Photograph courtesy Michael Gilbert
When Michael Gilbert was a student at Springdale Elementary School back in the 1940s, he was excellent at arithmetic. He was so good that he could always finish classroom assignments early, and when he did, while all the other kids were still in their seats, eyes down, straining with the numbers on the page, young Michael would stand up abruptly.
“In dreamland,” as Gilbert puts it now, and, with hands gripping an imaginary baseball bat, he would start swinging away at whatever pitch, fast ball or curve, that he could see in his mind’s eye and keep it up until his teacher made him sit back down. Demonstrating that swing to a friend recently, from a sitting position in a booth at the new restaurant at Novel bookstore on Perkins, Gilbert, now 77 and semi-retired from a lengthy career as a world-class classical musician, still has some regrets that he didn’t end up as a new DiMaggio.
Joe DiMaggio — “Jolting Joe” back then of the Yankees, his team — was one of Gilbert’s heroes, right up there with Jascha Heifetz, the great Russian-born violinist who, like Gilbert himself, had been presented with a violin by his musician father at the age of 2, and thereafter given patient paternal instruction in its use.
When he was 12 years old, Michael Gilbert did get to see DiMaggio hit one out during a spring-training exhibition game at Memphis’ venerable Russwood Park, but he never got a baseball career of his own going. He did get an abortive try-out of sorts with “Humko,” a team sponsored then by a local shortening manufacturer of that name, in the kids’ league maintained for 10- to 12-year-olds by the Memphis Rotary Club.
“They lined a bunch of us up in the outfield and hit us some fly balls. It wasn’t much of a test,” remembers a disappointed Gilbert. Luckily, his taskmaster father had set him on the way to a fallback livelihood in the family business of music. One should say classical music, because that was the major focus, to be sure, of the aforesaid father, Noel Gilbert, a violinist of note himself who was renowned for decades locally as the conductor and impresario of the Memphis Symphony Orchestra.
But the senior Gilbert was, like his son when the time came, eclectic in his involvement with the world of music. “Dad was a solid kind of citizen. He was a musician about town, and he did what there was to do.” That meant not just conducting the city’s symphony orchestra but making himself (and members of his family, including Michael) available for other musical efforts in whatever genre. That included supplying the string sections that, often in tandem with the Memphis Horns, backing up soul artists making a name for themselves for hit-producing outfits like Stax-Volt on McLemore Avenue.
Reminiscing in the booth at Novel in late October — the occasion for his being home in Memphis was the 60th-anniversary reunion of his Central High School graduating class — Michael Gilbert made it clear that he shares his late father’s big-tent attitude toward music. He likes it all, regardless of genre. Beethoven, Brahms, Bach, Beatles, whatever. He recalled being in Paris not long ago and entering a cafe and hearing an old Stax number on the establishment’s jukebox and being able to pick out his father’s distinctive sound from the violin part.
That memory spurred another — of an occasion in 1961 when he, having meanwhile graduated from Juilliard, was engaged with his father in dubbing a violin track on a new recording for the Satellite label that would later morph into Stax. Gilbert recalls being entranced by the perfect pitch of the singer as she intoned the two words that began the song and formed its title. “Gee Whiz” was the song, and it became not only 19-year-old Carla Thomas’s first big hit but one of the records that would go on to establish the Memphis soul sound for the world at large.
Then, as now, Gilbert famously had an ear for pitch. During the Crescent Club luncheon that became the finale for the two-day Central High class-reunion event, a classmate, Jane Oglesby Cook, prepared to have the other attendees rise to sing along with her in a rendition of “God Bless America.” She told them that, back in the day, when she and Gilbert had been students at Snowden Junior High School, their music teacher, a Ms. Lancaster, would unfailingly call on Michael to sound out the right key for this or that musical number that needed to be performed.
And now, at the reunion, when Michael’s classmate asked him to supply a “G,” he did so readily, resonantly, and, it would seem, flawlessly. The song could begin.
Like his father, andto the extent that he can manage it, Michael Gilbert does what there is to do for his hometown musically. For years he kept a garage apartment in Midtown, and, even after giving that up, there would be frequent layovers in the homes of siblings still living in Memphis. He made a point of maintaining his links to the city during the course of a very busy and accomplished professional life elsewhere.
After Central High School and after Juilliard, the world-renowned New York music academy where he received further training from famous violin teachers, Gilbert pursued a hugely successful career — soon becoming concertmaster (first violinist) for the San Antonio Symphony and the Santa Fe Opera, then concertmaster for the American Symphony Orchestra through an appointment by Leopold Stokowski.
From 1970 on, he was with the New York Philharmonic, where he remained for 30 years, playing under such conductors as Leonard Bernstein, Pierre Boulez, Zubin Mehta, and Kurt Masur. Along the way he acquired a wife, the Japanese-born Yoko Takebe — a violinist, too — who would join him in the Philharmonic. Together or separately, the Gilberts would perform with an additional who’s who of legendary conductors, famous names like Jean Morel, Erich Leinsdorf, Klaus Tennstedt, Herbert van Karajan, and Pablo Casals.
Both of the children born to Michael and Yoko Gilbert are musical personages in their own right, and yes, they, too — Jennifer and Alan, aged 48 and 50, respectively — are violinists, though they have mastered other instruments as well. Jennifer Gilbert is currently concertmaster with the Orchestre National de Lyon in France, and Alan Gilbert, until recently the music director of the New York Philharmonic and now the chief conductor-designate of the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, is perhaps the most famous Gilbert of the lot, having guided the Big Apple’s celebrated orchestra for most of the last decade.
