Rudié!

Finding Great Music in Small Packages

© 1999, Dyanne Fry Cortez
Originally published in The Good Life magazine. Reprinted with permission

It may not have been what the architect had in mind, but the windowed alcove in Brent and Suzie Martin's family room made a fine stage for a string quartet. Sixty people sat on folding chairs and couches under the vaulted ceiling, listening to the dissonant music of Samuel Barber as the winter sun faded from the hills above Barton Creek.

Lead violinist Robert Rudié set the pace, looking informally elegant in a loose-fitting shirt of green velvet. The shirt was embroidered with tiny mirrors that caught the light as his bow danced across the strings. With white hair swept back from a high forehead and a pair of reading glasses perched on his Gallic nose, he looked a lithe and active sixty-five. He is, in fact, eighty.

Born in New York City, educated at Juilliard, Rudié has played grand orchestral works on many of the world's great stages. For the past decade, however, his chief occupation has been chamber music: pieces written for small groups of instruments, intended for performance in the parlors and dining rooms of well-to-do fans. Rudié is founder and music director of Salon Concerts, Inc., which continues that tradition by staging chamber concerts in private homes. The non-profit organization is currently presenting its ninth subscription season.

“Chamber music is a part of the classical literature which is a great privilege and a great joy to play,” Rudié says. “Most of the great composers, especially in the last two hundred years, have written some of their finest music for chamber ensembles. Beethoven wrote fifteen string quartets. They're as 'serious' as anything he wrote. Haydn wrote almost as many string quartets as symphonies, and he wrote 104 symphonies.”

The current season features music of Sibelius, Shostakovich, and other twentieth-century composers. Last month's concert included a piece by Rudié's wife, Austin composer Kathryn Mishell.

Tomorrow's Players

Proceeds from Salon Concerts support Chamber Music in Public Schools (CHAMPS), Rudié's gift to his great-grandchildren's generation. Orchestra students audition for CHAMPS, which currently sponsors string quartets at ten Austin-area schools. Instructors spend one class period a week with each group. The quartets perform at school events and appear as warm-up acts at Salon Concerts.

Rudié isn't the only teacher in the program, but those involved say he does most of the work. “He's ten years my senior, and he has a lot more energy than I do,” says Rod Kennedy of Kerrville, current president of Salon Concerts' board of directors. “He seems to be totally dedicated to giving something back in his senior years. He is paid a token fee, which is meant to justify all the time he puts in. But I'm sure he'd give that money away if he thought there was a cause that would help the kids.”

In fact, Rudié admits he ran CHAMPS for the first five years without getting paid at all. “I don't regret a moment of it. I knew it was a wonderful thing to do,” he says. “For the students, it opens their ears and souls to this wonderful music.”

It also gives them an opportunity to become better, more confident players. “In a string quartet, every note is important. You can't think, well, if I don't get it, there are nine other people behind me."” Perhaps more importantly, “it's an experience in working with others, learning how to adjust,” Rudié adds. “You have to be aware of it all the time; there's nobody conducting. Sometimes there's a member, maybe even two, that are not as skilled as the others. Everybody has to adjust to that, too.” That sort of experience pays off, he believes, in areas of life that are far removed from music.

Stage Presence

A piano plays in a darkened theater as a lights come up on the stage. A sour-faced cleric appears, draped in nineteenth-century garb. He reads a decree from the Bishop of Nice forbidding the burial of Niccolo Paganini, the late, great violinist and composer, in consecrated ground. Lights dim briefly as the man on stage turns his back, dons a long, black wig, and picks up a violin. When he faces the audience again, he's the ghost of Paganini, come to testify in his own defense.

Rudié plays all the characters in Paganini!, a play he co-wrote with David Schechter. He has always been fascinated with the maestro's music, his unconventional life, and his techniques for making previously unheard-of sounds on a violin.

“He was the first musical superstar,” Rudié says. “The force of his personality, the passion of his playing, made him a celebrity. Before Paganini, violinists--instrumentalists in general, and even composers--were attached to a church or a royal household or a very wealthy businessman's household. Paganini could hire his own hall, do his own ads, make a fortune.”

Rudié did his first improvisational sketch on Paganini in 1978, when he was still living in New York. Isaiah Sheffer, who now hosts Selected Shorts on public radio, helped him improve the piece. A year or so later, Sheffer introduced Rudié to playwright and actor Steve Allen. Allen played the lead character in a TV series called Meeting of Minds, in which characters from history appeared “live” and participated in panel discussions.

“Isaiah asked Steve why he never had musicians on the show. Steve said, 'You can't get musicians to be actors, too.' Isaiah said, 'I've got just the man for you,'” Rudié recalls. He appeared as Paganini during the 1980-81 season. That episode won an Emmy award. The current version of Paganini! premiered at Austin's Capital City Playhouse in the mid-1980s, and has toured all over the United States.

Rudié has tried other roles in recent years. His 1995 portrayal of Max in The Homecoming, presented by the Subterranean Theatre Company, earned him an “outstanding actor” nomination from the Austin Circle of Theaters. He appeared in several productions of A Christmas Carol, sometimes as Scrooge, and once as the ghost of Jacob Marley. He has also played Salieri in Amadeus, Admiral Joseph in HMS Pinafore, “...and I played a crazy sculptor in a new movie called Just Sue Me, filmed in San Marcos,” he adds.

