Jay Friedman, the CSO's history-making principal trombonist, retires

Chicago Tribune

a day ago

In January 1957, Jay Friedman walked into Orchestra Hall for the first time. He was a gangly teenager with a passion for the euphonium. His band director at Hyde Park High School had bought him a ticket to hear the Chicago Symphony play Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 1.
'I didn't know who Mahler was; I didn't know what Chicago Symphony was,' Friedman says.
Five years later, in 1962, Friedman would be onstage as the orchestra's new assistant principal trombone, an instrument which, at the time of that memorable concert, he'd barely begun to play. In eight years, he'd be principal. And though he had no way of knowing it then, he'd go on to become a prolific conductor himself — even, on occasion, conducting the CSO.
After a staggering 63 years with the orchestra, Friedman officially retires on Sept. 14, after being on leave since the spring. At that point, he and second harpist Lynne Turner, who retires this month, will share the distinction of being the longest-serving members of the Chicago Symphony, their tenures spanning nearly half of the orchestra's history.
Friedman's leadership of the trombone section — attendant physical demands and all — has even outlasted Adolph 'Bud' Herseth's then-unheard-of 56 seasons as principal trumpet and principal trumpet emeritus of the CSO. Friedman will be the last to retire from the quartet of brass principals whose sound made the Chicago Symphony known around the world: Herseth on trumpet, Dale Clevenger on horn and Arnold Jacobs on tuba.
'No one had heard those sounds before,' says Michael Mulcahy, who has played alongside Friedman in the trombone section since he joined the orchestra in 1989. 'It was such an even and resonant presence. It really changed the profile internationally of the orchestra. Before then, it was more of an insider secret.'
Many equate the Chicago brass with the high-octane, muscular sound of the Solti years — 'halftime at a football game,' as the old jeer went. But when asked about their sound concepts, both Friedman and Mulcahy returned again and again to subtlety.
'Jay is very passionate about the soft dynamics,' Mulcahy says. 'When something's meant to be four or five p's (pianos), as Tchaikovsky writes in the sixth symphony, Jay would want to hear all the shades down to that… He would not take the easy way out.'
Friedman grew up in Hyde Park, raised mostly by his mother and relatives after his father died. While his mother worked odd jobs, he attended a junior military academy in Kenwood — a miserable experience, with one exception.
'That's where I started music,' he says. 'It's the only good thing that ever happened to me there.'
He started on the euphonium, common in wind bands but scarcely used in orchestral repertoire. After graduating from the military academy, he became part of a bevy of musical talent coming out of Hyde Park High: one Herbie Hancock, the year below Friedman in school, accompanied him on Arthur Pryor's 'Thoughts of Love' during the school's solo competition. (When they reunited on the Orchestra Hall stage decades later, Hancock remembered him. 'He was a genius back then, too. Every time you'd go in the band room, he'd be in the corner playing stuff on the piano,' Friedman attests.)
On top of passing along tickets, Friedman's band director arranged for him to take lessons with Vincent Cichowicz, a CSO trumpet player and an influential brass pedagogue. After their first lesson together, Cichowicz told Friedman he ought to try an orchestral instrument — and the trombone had the most similar embouchure to the euphonium. Trombone it was.
Musicians of Chicago Symphony orchestra, Adolph Herseth [left] and Vincent Cichowicz, trumpet players, warm up backstage before a concert. (George Quinn/Chicago Tribune)Friedman beavered away at his new instrument, sometimes as long as 10 hours a day. In a few short months, he was accomplished enough to get into the Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University, and, after that, the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, the training orchestra affiliated with the CSO.
In those days, Civic's top musicians would be invited to audition for CSO openings. But by a series of flukes, Friedman never once auditioned for the CSO. When a musician strike scuttled the orchestra's audition call for the 1962 season, he was promoted directly from Civic as a stopgap.
The closest thing Friedman had to a tryout was arguably more stressful than an official audition. While rehearsing an all-Wagner concert in 1963, Fritz Reiner, the CSO's formidable yet formative music director, complained that he couldn't hear Friedman on the bass trumpet — an obscure doubling rarely seen outside of Wagner. He drilled all Friedman's entrances, alone, in front of the orchestra.
'Reiner had fired two or three assistant first trombones the decade before while playing these auxiliary instruments — he would just nail people, and you're out. It was the hottest chair in the orchestra,' Friedman says. 'So, Bud Herseth leans over and says, 'Put your stand down, pick the horn up and blow it as loud as you can, right in his face.' And I did.'
In Friedman's fourth season, then-principal trombone Robert Lambert went on a sick leave that became permanent. A few months into the season, Friedman asked the CSO's president if he could audition formally for Jean Martinon, by then the music director.
'He said, 'From what the conductor tells me, you have the job,'' Friedman recalls. The worst he'd have to do, he told Friedman, would be to play an audition for him. In the end, Martinon never even asked him for that.
In the years since, Friedman has appeared with the CSO as a soloist — starting with Ernest Bloch's Symphony for Trombone and Orchestra in 1969 and spanning through 2018, when the orchestra took Jennifer Higdon's Low Brass Concerto on a domestic tour.
He's even stood before the orchestra as a conductor. Friedman has led the ensemble during donor performances and while it went on strike in 2019. Other career highlights include being a frequent guest conductor of the Civic Orchestra, his former stomping grounds; leading the Hawai'i Symphony on a tour of the islands; and conducting Daniel Barenboim in the Emperor Concerto with the RAI National Symphony Orchestra in Italy.
'He said I gave him maybe the best accompaniment to the Beethoven he ever had,' says Friedman.
This year, Friedman is celebrating 30 years as the music director of the Symphony of Oak Park River Forest, a nonprofessional orchestra in the western suburbs. Though most musicians in the ensemble have day jobs outside of music, they tackle repertoire you'd sooner find at Orchestra Hall, like Beethoven's Triple Concerto (Oct. 26); a concerto by and featuring San Francisco Symphony principal trombonist Timothy Higgins (April 19); and the premiere of a new piano concerto written by Alex Groesch, a cellist in the orchestra (June 14). Riccardo Muti guest-rehearses the orchestra once a year, a tradition that has continued past his directorship at the CSO.
Mulcahy has played in SOPRF as a ringer on occasion himself. 'He undertook incredibly ambitious projects, doing repertoire and pieces I can't imagine any amateur orchestra would ever (attempt),' he says of Friedman.
So, what does a great conductor make? In Friedman's eyes, it's efficiency and a healthy dose of realism. He points to the strike concerts he led as examples. The last of those featured Mahler 1, the very first symphony a teenage Friedman had heard the orchestra play.
'I had a 90-minute rehearsal, not four days of rehearsals,' he says. 'But Mahler 1? The orchestra can play that in their sleep.'
In retirement, Friedman will continue to play and conduct the SOPRF, play golf, and spend time with his wife and two Parson Russell Terriers, Roxie and Mr. Friedman. (You might already know them, if not by name: They're canine actors who have starred in commercials for Toyota, Starbucks and Crate & Barrel, to name a few.)
With Friedman's retirement, the orchestra is losing a true original, says Mulcahy.
'The worst enemy of joy in a job is cynicism,' he says. 'Even when things disappoint you, you still have to hold on to your aspirations and somehow live up to your own individual code… His individualism helped me keep mine, that's for sure.'
Lynne Turner, CSO harpist since 1962, retires from the orchestra