Taking a Baroque Bow

Local audiences have savored the virtuosity of violinist Elizabeth Blumenstock, a prominent member of the San Francisco-based Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, in recent concerts in Newport Beach. Blumenstock returns Tuesday, this time as both violinist and leader of the group that the New York Times dubbed “the country’s leading early music orchestra.”

“The truth is, I’m not that much of a virtuosa,” Blumenstock said modestly in a recent phone interview from her San Francisco home. “I’m a good player. I have a good relationship with my audience. Occasionally I can bring off certain things. But put a modern violin bow in my hand and I sound rank. I don’t have a personal relationship with a modern bow.”

Fortunately, nobody would encourage her to make such a switch when she produces such fabulous results with a baroque bow.

“A baroque bow has different physics,” she explained. “It’s curved differently. It’s not designed to produce an even, powerful tone from end to end, which they try to teach you in school. There are so many tiny muscles and nerves trained to produce a sound. I had the luxury of spotty training to train myself. The baroque bow taught me.”

Blumenstock’s training, at least in appreciating baroque music, came early. She was born in Berkeley; moved around the East with her widowed mother, a teacher; and “grew up listening to Bach, Schutz and Buxtehude. My mother was a big baroque fan.”

She began playing the violin at 8, took lessons for three years and continued studying at a private high school in Vermont. And that was about it.

“It was hit and miss,” she said. “I haven’t really studied anywhere, not really.

“I was always good at the mechanics,” she added. “I had a good sense of rhythm, of pitch, all the skills you need. But the particularly aesthetic skills weren’t in place comfortably.”

That changed in college when Blumenstock was singing a piece by John Dowland in a small choir led by Philip Brett at UC Berkeley.

“He was conducting the heck out of it, pointing with his body,” she said. “It had never occurred to me that music was constructed with phrases. At that moment, I got it. Somehow, someway, I got it.”

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Another turning point was listening to the arresting period practice recordings just then coming out by Nikolaus Harnoncourt.

“They really went straight to the heart,” she said. “ ‘Oh,’ I thought, ‘that’s how it’s supposed to sound. I know how to do that.’ Without picking up a baroque violin, I knew. I was about 22.”

But a career didn’t happen immediately. “Motherhood intervened,” she said.

She and her cellist husband, Douglas, had two children: Susannah, now 21, a jazz dancer, and Daniel, 18, a rock musician. Her husband died in 1981 of lymphoma and she returned to the Oakland Symphony, then led by the brilliant Calvin Simmons, where she and her husband had played.

“They were incredibly generous,” she said. “They didn’t even ask me to audition. They just said, ‘Come back.’ They were being very kind.”

The Philharmonia Baroque had made its first appearance that year. She thought she could manage both groups because of their short seasons.

“I called up Michael Sand, who was then concertmaster, because we had played quartets together. ‘Hi, remember me? I’d really like to be in Philharmonia.’ He wanted to make sure I knew it was a period instrument orchestra. ‘Yeah, yeah. That’s why I want to be in it.’ ”

Because the group had no formal audition process, he invited her to play duets with him.

“Sure. But I don’t have a violin.”

There was a short silence, she recalled.

“I don’t have a bow either.”

Sand lent her both. “I took them and practiced like a maniac all week.”

She got into the orchestra and has been there ever since, although she continues to appear with other early music groups.

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All the groups face controversies over tempos, phrasing, embellishments and even whether period instruments are necessary. But Blumenstock tries to steer clear of them.

“I’m not a confrontational or an argumentative person,” she said. “Gut strings, for instance, are not rule No. 1 for me, but certainly lively and expressive playing is. My main interest is giving a real vigorous and expressive reading of the music and making people happy they came to the concert.

“Certainly I have opinions. Little fussy things, like where you start trills, whose style of bowing. . . . I just don’t choose to be embroiled with arguments about whether what I’m doing is truly authentic. I know enough to know it’s an entirely possible interpretation of what was done. I’m interested in what I’m doing now, how it fits and serves what I see in the music. There is room for everything.”

In fact, she has shaped the Tuesday program to showcase everybody, at least in the orchestra.

“Everybody gets a solo in this concert,” she said. “Everyone has responsibility not just for being in a section supporting soloists. I’ve done my best to make sure there’s a challenge for everybody.”

* Violinist Elizabeth Blumenstock leads the San Francisco-based Philharmonia Baroque in a varied program of works by Biber, Muffat, Pachelbel and others on Tuesday at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, 600 St. Andrews Road, Newport Beach. 8 p.m. $25. (800) 407-1400.