Soloist turns out to be team player

By Bob Welch 
Columnist, The Register-Guard.

The letter, postmarked from Altadena, Calif., came from the viola soloist whom I'd chided for not "playing hurt" at the Oregon Bach Festival last month. She had cut her finger in the kitchen.

If this were sports, I had written tongue in cheek, organizers wouldn't have canceled a fifth of the event - equal to $7.80 of my $39 ticket - because of her absence. She'd have been taped up and sent out on stage, or her backup would have been. And the Brandenburg Concertos would have been played in full.

As I started reading the letter, I could hear those four opening doomsday notes from Beethoven's Fifth - fate knocking on my door.

"Dear Mr. Welch," she wrote. "Ever since I read your Bach Festival article I've wanted to write and" - threaten to impale me with her bow, I imagined - "apologize for slicing off the end of my finger (it was garlic). I want to make sure you don't feel cheated, so I'm returning your $7.80 to you. Perhaps this will help you come back to another concert. Go Ducks, Kazi Pitelka."

I laughed out loud. And, after returning her check - her good-sport nature was worth at least $7.80 - called to chat with her about classical musicians and how I'd never stopped to think they might have senses of humor. Or, for that matter, real lives beyond the stage.

"It's all so formal," I said. "I mean, I imagine you walking off stage and - I dunno - going into a practice room to begin getting ready for your next performance. And then when I called you the other day, you mentioned your kids and swimming and I thought, `Gee, I never thought of a professional musician swimming or having kids.' "

"People would be surprised how normal we are," said Pitelka, who's 49 and has been playing in the Bach Festival for 18 years. "We have some Eugene friends who expressed the same thing you did - the tuxes and everything - and then came to a few of our parties and said, `Wow, you guys really party.' "

Get this: Brought up in Berkeley, Pitelka was better known by the police than by music audiences. "It was the '60s," she says. "I got arrested for being in anti-war protests. Music saved me."

She's a college dropout, having quit Indiana University after two years because it was too much the "music factory."

She's been to the Yachats Smelt Fry. Every year, after the Bach Festival ends, she and other musicians and their families camp at nearby Washburne Memorial State Park. She gardens, specializing in fruit trees. She and husband John Steinmetz, a bassoonist who plays in the festival, have a 14-year-old daughter and a 7-year-old son. And she's been known to high-five people back stage after great performances.

"Sports and music have much in common," she said. "You're playing together as a team and it's just this high, especially when you have a wonderful rapport with the audience."

"When you've really nailed a piece," I said, "have you ever wanted to do a Tiger Woods fist pump?"

"Actually, we make noise to each other on stage, but it's soft enough so the audience can't hear it," Pitelka said. "But, yeah, it's pretty formal. Some of us wish there were a better way. Sometimes the formality can be a wall, but some people love that formality and ritual."

Those would be the people who didn't appreciate harpsichordist Owen Burdick using a phony French accent to make his introductions at Beall Concert Hall a few years back, then shifting to jive.

"We laugh a lot," Pitelka said. "Some of us have known each other since we were 16."

Which is why it was especially hard for her to miss the 2003 festival. Call it the agony of defeat or, better yet, the agony of de finger.

"This friend had brought me this beautiful knife from Japan and I was slicing garlic and, snip, I cut the tip of my left middle finger."

As they say in sports: There's always next year. Already, the Brandenburg Concertos - all of them - are rumored to be on the Bach sked. If so, I'm there. As Pitelka plays her first note, I'll be the guy starting The Wave.