Michael Gilbert and the other members of his immediate family are always on the move, either in pursuit of their own efforts or in support of each other, traveling to venues around the world. The “semi-retired” Michael stays busy. He is scheduled to conduct a series of classical masterworks in Mexico City this spring, and he is the music director of the annual Music Masters Course in Japan, a summer teaching venue in which the other musical Gilberts also participate.
For all that, it doesn’t require a class reunion to get him — or them — back to Memphis, where in recent years Gilbert was a regular presence attending to the Eroica Ensemble, an orchestral-music ensemble he founded and led, and for the most part, funded himself. With a mixed and ever-shifting membership of established and developing local talent, the Ensemble was a pay-back gift of sorts to the home bailiwick of Memphis.
The Eroica Ensemble, though dormant for the moment, functioned for years as a training ground for aspiring musicians in the West Tennessee area, with Gilbert as the main instructor, putting student musicians from various area institutions in harness with faculty members and occasionally importing established star players from elsewhere, their airfare paid from Gilbert’s pocket. Often the orchestra would lack enough players to complete a section — woodwinds, say, or horns — in which case Gilbert would re-score the work to be performed, assigning familiar parts to different and unaccustomed instruments.
Audience responses to this makeshift but remarkably well-integrated and thoroughly rehearsed orchestra — named for the Third Beethoven Symphony, “heroic” in its themes as well as in its familiar name — were uniformly enthusiastic. The Ensemble was eclectic in spirit — like its founder, who in his growing up would groove on the same pop and early R&B as his schoolmates and, like so many of them, get inspiration from the passion and harmonies of Rev. Herbert Brewster’s choirs at East Trigg Avenue Baptist Church.
Back in the day, the young Michael Gilbert had found something useful in his own church experience.
“I’m not a religious guy, but there’s something to respect there,” he says “My dad was a skeptic. But my mother sent us to Sunday School. Baptist, of all things! And I took it seriously, the hellfire and damnation. My dad was tough. You needed a different tough to cope with it.”
There was intensity to be gained from that kind of superstructure, one that would be augmented later by visits to black churches, where the young Gilbert discovered “a kind of openness,” from which he divined that “if you have good thoughts and really connect with people, you can help with their lives.”
That concern for the lives of people continues to permeate the thinking of the Michael Gilbert of today, who broods about an out-of-control national politics and about the consequences of global warming, which he takes “completely seriously,” imagining “volcanos erupting, everything blown to smithereens, seas rising, and millions of people wiped out.” Amid such possible perils, he says, “You have to give people a chance. People matter.” And in such thinking lay much of the inspiration for the Eroica Ensemble.
The Ensemble was a road show of sorts, taking its performances into community venues — First Congregational Church, Anshei Sphard synagogue, the Stax Academy and Museum, an African-American church just across the Mississippi line, wherever — and it recruited its personnel from such places as well, from “whoever was there,” as Michael Gilbert puts it.
In addition to add-ons and the rotating members of his immediate family, other members of the extended Gilbert musical clan were always on tap: his sister Joan, a pianist, now retired, who then taught at the University of Memphis; his brother Robert, a French horn player who was at the time a member of the Ole Miss faculty; and Robert’s sons, Daniel and Anthony, both violinists.
The orchestra’s operating philosophy doubled as a personal credo for Gilbert: “Music is for everybody. That’s what we are. That’s what I am.”
Alas, the Eroica Ensemble has been forced to suspend activity for the last couple of years, for lack of sufficient financing. “When I had money, we gave concerts,” Gilbert says simply.
Orchestras, even the great ones, depend like the rest of us on dependable sources of income or endowments, and the Eroica Ensemble, which always needed to augment its funding, was forced to compete with the Memphis Symphony Orchestra, Michael Stern’s Iris Orchestra in Germantown, and other local arts groups for the favor of patrons.
Eventually Gilbert concluded that he could no longer afford to keep the Ensemble going single-handedly. “It was a nice project, but it wasn’t feasible to continue doing it with my own money,” he says. “The people who were asked to put in money for the Symphony, Iris, whatever, are the same people. You have to stand in line.”
But once a baseballer, alwaysa baseballer. Gilbert has always made it a point, in whatever musical group he’s been associated with, to organize competitive softball games — between members of this section or that or between his own orchestra and whatever other orchestra happened to be in the same general vicinity. In the New York area, where Gilbert has maintained his permanent residence for the last 50 years, there has been no dearth of potential opponents, and many a game has been played, virtuosos against virtuosos, in the friendly confines of Central Park.
And baseball, alone among the major sports, admits of no time limit. In theory, as long as you can manage to stay at bat, you can swing away forever. Michael Gilbert continues to imagine ways by which to realize “our basic connection to Memphis, my position in Memphis, our family’s in Memphis,” to express “what I feel for the city, what I’d like for the city.”
These days his thinking runs to finding a role for his illustrious son Alan, the world-famous conductor who in today’s musical universe belongs to an elite that can be numbered on the fingers of a single hand. “Sometime [I think] it would be nice for him to have some connection with Memphis. I don’t want to go begging, but it would be nice to share Alan with the city,” Michael Gilbert continues to muse from his booth at Novel. “I don’t like to go around bragging, either, but we’re high-level musicians, and we can do something.”
Eventually the conversation at Novel comes to an end. Gilbert rises out of the booth, the thoughtful focus of this unassuming maestro’s eyes still suggesting that a portion of his mind remains preoccupied with planning some future homage to hometown Memphis, something new and enduring and music-related. He smiles, and the expressively mobile arms that have, from time to time, been illustrating some fine point of conducting, rearrange themselves into a phantom home-run swing.
“Ernie Banks of the Cubs used to say: ‘It’s a great day for a ball game.’ You can say that for music, too,” Gilbert says. Clearly, this ball game ain’t over.
