PRACTICE FOR M.D. INCLUDES VIOLIN

Dr. Ronald Goldman has a fantasy. During a performance by an eminent string quartet, the second violinist suddenly is stricken--nothing fatal, of course--and the usual request, “Is there a doctor in the house?” is made. Goldman rushes forward, quickly attends to the immediate needs of the stricken musician, then pulls out his own violin and completes the concert with the quartet.

For Goldman, such a scene is not entirely hypothetical, for he is both physician and violinist. A board-certified ophthalmologist with a practice in Chula Vista and Coronado, Goldman is known to San Diego audiences as the Gennaro Trio’s first violinist. One of the area’s premier chamber ensembles, Gennaro is performing the complete cycle of Beethoven piano trios in a four-week series at the First Unitarian Church.

Nor does the ambitious doctor pursue music solely for his own refreshment. Each August he runs the San Diego Chamber Music Workshop held at San Diego State University, a summer institute for serious ensemble musicians which he founded eight years ago with some of his own seed money. For four years, Goldman organized and ran a Sunday-morning chamber music series at the Marquis Public Theatre, a program of free concerts that featured local and imported musicians underwritten by a grant from the musicians’ union.

Practicing music and medicine at the same time may appear to the layman to pose a formidable scheduling problem. “Because of the nature of ophthalmology,” Goldman said, “there are few weekend emergency and night calls. This means I can schedule a rehearsal and most of the time keep it.” He also noted that his medical practice, while demanding, did guarantee a predictable amount of spare time, as opposed to the lot of many professional musicians who have to work several jobs just to make ends meet.

Of course, a person does not become a skilled violinist in his spare time. Goldman had quite a head start. “I started violin by parental edict when I was 5 years old. Practicing violin every day became a regimented daily occurrence. My father was a grocer who never took a vacation. I practiced every day, even the weeks when my teacher took his annual trip to the High Sierras.”

While he pursued his studies through high school, he did not have sufficient confidence in his musical talent to bank a career on it, so he aimed for medicine instead. “I lacked musical insight as a teen-ager,” Goldman said. “I learned interpretation strictly by rote, even though I had perfect pitch and could transpose anything. I could do anything technical, but I lacked musical maturity.”

Through college and medical school, Goldman’s violin-playing was intermittent, but during his military service as an Air Force flight surgeon it proved a welcome diversion. “When I was serving in Thailand, I had my violin with me. It was a joke with the fighter pilots that ‘Doc’ played the violin. I played for them occasionally. They’d listen to the concerts as long as they weren’t too long and as long as they had a drink in hand.”

After launching his family and his medical practice in San Diego, Goldman began looking for a chamber ensemble in which he might rejuvenate his musical skills. He played with several groups, including the Deatherage Piano Quartet and the Owen-Goldman Trio. When the E.R.A. Trio lost its first violinist in 1982, Goldman joined E.R.A.’s pianist Ilana Mysior and cellist Mary Lindblom, and they renamed the trio after his 18th Century Gennaro Gagliano violin.

While the Gennaro Trio plays mainly locally and in Los Angeles, last year it performed in Aspen, Colo., at the “Evenings at the Wheeler Opera House,” and the previous summer it played in Banff, Canada, after a week of intensive study at the Banff Music Festival with Menachem Pressler of the Beaux Arts Trio.

Goldman admitted that his musical training has had some influence on his practice of medicine. “Musicians are trained to be critical of themselves,” he said, “so that no one ever gets a satisfactory performance in all respects. I think that attitude carries over into my medicine. In microsurgery, there’s always something, say, in the architecture of the surgery, that could have been a hair better. In terms of surgery, I rarely use the word perfect, although my colleagues use it all the time.”

While the intangible rewards of medicine versus music are not easy to compare, advances in technology have taken some of the challenge out of Goldman’s medical specialty. “With the microsurgical techniques and instrumentation available in ophthalmology, even the average surgeon’s results are excellent, so that the differences among doctors are much smaller than they were some 30 years ago. But with music, the individual player’s ability is everything.”

Does he urge his patients to attend performances of the Gennaro Trio? “Oh, no! The medical examination is traumatic enough. If I learn they are musicians, I may drop the date of an upcoming concert, but I rarely do anything more.”

With Goldman’s passion for the violin, it is not surprising that his sons Marc, 8, and David, 10, both play the violin. With three musicians practicing in the Goldman household, practice space is frequently scarce, although the youngest likes to practice in the solitude of the bathroom.

“I take them around to senior citizen homes to perform, so they get used to playing in front of people,” Goldman said. “The seniors see them as lovely grandchildren who have a little talent, and the boys know that after those performances, Dad will never be critical of them.”

Goldman shares his medical practice with his younger brother, Rodger, who is also an ophthalmologist. Rodger studied piano as a youth, but he is not a performer like his brother. “He now has a harpsichord in his home and plays only for select people. He’s not an exhibitionist,” Goldman said. When asked if that observation implied that he was an exhibitionist, he smiled and replied, “Well, I do get a lot of pleasure playing with our trio.”