Top brass
21-year-old tuba player Carol Jantsch is making history at SPAC
By STEVE BARNES, Senior writer
First published: Friday, August 11, 2006
Carol Jantsch is singular except in the number of ways in which she's, well, even more singular.
She's the only tuba player in the Philadelphia Orchestra.
She's the sole female tuba player on staff with a major America orchestra -- and is believed to be the first in history.
She's the lone one-person section in the Philly orchestra. (In contrast, there are two harps, four trombones and 32 violins.)
And, at 21, she's the youngest member of the orchestra.
A few months ago, Jantsch was a senior at the University of Michigan, about to graduate and playing on her school's Ultimate Frisbee team during a season that took it to ninth in the nation. But unlike many of her fellow students, Jantsch already had a job waiting -- one that pays more than $100,000 a year.
Her first night as an official member and principal tuba of the Philadelphia Orchestra was Wednesday at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, when the ensemble performed the Overture to "William Tell," Shostakovich's Symphony No. 15 and, with Yo-Yo Ma as soloist, the Dvorak Cello Concerto.
"It's all still a little unreal, crazy," Jantsch (pronounced yontch) was saying Wednesday afternoon, sitting in the SPAC amphitheater after a 2 -hour rehearsal.
Her world felt aswirl partly because of the newness of her job, but more because she'd returned only two days earlier from playing at a music festival in Germany. She traveled from Europe to her college apartment in Ann Arbor, Mich., on Monday, packed, drove to Saratoga Springs on Tuesday and was onstage at SPAC late Wednesday morning for rehearsal.
Settling down
After the orchestra's residency ends, with Saturday night's performance, Jantsch will move from Michigan to Philadelphia, where, courtesy of her six-figure salary, she's found a "really, really nice" apartment located just a block or so from the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, the orchestra's permanent home. And then the orchestra and its newest, youngest member are off to Europe for a tour before starting the fall season in Philadelphia.
"I think that's when it'll settle down finally," she says.
In the meantime, she planned to learn to water ski on Thursday afternoon, between rehearsal and the evening SPAC performance, at the invitation of the orchestra's trombone section, which she sits next to at the back of the stage.
"She's a special young player. We're glad to have her," says Blair Bollinger, bass trombonist and chair of the search committee that selected her from nearly 200 other applicants.
Selection process
When Jantsch learned early in 2005 that the orchestra's tuba player was retiring after 32 years, she applied but was rejected for lack of experience. Last summer, she was accepted to perform at the Bar Harbor Brass Week in Maine; Bollinger, the brass festival's music director, heard her audition tape and recommended his Philadelphia colleagues give her another chance. She and six other finalists substituted with the orchestra last season, and she ultimately was chosen in March, beating out tuba players, all men, who had been performing longer than she was alive or who held principal or other prominent chairs with major orchestras.
"Carol was the one, when she was playing with us, that would cause others in the orchestra to turn around and say, 'Wow, who is that?' says Bollinger. She also is an expressive, sensitive musician whose sound quality fit in best with the other lower brass that anchors the orchestra, he says.
Jantsch grew up in Ohio but has considered Michigan her home state since attending, at age 9, the Interlochen Arts Academy in Traverse City, Mich., where she first picked up a euphonium, the tuba's smaller sibling.
"I liked it because it was different," she says. She refused to play flute -- too stereotypically girlie -- and her brother was already playing the trumpet. Thus low brass. Within a few years Jantsch was studying with top tuba teachers, and she returned to Interlochen as a teenager to play tuba at its elite boarding school.
Landing at the top of her profession by age 21 is both intimidating and exciting, Jantsch says. At times -- like when, Wednesday on the SPAC stage, she realized she didn't know the music as well as she'd have liked -- insecurity ghosts over her consciousness and she feels like an impostor, sure to be found out by players more than three times her age. But then she lets out a bass blast through 18 feet of tuba tubing, and remembers that, yes, Carol Jantsch, age 21, really does belong here.
Blair Bollinger's booming bass trombone bolstered the exciting finale. Shostakovich's amazing and somewhat schizophrenic Symphony No. 15 isn't often performed, and gave numerous challenges to Maestro Dutoit, who individualized the detailed sectional conversations and responses. Moods shift in this work, and the orchestration is so elaborate in parts that the listener has a tough job keeping up. A busy percussion section gave intensity to the heartbeat-like rhythm of the finale, which ended without adequate preparation, as intended.
A man seated near me in the audience clearly didn't like the work, announcing loudly that 'Shostakovich was a nut!'
This symphony offers solo passages for most of the orchestra's principal players, and showy, difficult work for a few. Noteable in this performance was the rich, even-toned virtuoso playing by Principal Trombone Nitzan Haroz, backed by the powerful sound of Carol Jantsch in her debut performance as principal tuba with the orchestra. The audience applauded the 21-year-old college grad as she entered the stage. She is the first female tubist to win a spot in a major orchestra.
) to live & breathe an art form.
and are excited about helping others realize how easy it all really is.
