BOSTON — Picture a music stand holding three items: sheet music, a metronome, and a photograph. The sheet music tells the performer what to play, the metronome how quickly. And the photograph keeps the performer in sync with the composer’s emotional state. That may sound a bit newfangled, even new-agey, but this is the kind of thing people were doing when the Romantic era was in full flower around the middle of the 19th century. Music was expected to be about more than itself. And when did that era end? It depends on whom you ask.
But if you ask Boston Symphony Orchestra violinist Victor Romanul, he’ll tell you a story about preparing for a performance with the aid of sheet music and sculpture — that is, photographs of the sculptures that inspired composer William Grant Still to write his Suite for Violin and Piano, which Romanul performs with pianist Randall Hodgkinson in Episode 2 of the BSO’s streaming concert series “Pathways of Romanticism.” (Also, his amazing performance of the suite’s second movement, “Mother and Child,” is included in the Boston Pops’ streaming Mother’s Day show.)
Victor Romanul has been performing professionally since the age of seven. At 11, he made his Symphony Hall debut performing Beethoven’s Triple Concerto, and he is still in awe of the place, because he loves the history of the Boston Symphony. And he lives for opportunities to give performances of pieces like Still’s suite.
William Grant Still was an African American composer of over 200 works of classical music in the European tradition, an Oberlin student who kept one foot in the commercial music worlds of Broadway and Hollywood, even as he composed and conducted orchestral and operatic works for the concert hall. Throughout his career, he faced much the same skepticism from classical music’s old guard as Leonard Bernstein would face years later, with the Brahmin wunderkind attempting to foist memorable tunes on an audience often unreceptive to melody in contemporary music.
This was not only because, like Bernstein, Grant Still was unable to keep himself from writing a good tune, but also because he was Black. (One venue allowed the composer to attend performances of his music only on “Negro Day.”) Despite this, the young composer made a name for himself as a purveyor of music that audiences enjoyed listening to, and this was fine for radio, film, theater, and the dance hall. But the classical music concert hall was a different matter.
Nevertheless, at a time when conservatories were already championing the who-cares-if-you-listen ethos that would reach its zenith in the 1950s, Arthur Fiedler programmed, and the Boston Pops Orchestra performed, William Grant Still’s Symphony No. 1 in A-flat major, “Afro-American.” He enjoyed much popularity with concert audiences and became one of the most frequently performed composers — Black or otherwise — in his lifetime. William Grant Still may have been a Black Leonard Bernstein. But there is no white William Grant Still.
Outside the classical world, Grant Still arranged music for innumerable popular artists, including the father of stride piano, James P. Johnson.
Grant Still wrote music that sounded good and also satisfied the conservatory crowd. Duke Ellington wrote music that sounded good but had to be explicitly billed as such for the benefit of the classical music world. Mr. Still likely never had to remind his peers that “if it sounds good, it is good,” because he passed muster with elite experts as a composer of serious concert music.
William Grant Still was active not during the Romantic period but during the Harlem Renaissance of the early 20th century. So why is he on a program about Romanticism? Because, by associating his music with another artistic medium, Still aligned himself with the 19th-century Romantic spirit. That’s why the orchestra programmed his Suite for Violin and Piano, and that’s why Romanul took the same approach to preparing it that a violinist might have taken in 1850.
In the suite’s first movement, suggested by Richmond Barthé’s “African Dancer,” Romanul dials in a fitting timbre to convey the atmosphere he envisions when he sees the sculpture. There’s something wild about his tone, and the part itself, combined with the violin’s urgent wail, is almost menacing. Romanul describes certain passages in this movement as “angular.” Yes. The melodic line at times sounds jagged, like something you could cut yourself on.
When you see Mr. Romanul perform certain passages in this suite, you’ll notice that he plays it like his heart is breaking. That’s because it is. In fact, he saw to it himself: Romanul researched sculptor Sargent Johnson and learned that, being an orphan, the young artist had spent his childhood bouncing from one foster home to another. (Romanul is the father of five children.) But here’s the really sad part: Having never known a mother’s love, Johnson made several sculptures titled “Mother and Child.” Trying to get it right? Romanul relives Johnson’s childhood every time he plays this movement of Still’s suite. And every time he plays it, he feels the pain.
