47 Years of Playing 2nd Fiddle : Violinist Harold Dicterow Is Devoted to the L.A. Philharmonic

It was 1946, and violinist Harold Dicterow needed a job. He, his wife and baby were living in one room of a boarding house. So when Alfred Wallenstein, the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s music director, offered Dicterow a job leading the second violin section, he grabbed it.

Never mind that the job wasn’t first violin, the more melodic, generally preferred assignment for violinists. Dicterow figured he’d stay a year, meet union requirements for studio orchestra work, then move on.

Forty-seven years later, Dicterow is still leading the Philharmonic’s second violin section. “Things kept getting better,” Dicterow says today. “Seasons kept getting longer. There were great people to be with, and great people to learn from.”

Talking with Dicterow, 74, about his career is like leafing through Philharmonic scrapbooks. The violinist played first for Wallenstein, then for Eduard van Beinum and every other subsequent music director to take the podium, first at Philharmonic Auditorium and, since 1964, at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

“Conductors from Zubin Mehta to Pierre Boulez have all remarked on Harold’s strength as a section leader,” says Ernest Fleischmann, the Philharmonic’s executive vice president and managing director. “Our second violins are an immensely strong section, and that is largely due to Harold’s leadership.”

For Dicterow, as for so many artists, the chance to pursue his art professionally is a childhood fantasy come to pass. Born Oct. 19, 1919, five days before the Philharmonic opened for business, Dicterow has been playing the violin since he was 7 years old. By 12, he was traveling to Manhattan from his Long Island home to study with distinguished teacher Vladimir Graffman.

Groomed to be a soloist, Dicterow played New York’s Town Hall at 17, Carnegie Hall a year later. Then, between those two appearances, his father died unexpectedly, and young Dicterow had to support his mother. They moved to San Francisco to live with his oldest sister and, once there, he auditioned successfully for the San Francisco Symphony.

Economics again intervened several years later when Dicterow and his family couldn’t make ends meet on his income from a 25-week San Francisco Symphony season. Hearing there was money to be made with film and radio studio orchestras in Los Angeles, the Dicterows headed south.

“Because of finances and circumstance, he got into orchestra work,” says violinist Glenn Dicterow, Harold’s 44-year-old son and the New York Philharmonic’s concertmaster. “But he’s certainly the most dedicated orchestral musician I know.”

Dicterow did make one attempt to leave the Philharmonic for studio work, but only at the very start of his career. When Wallenstein asked him what it would take to keep him at the Philharmonic, the musician says, he tossed off what he considered to be a preposterous salary. Philharmonic management met the figure, and Dicterow says he felt obligated to stay.

Like many other Philharmonic musicians, Dicterow has since done his share of free-lance work in TV and film. But studio contract orchestras soon ended, and Dicterow never again thought of leaving the Philharmonic. Not once, he swears.

He also has enjoyed leading the second section, he says, where, as principal, he directs his colleagues’ bowings and he solos for the section. While other second violinists have auditioned for and moved on to the first section as openings occurred, he has not.

Dicterow and his wife Irina, an accomplished artist and pianist, nurtured two violinists at home as well. Glenn, in fact, was just 11 when he and older brother Maurice played the Bach Double Concerto with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. “Having (my father) as a role model was certainly inspiring,” says Glenn. “I begged for the fiddle when I was 8.”

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Glenn couldn’t be discouraged from a career in music, says Dicterow, whose early years had been so difficult financially that he tried to dissuade his sons. But he was more successful convincing his older son, Maurice, to study medicine. Now 48, Maurice is a family practitioner in Sherman Oaks (but he also plays violin with the Glendale Symphony, subs with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and does occasional free-lance gigs.)

Both sons speak of their father’s legacy of discipline, and both recall him saying that if they weren’t going to practice, there was no need to play at all. Even now, Dicterow averages two hours of practice a day.

Opening the tall wardrobe at the back of his dressing room, he points to the stacks of music nestled on a shelf above his formal clothes. “I try to get to rehearsal at least an hour early to practice,” he says. “You can’t neglect the instrument. Even if I go on vacation, that fiddle goes with me.”

So do his memories of nearly 50 years with the Philharmonic. There was the time, for instance, when Mehta came upon some 50 young people surrounding the stage door outside a Philharmonic concert in one of the Eastern Bloc countries. “They said they wanted to go to the concert but didn’t have tickets,” says Dicterow. “Zubin said he wouldn’t start until the guards let them in. The concert was delayed, and, finally, they were let in.”

Dicterow calls Carlo Maria Giulini, who succeeded Mehta in 1978, “one of those heavenly conductors. His repertoire was limited--he wouldn’t do (Stravinsky’s) ‘The Rite of Spring’ or things like that--but when it came to the classics, he was just untouchable.”

Current music director Esa-Pekka Salonen, Dicterow says, “has a broad repertoire. He is great in new works and just wonderful in the old classics. And he’s a nice guy, too; he knows how to play you to get the best out of you.”

While Dicterow says he is looking forward to the opening of Disney Hall, the orchestra’s future home, he expects to attend as a concertgoer rather than performer. The strain as he gets older is less making music than making the long commute downtown from his new home in the Conejo Valley: “I hate leaving the orchestra--it’s my life--but how much longer do you do it?”

Yet retiring will not be easy, he says. “You are bringing to life great music. It’s an absolute joy you can’t describe in words and it never stops. That’s what makes my job so wonderful.”