JAVS Fall 1997

43

just before being sent to Germany. Then began a twenty-year period of free-lance viola playing in New York. He worked with Paul Whiteman in a dance band and with Hildegard in the Plaza Hotel. After being rec ommended for the CBS orchestra he relin quished his position with Hildegard, being replaced by Leonard Davis, who later joined the viola section of the New York Phil harmonic. He recalls this period as quite lucrative: "Those days we took jobs for radio and television stations. You worked only four hours a day, five days a week-anything else was overtime. So it was much better pay than the New York Philharmonic. The Phil harmonic had started a pension plan: you were supposed to receive one hundred percent of your pension after you had been with them for twenty-five years, but after twenty years or so they would fire you so they wouldn't have to pay you all your pension.... When I worked for the CBS orchestra, on Sundays you would find a big library of music on your stand and they would just talk through the rehearsal to make sure we all had the same cuts. Also, at CBS, Dave Soyer and I played TV shows for Jackie Gleason, Ed Sullivan, and Arthur Godfrey-in addition to our Sunday radio stint conducted by Alfredo Antonini. "It was while I was with CBS that Tibor Serly approached me and asked if I would like to learn a new concerto. He explained that the composer was still finishing it up and that there wouldn't be any financial re muneration. It was a challenging project, he said, a piece that no one had ever played before. There were still a lot of options or chances to do things on your own without worrying about previous performances. "I was honored to have been selected to learn this new concerto, since there were many other fine violists working in New York City who could have done it instead of me." It should be noted that while Bartok was slowly becoming established in New York, Fisch was still in Germany with the armed forces. Fisch recalls the rehearsals with Tibor Serly thus: "I remember he had all kinds of sheets of music out and he was still working on it. As we were learning the first movement, he was still working on the last. Bartok was

not famous at this time; his quartets achieved renown only after the Juilliard Quartet began to include them in their repertoire. I don't remember ever playing anything by Bartok until that time. ''At the beginning I had no piano accom paniment. Serly would pick the viola music apart saying, 'Let's hear this' or 'let's try that.' He .didn't offer any technical suggestions, just interpretive ones, I think He would demon strate on his own viola the character of the music but gave no fingerings or bowings, although he wrote in the slurs. (I probably wouldn't have used his fingerings anyhow-! had learned to play under a conductor who would ask what fingering we were using- 'Whatever is printed in the score,' we'd an swer, and he would say, 'Well, do you know who put them in?' Someone would answer no-'Then why play them?' he'd say. 'Use your own fingering!') "Serly gave just the notes-just the nuances and phrasing. I think phrasing was more important to him. I remember trying things out, sometimes an octave higher or lower, just to see how it would sound. From listening to the performance now, I realize that if some of the passages went very high or seemed impossible, we would have probably moved it down-at least to satisfy me, even if not for someone else who might eventually have played it. I remember I liked the way Dave Soyer played at the very beginning, the down ward flourish. [David Soyer, cellist with the Guarneri Quartet, learned the cello version and performed it at the private gathering in March 1948] . At the end of the first phrase in the very first movement, Dave Soyer made a crescendo with a little accelerando and whipped off the last note, which to me was very effective. We didn't really work together but I remember we played to each other. He would play a part of it and then I would play part of it and we would listen to one another. If my memory serves me, we were both given the music in manuscript at the same time, and we practised the concerto at our leisure time inasmuch as we worked for five days at the studio and had families, etc. Separately we went to Tibor to be coached on most of the work. After several occasions, Lucy Brown would accompany us a movement at a time.