Throughout the suite, Still’s string writing makes it clear that the man had roots in pop, jazz, and, most importantly, the blues. (For that matter, you can hear it in the piano, as well.) He also knew something about American-songbook style songcraft and writing for violin in a cinematic style. Hence the melodic modes, phrasing, and formal design of “Mother and Child,” as well as the occasional nod to Joe Venuti in the “Gamin” third movement.
Critics have long observed something fundamental about Mr. Romanul’s violin playing: It’s never about him. The Boston Globe hit the nail on the head when it wrote that the sum of Romanul’s skills are always used to serve the music. We know you would have no doubt about that after just a moment’s conversation with Romanul, because we spoke with him early this month to learn about the process he and pianist Randall Hodgkinson followed to prepare their performance of Still’s suite and to find out why he chose this music in the first place.
Who selects the chamber music pieces that BSO players perform at the end of symphony programs?
It’s a partnership. Artistic management puts out some parameters and issues an email with ideas — suggestions of composers or works. If there’s a certain piece, such as this William Grant Still suite, that they strongly feel they’d like to do, then they notate that.
But they’re open to any suggestions or creative ideas from the players, and people who would like to, submit their proposals to the artistic management, and then they compile them and meet with the artistic advisory committee of the symphony. Then they hammer out a plan for which pieces should go with each of the symphony programs. Each named series of concerts has a different suggestion process.
So artistic management recommended the suite by William Grant Still?
Yes. And I listened to it and just fell in love with it, basically.
Had you heard it before?
I had heard “Mother and Child,” but I wasn’t familiar with the entire suite. What I found so fascinating, honestly, was the artwork. I was very moved by it. So, as I would practice each movement, I would put a photo of the corresponding sculpture on the other side of the music stand, lit up, so I could get a feeling from it and tailor my preparation accordingly. Looking at the artwork and playing and hearing the music, I got a feeling for what the composer felt was coming off the artwork as he tried to put it into music.
With each of the movements, I found it interesting that the written tempi didn’t always seem to match what would perhaps be best for the piece. I mean, the first movement, “African Dancer,” for example. The sculpture depicts a figure sort of reclined back, but the tempo was very fast. And when I look at the sculpture I can imagine sort of a wild, spiritual dance, maybe sort of thrusting this way and that way, but also yearning for something higher. And the music has all this in there. She seems to be expressing some kind of yearning. But if you play it at the tempo that’s written, it sort of just runs over the whole top of it, and it doesn’t really get into what I think a dancer would be doing. It will just be frenzied. So I took it down some in the tempo and also the secondary tempo, which is very much like a spiritual. I took that tempo down, as well. It seems to have this yearning, and yet I can imagine the music as somewhat angular.
The second movement is based on Sargent Johnson’s “Mother and Child.” And what surprised me about this sculpture is that while the mother is sort of abstract, with almost no face, it’s really all about surrounding the child and protecting the child. Yet the child’s arms are raised like, “Let me out!”
So the music has a lot of ache in its step. To me, as a father, it feels like that. It’s titled “Mother and Child,” but it’s not only about mothers. I’m a parent of five grown kids. And if you’re a parent, you have that ache, because the child wants their independence, which I can see here. Yet you want to protect them. There’s that push-pull — wanting to protect, but you want the child also to grow. That kind of ache (and the music has a lot of it) comes out of this tremendous love, because you know you have to let them go.
I recognized all this in the sculpture, and then I read that Sargent Johnson was orphaned and grew up in foster homes. So perhaps he made his series of mother-and-child sculptures as an expression of his own yearning, his childhood longing to be cherished and protected.
The final movement is “Gamin,” which you can see written on the lower part of [Augusta Savage’s sculpture, shown below]. Now, I didn’t know this term, “gamin,” but it is French, and it refers to a young boy, especially one who has become a little street smart — cheeky, rascally, sly. But in Augusta Savage’s sculpture, there’s also a certain innocence in the boy’s face (the model was Savage’s nephew). Yet the boy seems to be acting a sort of mock grown-up character. And again, if you play the music at the written tempo, it doesn’t sound right. But if you take the tempo down a little bit, you can start to hear that kind of sly, rascally, cheeky quality. But it’s not a negative portrayal. It’s just a sweet kind of boy who’s thinking a little bit too far ahead, maybe trying to be what he imagines a grownup is like, maybe trying to look big.