Early Start

Rudié's parents were French immigrants who met in the United States. "My mother was a pianist, and my father a cellist. They played concerts with an uncle who was a violinist," he says. His folks didn't push him into music. They knew it wasn't an easy life. But when they saw young Robert playing with two curtain rods, using one as a fiddle and the other as a bow, they bowed to the inevitable. He started lessons at age seven.

"I played in one of the first radio orchestras, the Wallenstein Sinfonietta, when I was a mere boy, ten or eleven years old. That was on station WOR in New York City," he says. "I also was, for a very short time, a member of the NBC Symphony, with Toscanini conducting."

Over the next fifty years, Rudié played with orchestras in Oklahoma City, Honolulu, Dallas, and New York. He spent eight years as a touring soloist with Columbia Artists' Management, playing recitals all over the United States. During the 1960s and '70s, he ran the school of music at Riverdale Country School, "in the very elite part of the Bronx, right on the Hudson River," he says. Two of the students at Riverdale were children of composer William Schuman, who would become the first director of New York's Lincoln Center.

"Through him, I met a lot of the wonderful lights of our twentieth-century music," Rudié says. One of those lights was Leonard Bernstein, who invited Rudié several times to his summer home on Martha's Vineyard. "We would play whatever composition he was working on, then play some ensembles, then have dinner," he recalls. "Then it would be midnight, and he would say, 'Let's play anagrams,' and we'd do that until 2 a.m."

The Course of True Love

Music has always been the guiding force in Rudié's life. But it was one of Cupid's arrows that brought him to Austin. He came here in 1981--just temporarily, he thought--to fill a vacancy on the University of Texas music faculty. The offer came at the right time: Riverdale had just closed its music school, leaving Rudié unexpectedly free.

He knew at least one person in central Texas. Leonard Posner, an old friend from Juilliard, was concertmaster of the Austin Symphony. One night, Posner invited Rudié to a dinner party. "We went to his house for cocktails first-and in walks this fabulous lady on the arm of Paul Olefsky, who was first cellist of the symphony," Rudié recalls.

The fabulous lady was seated next to him at dinner. Her name was Kathryn Mishell. A native of California, she had lived in Austin since 1972. In addition to being a composer and concert pianist, she taught piano at her home studio in West Lake Hills. She was forty years old; Rudié was sixty-two. "I was just smitten. I still am," he says. And Mishell concedes that, well, it was mutual.

When Rudié's faculty appointment ended, he went home to New York where he still had a few irons in the fire, musically speaking. He and Mishell carried on a visiting romance for several years. "I didn't want to move to Austin with nothing--or let me say, with no way to earn a living. The most important thing--Kathryn--was already here," he says.

When the Austin Symphony offered him a job as assistant concertmaster, RudiÈ took it, even though he had held concertmaster's posts in several larger orchestras. "At first I just played major concerts, commuting and staying ten days at a time. Then, I gradually transferred all of my life here."

The Artist's Life in Austin

He and Mishell married in 1988. Today, they work in separate studios, situated at opposite ends of the house. Rudié's room is a cheerful place, decorated with mementos of his life's work and portraits of famous violinists. The front wall is all glass, with a view of a green back yard and a cedar-covered hillside. "It is quiet and very lovely for me. Quite different from New York City. I love it," he says. But his existence in Austin is not what most people would describe as quiet.

He stayed with the symphony nine years, and spent two and a half years coaching string quartets for the Austin Chamber Music Center before starting Salon Concerts and CHAMPS. Alongside his work with those programs, he currently has eighteen students taking private lessons on violin and viola. "In addition to our very happy personal life, he's known here. He's not just tagging along as my husband," notes Mishell. "Because he wanted to make a life here, he has done wonderful things. I think it's really neat that you can pick yourself up at that age and start again."

In Rudié's eyes, life couldn't be finer. He spends some mornings visiting schools, and some doing the administrative work that keeps his programs going. "I take a good, brisk walk whenever I can, about three miles, some uphill, some downhill," he says. "And sometimes I just have breakfast. Usually a nice Texas Ruby Red grapefruit and some good cereal with nuts and raisins in it."

His students come mostly in the afternoons. And sometimes there are play rehearsals, or group rehearsals for the next Salon Concert. Regardless of the performance schedule, RudiÈ still tries to practice his violin for at least forty-five minutes every day. "It's a thing you cannot neglect for very long without feeling pretty bad on the instrument," he explains. "You're not training huge muscles that you run and punch and throw a football with. They're smaller muscles, but you have to be in control of them."

Does he ever think about retirement? "Of course I've thought about it, but it's a silly thing to do. I'm having too good a time," Rudié says. He concedes, however, that there may come a day when his playing doesn't measure up to his own standards, and he'll have to quit performing in public.

"That'll be a very sad day," he says. "When it comes, I hope I realize it right away. But if I don't, my wife will tell me."