Final bow

Kelly Farris, the violinist who enters to applause after the rest of the Spokane Symphony is seated and ready to go, is about to go himself.

On Friday night, he will bow to the audience, point to oboist Keith Thomas for the orchestra’s tuning note, then take his seat in the first chair of the first violins – the final time he will perform that ritual at the Opera House.

Farris is bowing out at the end of this season, retiring after having served 37 years under the baton of the orchestra’s six music directors since 1969.

He even played under the symphony’s first music director, Harold Paul Whelan, who founded the orchestra in 1945 and led it until 1961.

“That was 1959,” Farris, who grew up in Walla Walla, said in an interview earlier this week. “I was 16, about to graduate from high school and had won the Young Artist award at the Spokane festival (the Greater Spokane Music and Allied Arts Festival, now Musicfest Northwest).

“I spent the week at the Davenport Hotel and would walk up the South Hill to Whelan’s home on Rockwood Boulevard, where he gave me lessons because he was a violinist, too. Then at the end of the week, I played two movements of Lalo’s ‘Symphonie espagnole’ with the Spokane Symphony under its founding conductor.

“That experience probably had as much as anything to do with my going into music as a career,” Farris says. “The next year I started at the University of Washington thinking I was heading into engineering or mathematics or science, but midway through the year I bagged those ideas and focused on music.”

Farris received his bachelor’s degree in violin performance from the University of Washington and moved to New York and the Juilliard School, where he studied with two icons of violin teaching, Ivan Galamian and Dorothy Delay.

He entered the U.S. Army and became a member of the Army’s Strolling Strings in Washington, D.C., playing for White House and other diplomatic functions. He also played chamber music with Washington area musicians including violinist and Supreme Court justice Abe Fortas, and became a member of the orchestra of New York City Ballet.

“As I was getting out of the Army,” Farris says, “I’d won an audition for a position in the violin section of the National Symphony there in D.C.”

But the orchestra was out on what Farris’ friends in the organization felt would be a long strike.

“I was married and we had a 2-year-old son but no money,” he says of his situation with Danish-born wife Else. “Since the Army gave you a one-way ticket back to your home draft board, we decided to come back to Walla Walla and wait out the strike.”

His brother-in-law, cellist Chris Tiemeyer, had met Spokane Symphony music director Donald Thulean at a music festival and told Thulean about Farris.

“Thulean called me in Walla Walla and told be there was a concertmaster opening available and asked if I would come up and play for him,” Farris recalls.

“I came up and played part of the Brahms concerto, or maybe it was Wieniawski, and some unaccompanied Bach on the stage of the Fox Theater. Don was the only one in the audience and he offered me the job. Just like that.”

(By comparison, the search for Farris’ replacement started earlier this season with an international announcement of the vacancy and may take longer than a year.)

“I thought it over for a week,” Farris says of Thulean’s offer, “and decided, ‘Well, I’ll try it for a year.’ ”

The one-year trial turned into a 37-year career.

Even after taking the Spokane job, Farris continued to play for five summer seasons with the New York City Ballet. He has also performed as a member of the Seattle Symphony, Seattle Opera Orchestra, Montana Chamber Orchestra and the Britt Festival Orchestra, and along with principal players from the country’s finest orchestras played for four seasons in the all-star chamber orchestra of the American String Project.

Farris joined the Eastern Washington University faculty in 1970 and in 1979 formed the Spokane String Quartet. He retired from Eastern in 2000 as professor emeritus and will take a year’s leave of absence from the quartet during the 2006-07 season.

Discussing the concertmaster’s role in the modern symphony orchestra, Farris noted the nitty-gritty task of marking the bowing movements in violin parts, then consulting the leaders of the violas, cellos and basses about how those markings will fit with the other string parts.

Then there’s the part of the job that audience members hear and remember – the often difficult, lengthy solos that composers assign to the concertmaster.

“The solos are a huge part of the job,” Farris says. “And every concert seems to have at least one big solo, maybe more. Friday’s concert has big solos in the Janacek overture and those very famous solos in ‘Swan Lake.’ ”

In early orchestras the concertmaster was often the conductor, and in the 19th century the concertmaster became the conductor’s representative to the orchestra’s players. Now the role is more subtle.

“Ideally the concertmaster has a great communicative relationship with the conductor and the trust of the conductor, both musically and personally,” Farris says. “The concertmaster is a sounding board for ideas, both musical and on personnel matters and in planning the orchestra’s repertoire.

“Maybe the most important part of the job comes down to the split-second communication during rehearsals of the conductor’s spoken or unspoken wishes,” he adds. ” ‘How can you fix this?’ ‘How can we make that sound better?’ Most of those have to do with the style of bowing.”

Farris denies, however, that there have been occasions when he saved a performance from collapse, as other orchestra members have claimed.

“Sometimes when things get unstable,” he allows, “a concertmaster becomes … well, more active physically – a little more assertive.”

Now that those duties will fall to someone else, what’s ahead for Farris?

“Well, there is still the ‘Symphony on the Edge’ performance at The Big Easy on May 19, and my last concert of the season with the quartet on May 21,” Farris says. “Then I’ll play a string of performances of ‘Rosenkavalier’ with Seattle Opera this summer.”

Then what?

“I’ll be doing some traveling with my wife Else, playing some golf, and seeing what other playing opportunities arise.”^