Anyway, the artwork is beautiful and very moving. The last movement is lighthearted, and the musical writing is perfect. Not that it’s Beethoven, but for a piece I didn’t know, really, for it to be as enjoyable to play as it is (and hopefully to listen to) is just not that common. So I got very excited about it and had a wonderful time preparing the piece with Randall Hodgkinson. He lives just a few miles from me, so we worked on it quite frequently, and he’s such a great pianist.
If you play exactly what’s on the page, you don’t really approach the sculpture. If you see the sculpture and know what “gamin” means — what the French call a street urchin — and you recognize the slyness and rascallyness — and then you see it in the music, and you can bring the music towards it more, really point it out, and then have some license in your approach to performing it. So we had the freedom to do things like swing the notes, which works just like a duck to water.
But not on “Mother and Child.” There you have slow, spiritual passages that are really so heartfelt that, to me, it’s not really the blues. It’s more like when I’ve played some spirituals for the BSO in other concerts that I’ve done online. I listened to early recordings of groups from 100 years ago whose members grew up singing with people who were slaves. There was a group that was active during the time of slavery and then continued into the early 1900s. The way they sing is, to me, hair raising, because you know it provided sustenance. Singing was like food…
They drew strength from it.
Exactly. So that, to me, is pretty serious.
In the slow passage of the first movement, “African Dancer,” we slowed it down to bring out a certain quality on the dancer’s face: I see a strong desire to be enraptured. I mean, the way she’s dancing, I’m sure she makes a lot of angular moves. And yet she’s kind of reclined back with her head up. It’s like she’s in another dimension somewhere, feeling some spiritual energy or something.
Maybe she’s dancing for herself, just out of a need for release. So the angular part to me is unabashed. Like nobody’s watching. The music has the seeds of that in there, but you need some license to bring it out.
You obviously have a special feel for this music that must be uncommon in classically trained violinists.
Well, I’ll leave it to others to…
C’mon! You must have a feel for it, or you wouldn’t have agreed to play the piece. Right?
But you know where that comes from? It comes from my grandmother, Stella Roman, who was a famous opera singer. Her married name was Romanul, but she took off the “ul,” trying to appear Italian. Richard Strauss chose her to sing the role of the Empress for the Italian première of “Die Frau ohne Schatten” at La Scala Theatre in 1940, and she studied “Four Last Songs” with him. She also sang the title role in “Rosenkavalier,” which she studied with Strauss but performed under a different conductor. She sang at La Scala in the ’30s and the Metropolitan Opera in the ’40s. And I grew up hearing her sing and tell stories.
In fact, when James Levine was here, he used to tell me he grew up listening to her sing. If you read about her, there are people that say good things (and not always good things) about her, but there’s one thing she did incredibly well, which you can hear on recordings online: She was very evocative in terms of the feeling that she put into her singing, and I grew up with this example. She studied with Hariclea Darclée, the first Tosca. Anyway, she talked all the time about interpreting when I was young.
James Levine was known for encouraging musicians to play their instruments as though they were singing. Your early influences must have given you the right mindset to work with him.
You know, it’s interesting: Whenever there was a singer onstage, it’s like he transformed. He came to life. When there was an opera or somebody singing arias onstage, he just became a superman. He was just perfect, and he was so wonderful with the singers, always so supportive.
The thing is, when I studied with Jascha Heifetz, he didn’t talk much about interpretation. But I grew up hearing people like Arthur Rubinstein, Andrés Segovia, and Jacqueline du Pré. I sat in the first row when she played the Elgar concerto at Symphony Hall. I heard performances that were just transcendent.
