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The Virginian-Pilot
Sep 11, 2005
THE GIFT OF MUSIC
BY TONY STEIN
 The Virginia Symphony began its 2005-06 season last Sunday night under the stars at City Park. When the concert was over, three of the principal players didn’t have to leave Chesapeake to return home. Those musical stars now live here as members of the city’s growing arts community.
Husband and wife Steve and Patti Carlson recently moved to Greenbrier after many years in Virginia Beach, and Mike Daniels took up residence in River Walk in 2003. Steve is associate principal/ third trumpet, Patti is principal clarinetist and Daniels is principal cellist for Hampton Roads’ premier musical entity.
Principal players are the soloists and leaders of their sections, representing the best of the symphony’s 69 full-time musicians. They are embarking on a new season that will continue until June, involving about 270 rehearsals and performances – referred to as “services” in musician lingo.
Steve Carlson will play about 70 percent of that schedule while Patti Carlson and Daniels will tackle the entire load and perform with the Virginia Opera.
Rehearsals generally last 2½ to three hours, and performances require about two hours. Symphony salaries range from $25,000 to $32,000, and many players also teach and/or perform elsewhere.
Though they take center stage as soloists, the Carlsons and Daniels are deeply conscious of their roles in the full orchestra.
“I am part of something bigger than I am, a wonderful whole,” Steve Carlson said.
“It’s very rewarding,” Patti Carlson added. “So many people are working together to create this incredible sound. It’s a huge team effort.”
Daniels talks about the sense of achievement it provides.
“It means a lot because not many people have developed the skills to do this,” he said. “It’s a wonderful thing to be doing.”
The Carlsons and Daniels each discovered a love for classical music in childhood. They studied and honed their performance skills as youths and now, in middle age, years of hard work have paid off.
Steve and Patti Carlson have played with the Virginia Symphony since 1975 and 1978 respectively. The Kemp Woods couple have been married since 1973, a relationship that sprung from an annoyance at first sight.
Patti, 53, is a Michigan native whose dad was an amateur clarinetist.
“I heard him practicing and I said, ‘I want to do that when I get old enough,’” Patti recalled.
“Old enough” was grade school, and she played all through school and at Michigan’s prestigious Interlochen summer music camp. She was a student at the University of Michigan when she met Steve.
“I do not like to be interrupted when I’m practicing,” she explained. “I had met him very briefly a couple of days before and I was annoyed when he knocked on my practice room door. He asked me out, and I thought he was kind of cute so I said yes.”
Education and career separated them for a time. She was at the Julliard School in New York, and he was teaching at the University of Missouri at Kansas City. That made for a difficult relationship.
“It was either get married or split up,” Patti said, “and I’m not a big city girl.”
That meant she moved to Kansas City. From there, they came to Norfolk and the Virginia Symphony.
When Patti talks about playing, she talks about the way a soloist can sometimes feel.
“There’s that expression ‘in the zone,’” she said. “Your playing is almost effortless. Usually, you’re thinking and listening to yourself but in the zone, things are just flowing.”
Most soloists have at least one solo performance horror story, and Patti’s has to do with Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” It begins with a long, rising clarinet phrase and her tone broke at the top.
“It earned me the only bad review I ever got in my life,” she said, “but someone told me that Benny Goodman screwed up the same passage, and I felt better.”
Steve Carlson, 57, is a Minnesota native whose father was an enthusiastic ukelele player and singer who also dabbled in clarinet and trumpet. Steve passed on the ukelele but loved to sing with his father. Then he discovered an old trumpet in a closet and started in seventh-grade band.
From there, he followed the pattern of study, teaching and playing that brought him together with Patti and eventually to Norfolk. He was principal trumpeter with the symphony for 27 years until he decided to step back to reach what he calls a balance of playing with the orchestra, teaching and spending time with the Carlsons’ grandchild.
Daniels, 45, is marking 15 years with the symphony.
The South Carolina native’s parents were both voice teachers. Daniels adds that his brother David is a famous counter-tenor, a voice range equivalent to a male alto.
Daniels began playing the piano at age 8, but it didn’t take. When he was 12, he opted for the cello, and discovered an immediate connection.
He was given a full scholarship to the University of Cincinnati and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees there. Then he ran into a professional roadblock.
“I spent four years trying to get a full-time job,” he said. “After all of those degrees, it was very frustrating.
“There was a lot of pressure and nervousness at auditions. There’s a screen between you and the judges so they can’t see you and you can’t see them. After every six contestants or so, they cull out the applicants.
“I had plenty of work because I could free-lance, but eventually I realized that I still needed to work on my technique. I took lessons with a fine teacher in Cleveland for three months and almost immediately read about the opening with the symphony here. I auditioned and got the job. That was in 1990.”
He has an unhappy recollection of his first solo with the symphony. The pin that braces the cello on the floor slipped and before he could straighten the instrument, only about two notes of the solo were left.
Daniels and his wife, Kathy, lived in a Norfolk apartment until two years ago when they bought a house in Chesapeake. She is a professional flutist, and they play together in the Adagio Trio with a harpist .
Carla Johnson, president and executive director of the Virginia Symphony, said the Carlsons and Daniels add a lot to the symphony.
“All of us in the Hampton Roads area are very fortunate to have such talented, creative people as part of the fabric of our community,” she said.
For Daniels and the Carlsons, music is at once a profession and a passion. Daniels talks about the joy of communicating his intense love of music to other people.
“Music is very much woven in the fabric of our lives,” Patti Carlson said. “I met my husband playing music. I have earned a living playing music. It’s a very spiritual thing for us.”
And Steve Carlson calls music “God’s gift to us.
“Music,” he said, brings us closer to God and elevates us to a higher existence.”
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The Virginia Symphony Orchestra with a complement of 79 professional musicians under the direction of Grammy-nominated Music Director JoAnn Falletta performs 140 concerts annually, reaching 200,000 concert goers every season in venues throughout the region. Our education and outreach programs reach 53,000 students and adult learners every year. The Virginia Symphony Orchestra is the cultural cornerstone of the performing arts in Hampton Roads.
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