Joanna Fleming
Cello
For the almost half of its existence, the Honolulu Symphony Orchestra has enjoyed the presence and cello-playing talent of Joanna Fleming. She joined the orchestra in 1958, and has now been with the HSO for 50 years. At the last concert of the 2007-08 season, audience and orchestra members were treated to a beautiful slide show showing some of the photos from Joanna's half century with the group. I spoke with her a few days later to ask her how things have changed with the job since she arrived and also to hear about some of her experiences with the orchestra.
The orchestra that Joanna joined 50 years ago was a part-time institution, and musicians had to take on additional part-time jobs to support themselves. On neighbor island tours, the orchestra did not stay in hotels as it does now. Instead, musicians would be housed in the homes of neighbor island symphony supporters. Joanna noted the challenge that this arrangement could present. Sometimes the families of these symphony supporters would throw big dinner parties before the concerts. Since the hosts were also responsible for driving the musician to the concert, if the party was going especially well that evening, the musician might end up arriving a bit late to the performance.
In 1958, the HSO did not play in a concert hall. Joanna recalls that the orchestra played in the McKinley High School auditorium, which was not well equipped to handle a symphony. She said that if a piano concerto was being performed, the piano (and pianist) would have to sit on a big wooden box in front of the stage. She counts the construction of the Blaisdell Concert Hall as one of the important improvements that she has seen for the orchestra over the years. Her recollection of the vision of those who felt that the orchestra needed to play in a fine concert hall seems particularly relevant these days.
But it seemed to me that some of Joanna's most treasured memories were of the music. She told me how the great British cellist Jacqueline du Pré, suffering from the ravages of multiple sclerosis, played a gripping and gutsy performance of Ernest Bloch's Schelomo at the Waikiki Shell. She described a concert in 1966 in which Igor Stravinsky conducted the HSO in a concert of his own music with a 21-year-old named Itzhak Perlman playing Mr. Stravinsky's violin concerto. She described Stravinsky, then 84, as "feeble but sharp." During a rehearsal of "The Firebird," when a member of the percussion section missed an entrance, Stravinsky said that he was surprised that the musician didn't know the piece, saying that it had been a part of the standard repertoire for quite a while already. Joanna marveled that she was in the presence of someone who could say, in a manner that was quite matter-of-fact and without exaggeration, that his music was a classic. "The Firebird" had been a staple of the orchestral repertoire for over fifty years when Stravinsky conducted it in Honolulu.
Perhaps the most touching reference that Joanna made to me was of a time when the Honolulu Symphony's commitment to outreach was well beyond what it does now. She mentioned the tours that the HSO had made to Micronesia, and the appreciation from the people of those islands for the orchestra being there. She pointed out that those tours represented the first time that any orchestra had played there, and told me about the thrill it gave her to know that the performances of Mozart and Haydn that she was part of were the first time that many of the audience members had ever heard those composers' music.
As Joanna Fleming begins her 51st season with the Honolulu Symphony, we wish her all the best - may her endpin always have a hole on the Blaisdell stage!
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