So if I’m going to be in Symphony Hall, in the dark hall with the statues lit up, with this camera sort of moving magically in the air and this wonderful video team and Grammy Award-winning audio team — If I’m going to have the chance to do that, then it is my great desire. I live for these opportunities to put myself into a role and express myself, and I push it to the limit. (Hopefully my technique will hold up.)
I’ve received some nice notes from people about my playing. If I can bring something beautiful into the world and touch a few people, as Grant Still did…
Composers are imagining in their minds what they want to bring forth, and they just put it down on paper. So what’s on paper is sort of a distilled, freeze-dried version of what they were hearing in their heads. So it’s really up to the person playing to kind of recreate it and bring it to life. And why not just do it in the most magical, evocative, three-dimensional way possible? Not for the express purpose of being thrilling, but just to do everything you can to optimally craft it and mold it.
You practice something hundreds of different ways, and then, when you’re playing, the thing you need to do is not to play in a preconceived way — “this is the way I practiced it.” Instead, you have a feeling, and that kind of awakens a track inside of you of one of the hundreds of different ways that you’ve practiced it. And it connects with another way a few notes later. So what is happening is an organic thing, and in my experience, when the audience feels that the notes are sort of being made up on the spot, it’s because you’ve covered all the bases. You’ve covered all possibilities. The feeling is actually your own feeling about the music as you’re playing it. You’re creating something on the spot — an experience. Hopefully you’re not just playing it the way you planned.
It’s more like improvisation?
It’s like improvisation. When you play one note, there’s no guarantee of the next note. It’s not like you play a note and then you know the next note. You play a note, and then the next note just kind of appears from inside the note before it, and people feel the difference.
People enjoy certain popular artists or certain improvisations, because it’s always something new. You don’t know what’s going to happen. But there’s also a way of playing classical music so that you never know quite what’s going happen. There’s always a little bit of a guessing game.
You know how it can be with special performances. Magic happens, and the crowd goes crazy, because somehow the performers managed to put it together in a way you didn’t expect. And yet it all made sense. It all fell into place in some kind of a mathematical-psychic way, and that’s a completely different experience. And when it happens, like when you came to Tanglewood and I played the Chaconne, the audience reaction was quite strong, I’d say…
You got a standing ovation, as I recall.
Yeah, and it was pretty quick. But the thing is, there are moments like that, when just something happens. You go to hear a symphony, you go to hear another symphony, and then one day you hear Bronfman play a concerto, and it’s like going from 10 miles an hour to 70 miles an hour — suddenly everything is clicking. It’s possible for us — for classical music — to be that thrilling.
When I play, I just try to go into a completely different world, like there’s no time, no space. It’s kind of like I’m floating somewhere outside all the boundaries of daily life. And then, hopefully, when I’m performing, if I’m comfortable, that mindset comes through. People say afterwards that I was in a different place. To me, there’s nothing better than that. I live for that chance.
I’m very grateful to the symphony. I love the history of the Boston Symphony. It’s amazing — the sacrifices the founders made and everybody has made through the years for this mission. And these musicians around me are all … Somebody who retired years ago gave the best line I ever heard in a retirement speech, “I have learned something from every person here in this orchestra.” Each person has their own strength and their own thing they can do at their level.
But what I live for and absolutely love are the moments where I can branch out and have a chance to do things like the Grant Still suite or the Bach at Tanglewood last summer.
I’ll leave you with one last story. My dad was in a Romanian prison for his anti-communist activities — sentenced to be executed — and my grandmother was engaged to sing the role of Mimi in “La bohème” at the Metropolitan Opera. And, of course, Mimi is dying with tuberculosis. And the morning of the performance, she received a phone call that her only other child had just died in Romania of tuberculosis. And she didn’t know how she could possibly go on, because here she was going to be singing about suffering from tuberculosis the entire night. And nobody knew this. But she sang, and she said she absolutely poured her heart out.
And she got the best review of her life. If you know the name Olin Downes, he was sort of the Harold Schonberg of the ’30s and ’40s, a famous reviewer in New York. In his review, Downes wrote that there was something “elementally true” about my grandmother’s singing. She was always proud of that review, saying it was almost like her own life experience. And the grief? It just somehow merged with her own abilities and created the elementally true work of art that Downes had written about.
