Violinists: Second Fiddle, con Brio

• Share

Violinist Alexander Schneider is no dazzling virtuoso. "After I first heard Heifetz, I cried for a week," he says. Nor, when he conducts an orchestra, is he a prima donna of the podium. Frequently, in fact, he is not even on the podium, preferring to lead unobtrusively from within the ranks with a toss of his head and a wave of his bow. Nor, as an intermittent member of the Budapest Quartet for more than 35 years, has he ever sawed away on anything but the No. 2 violin part. In short, he has made a career of playing second fiddle—and to all but his enthusiastic admirers he remains the dim background figure that second fiddlers are supposed to be.

But ebullient, frizzy-haired "Sasha" Schneider is, at 59, a second fiddler the likes of which chamber music has rarely seen. Whirling like a dervish around the fringes of the limelight, he is not only a tireless performer but also an enormously influential catalyst and organizer, teacher and tastemaker. Wherever he goes, music seems to happen around him through a sort of spontaneous combustion.

The Organizer. Having persuaded Cellist Pablo Casals to come out of exile and begin performing again in 1950, Schneider now serves as major-domo of the annual Casals Festival in Puerto Rico. He is one of the guiding spirits of Pianist Rudolf Serkin's Marlboro Festival in Vermont. An indefatigable organizer of concerts, he has created such benign features of New York City musical life as the free outdoor performances in Greenwich Village and the offbeat chamber series at Manhattan's New School. A restless exponent of widening the repertory, he once formed a Schneider String Quartet expressly to perform all 83 of Haydn's quartets. He has been musical godfather to numerous younger musicians, among them Pianist Peter Serkin, Violinist Jaime Laredo, and the Guarneri Quartet.

"If you want to be an artist, you have to be a prostitute," Schneider proclaims in his favorite paradoxical vein. "A prostitute is not ashamed of undressing and showing her beautiful body. An artist has to undress emotionally. The moment you fear showing yourself, stay home." He prefers the intimacy of chamber music because "it is much more personal than symphony music—you must expose more."

By these standards, last week's concert at Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum was a typical Schneider enterprise. It was part of yet another series directed by him. The program consisted of chamber works by Haydn, Mozart and Schubert, all played by Schneider and his fellow performers with much warmth, zest and perhaps a shade too much emotionalism (in Schneider's view, "Haydn was a romantic composer; Mozart too—and Bach"). The performance was unified, but each player had the freedom to express his own personality. "Homogeneity is the worst thing in music," Schneider explains. "It is not so good in marriage either. The first five bars sound wonderful, but afterward you are very bored because everything sounds the same."