely, that-- see, we had a guy with five hundred $1 bills in the corner. Well, it was this kind of learning about the way in which things are done in other cultures that was very important. So, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, and of course, who's that? Andre Previn, and Andre Previn, he really loves this community. And one of the reasons he loves it is because of the guy on the left, who's Edward Surovell. Now, Previn, you know, when Bernstein died, we lost one of the most versatile musicians. But that left Andre Previn, who scores films, and has won four Academy Awards, he plays chamber music, he plays jazz, he composes, and he conducts. And we said, this is the kind of guy we ought to be bringing to Ann Arbor. Spend some time with the Ann Arbor Symphony, with the Southeast Michigan Jazz Association, over at Kerrytown Concert House with our conductors, and so and so forth. And so Ed and I flew to Previn's home and spent a day with him, and he said, you guys don't know how much I love Ann Arbor, because you have the finest record store in the world right there. It was the old Liberty Music. And then, what we found out was he and Ed share an interest in antiquarian books and antiques. So every time he would come, these two guys would be out for a day or so looking at this place. So, Previn in his most recent visit was here with Anne-Sophie Mutter, who at that time was his wife. That particular opportunity never was able to happen. We dreamed that up in the early 1990's to get Previn here for a residency. Instead, we brought the Martha Graham Dance Company here, and Martha Graham of course was another great artist who tapped into music and art, so on and so on. We're going to move this thing along. I wanted this year because that's Michael Tilson Thomas on the left, he'll be with us of course next weekend, and that's the violinist who played in the 1988 May Festival. She wears leather pants. Nadia Solerno-Sonnenbert, OK? When she arrived, when I picked her up at the airport, you know, she says, kid, there's two-- Ken, there's two things I love: the Yankees and the Wolverines. And when she said the Wolverines, I called Jack Widenbach, who was our athletics director at the time, and said, can we have a meet-and-greet with Bo? And, well, that didn't work, but he was able to get a autographed photo of Bo, and a ball cap, and so and so forth, and we had her photographed over at Michigan Stadium. That photograph of Bo, she put into her violin case. The next time I saw it after that was on the Johnny Carson Show. When she was playing there, she opened up the case and there was Bo. And, of course, there's Horowitz. You know, and we always thought Horowitz-- Horowitz loved Ann Arbor because of the people, because of the hall and its quality and so on. And then he-- it's reported that he said, are you kidding? I get 80% of the house, and you got a big house! Actually, he played twice in Ann Arbor during our centennial year, but that's a great relationship there. And then, of course, here's Van Cliburn, another great pianist. Van was our first Ford Honoree in 1996, and of course Lang Lang will be coming on April seventh with the Schlessvig Hollstein Festival, and wherever Lang Lang is, you're going to find a gazillion, kids because he has this magic. It's reported that there are now twenty million kids playing piano in China, because of the influence he had playing for, what? For three billion people at the Olympics. And he's a wonderful guy. That of course is another Pied Piper, it's Jimmy Galway, who every time he comes, the flutists from the Southeast Michigan Flute Association come to our stage and he works with them. Here's Sweet Honey in the Rock, one of the other Ford Honorees, a great group that we've had a long relationship with, and a little story here. We honored them-- well, they've gotten our Ford Honors, but we commissioned, we were co-commissioners of a thirtieth anniversary piece that was premiered here, and then they felt a deep enough affection with us that, at the time we went to the Supreme Court for our defensive of our affirmative action policies, Marvin Krislov-- who was our attorney at the time, now president of Oberlin-- had said to me, you know, Ken, I can imagine what the rally might look like the night before, and I think we need some spirit in that. I think we need some song. I think we need Sweet Honey in the Rock. Would you invite them? And so I called Bernice Johnson Reagon, and invited Bernice, and she said, well, Ken, let me think about it and talk to the women. Well, the next day she called me back, and she said, we're deeply touched by this invitation. She said, in the trajectory of our people in this country, there are landmarks along the way. We see this one as very important. And that you have asked us to be part of the University of Michigan's defense, by singing the night before and helping to inspire your people, is a real honor. And that's what they did. They were the last on the program, they sang themselves, and then they had us all join in, in some of the great freedom songs. And the gift that Mary Sue Coleman and Marvin gave to them was the-- an autographed copy of the case, to each of the women. It was really very touching to them. Sweet Honey in the Rock. And of course, Patrick Stewart, the Royal Shakespeare Company, were here in 2006, and the summer before he came, I said, Mr. Stewart, I can offer you a leading role, center stage, largest theater in the round in the US. Are you interested? He said, absolutely. So I said, you're going to conduct a Michigan band, which he did, and he had a great time with that. But they were all over town, they did all kinds of things, and we love that relationship. And of course, kids here were very interested. You know, thirteen for-credit courses were offered by the University as a part of this residency, and this young woman on the bottom left is the first one in line. She was there fourteen hours. And now you know what we've done with students sales is it's all online, and everybody appreciates that much more. And up here, this is Bo Schembecker going to his first professional Shakespeare theater, and his meeting with Finbar Lynch and John Light. We also know that the night before he died, when he was out with dinner with Andrea Fisher Newman and Dave Brandon, he talked about how interesting that event was for him, because he had a chance to talk with artists about their craft and their preparation. And then here's Lloyd Carr, who, every time the Shakespeare-- Royal Shakespeare Company came, he had them down, observe practice, and they really enjoyed that. And finally, I want to just remind everybody how lucky we've been. These two guys ran the Musical Society for most of it's history, and we are really blessed by their leadership. That's Charlie Sink, who, from 1904 to 1968, ran the Musical Society, and he was succeeded by Gail Rector, who overlapped with him from 1957 to 1987. But they-- they were the impresarios of the old school, I would say, and this was the school of Sol Hurock, who had the big ideas. And in neither case did they think that the fact that we were a small midwestern town would need to stop in the way of having the greatest artists in the world come here. And it was really that vision, that they have, that we on our staff have tried to continue. If the great artist is out there, just go get them. So, that is our presentation. Remember to go to ums.org, but also umslobby.org. And there's plenty of food in the back. I've got to say, one of things I like about doing things with the library, you don't have to wait for the food. It's there when you start, and so I-- it relieved me to know I wasn't keeping you from the food, but rather-- Thank you very much. [ENDING MUSIC]