Profile | Norma Durst, Seattle Symphony violist
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The year Norma Durst joined the Seattle Symphony, President Truman signed the Marshall Plan, the State of Israel was established and T.S. Eliot won the Nobel Price for literature.
It was 1948, and the orchestra she encountered was decidedly different from today's Seattle Symphony. Now, after 56 years in the viola section, 80-year-old Durst is retiring at the end of the current season. She and two other retirees, fellow violist Renate Stage (who joined the symphony in 1965) and oboist John DeJarnatt (1968), will be honored in a ceremony at the orchestra's Masterpiece Series subscription concert on Thursday in Benaroya Hall. (A party for current and former symphony members will be held later this weekend, also honoring the retirees.)
"I was going to get to Carnegie Hall no matter what," declared Durst, referring to the orchestra's East Coast tour last March and April. During a rehearsal break at Benaroya Hall, we moved into the wings to chat, as she carefully laid her viola in its case.
"The music has been getting harder to see — all those tiny little notes! And I have had some health problems. But I was determined to go on."
Durst has missed only one opening night since she joined the orchestra, and she played in every Seattle Opera performance of "The Ring" (music she calls "very difficult and very satisfying").
Along the way, the Kansas-born Durst has seen some remarkable changes in the orchestra.
"When I joined the symphony," she explains, "it was a part-time orchestra. We had about eight single concerts in a season that ran from late October to March. Eugene Linden was the conductor; soon afterward, Manuel Rosenthal took over."
Durst still remembers what they played in her first concert: Stravinsky's ballet suite, "The Firebird." She played that work again when the Opera House opened, with the composer conducting, and she played when the "Firebird" rose again at the opening of Benaroya Hall. Later this summer, she'll play the "Firebird" with the orchestra one last time before her retirement in July.
The orchestra had fewer players in the old days, and the sound was "quite different — not as full, for one thing." Durst and her fellow players performed at the Moore Theatre; later they migrated to the University of Washington, then to the Civic Auditorium on the site of today's McCaw Hall ("It was just a big barn"), back to the Moore and then on to the now-defunct Orpheum Theater.
A long parade of great conductors and top soloists graced those stages, and Durst heard them all from her perch in the middle of the stage, where the violas sit.
"I remember Stravinsky very clearly," she says.
"He sort of hippety-hopped out to the podium, and then hopped up on it. He told us, 'They always play my music too fast,' and so his conducting of 'Firebird' was not as fast as it is often played."
Durst remembers the great Leopold Stokowsky, as well as Sir Thomas Beecham — the man who gave Seattle the famous warning against becoming "an aesthetic dustbin."
"When Beecham was rehearsing, the percussionists made a mistake," Durst remembers, "and so he repeated it, and they made the mistake again. His little goatee was just quivering with rage, and he said, 'You can make a mistake once, but not twice!' "
One of her cherished memories is the time she needed a new viola, and she took two or three instruments to the home of Milton Katims — then the Seattle Symphony music director and a renowned violist who played regularly with the Budapest Quartet.
Both players tried out the instruments and listened to the other playing them. Finally Katims recommended "the Italian one," and Durst acquired her 1777 Lorenzo and Tomaso Carcassi viola. It is a smallish viola, beautiful to look at and to play, and Durst notes that "it's been through a lot with me.
"I've always treasured that experience, that Mr. Katims would be willing to try out those violas with me," she says. "Later on, I had his daughter Pamela in school; she played the flute."
Alongside Durst's symphony career was a parallel career in teaching elementary instrumental music in the Seattle School District, which she did for 31 years.
"I loved the children; they were wonderful," says Durst.
"Some of the teachers would open the door with such a flourish when I arrived, saying 'Here she is!' You'd think I was Miss America.
"My prize student is now the principal viola in the Boston Symphony Orchestra." (She is referring to Steven Ansell, who at 23 became principal viola of the Pittsburgh Symphony under Andre Previn and later founded the Muir String Quartet; he has performed at the White House and on PBS.)
Aside from the "Firebird," Durst's favorites are Beethoven and Brahms symphonies. She blinks back tears at the thought of abandoning this repertoire: "A few days ago it just hit me: I'll never play a Brahms or Beethoven symphony again. That really bothers me. I will miss my friends in the orchestra so much, and I will miss Jerry (Gerard Schwarz) too."
Fortunately, Durst's name is going onto the list of available substitutes, so she just might be back to do that in the future.
In the meanwhile, she has some projects: getting her house in order, cleaning off the dining room table — and looking for parts for her beloved 1965 Corvair, which was totaled when she was rear-ended six years ago.
"I had it towed to my house," she explains.
"I haven't given up on it. I really love that car."
Melinda Bargreen: mbargreen@seattletimes.com
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