PIANIST LIKES MUSICAL CLIMATE IN S.D.

While most performers hold an understandably partisan affection for their chosen instrument, pianist Karen Follingstad suffers from what Freud might have termed string envy. “I’m always trying to do things with the piano to make it sound like a string instrument,” she said.

When she married cellist Jeffrey Levenson, at the time a member of the Thouvenel String Quartet, she entered the string family vicariously. “I love string players, so I married this whole string quartet,” she said.

“When you marry a member of a quartet,” the 34-year-old musician explained, “your whole life revolves around the quartet. I still recall waking up to rehearsals already in progress--brushing my teeth to the strains of Schubert’s ‘Death and the Maiden’ coming from the other room.”

Two years ago, Follingstad was appointed to the music faculty at San Diego State University. In that short time, she has become a staple of the local music scene, regularly accompanying, among others, San Diego Symphony concertmaster Andres Cardenes in duo recitals. In the La Jolla Chamber Music Society’s recently completed Summerfest ‘86, she appeared in both Sunday afternoon concerts of that highly successful music festival.

While she is preparing for her New York City solo debut next spring, Follingstad is essentially a collaborative musician.

“As a soloist, I get very lonely. I find that if I have good collaboration, that brings out my best playing,” she said. And she admits to a view most pianists would consider rank heresy: “For me the piano is not really complete by itself.”

Even though she frequently performs in what is ordinarily termed the accompanist’s role, it is a category that rankles her. “When I play with a trio or quartet, or when I play lieder with a vocalist, I prefer to call myself a recital collaborator, since the piano is of equal--and sometimes greater--importance.” For Follingstad, accompanying is a term that applies to playing the piano for choir and ballet rehearsals, not to performing serious chamber music.

Follingstad’s early performing career blossomed in Germany, where she lived for four years and passed the Frankfurt conservatory’s rigid Konzertexamen . She found it difficult, however, to translate her European successes into a musical career in the United States.

“It was a culture shock coming back,” she said. “In Europe, I was performing a lot, because you don’t have to be a big name there to play a lot. In Germany, if people saw that the ‘Goldberg Variations’ was being performed, they would go, no matter who the performer was.”

She left Germany to work on her master’s degree in piano performance at Indiana University, a decision prompted less by musical impetus than by the breakup of her first marriage.

“Here I was a student all over again, and it was hard to break out of category,” she said. “Also, there are no stepping stones from student to professional in American music--unless you win a big competition, and that’s no guarantee.”

Between Indiana University and San Diego, Follingstad pursued chamber music in Midland, Tex., where the Thouvenel String Quartet was in permanent residence. “The first year I was in Midland, I went absolutely crazy, so I started a doctoral program at the University of Texas at Austin. Our four years in Midland I spent commuting the 300 miles to Austin, where I pursued my degree courtesy of Southwest Airlines. It was then that I started to wonder if I could have a relationship and a career in the same place.”

Fortunately, relocating in San Diego solved Follingstad’s commuting problem. Levenson easily found a place in the local symphony’s cello section, and she found the California musical climate more favorable.

“It’s a kind of hedonism,” she observed. “In California, fine music is like fine wine. People like good food and good music. In Texas--at least where we were--I always felt we were trying to superimpose classical music on a strong native culture that was basically alien to it.”

Balancing the university’s demands with her performer’s discipline is the price Follingstad finds she has to pay for her California connection. “But if you don’t have a position,” she lamented, “people don’t really respect you. It’s hard to play a concert Sunday night and get up the next morning to teach an 8 a.m. class. Sometimes, when I’m preparing a concert, I have to close off a little from my students. I teach them, of course, but I have to conserve my energy.” Teaching gives her a certain emotional balance, however. “If I just perform, then I get a little too neurotic,” she confessed.

She was quick to point out that when the university hired her, it wanted a pianist who would perform regularly. This fall she is receiving released time from her department to perform the complete Beethoven cycle of violin and piano sonatas with Cardenes.

Follingstad’s musical idealism is as earnest as her demeanor, and she is eager to expand the perimeter of the traditional audience for classical music.

“Last spring I played a concerto with the SDSU Orchestra for the Kiwanis Club, and the response was unbelievable,” she said. “A lot of the people there were not regular concert goers, but they exploded with great enthusiasm. I think that, in this age of electronics, the human element has again become special.”