Violinist recalls career as 70th birthday nears

Joseph Silverstein doesn’t turn 70 until March 21 of next year, but he’s already started celebrating. And why not? The esteemed violinist and conductor shares the birth date with J.S. Bach, and even if it weren’t a milestone birthday, being a musician born under that lucky star is reason enough to celebrate every year. If you talk to Silverstein, however, there’s a sense that music and good times have always been a natural pairing in his life.

“Between what I’m playing and what I’ve played over the decades, it’s an interesting moment, turning 70,” said the musician the other day from his home in Sturbridge, Mass. “Music is the only profession in the world where age is not looked on with great criticism.”

He began a music career at age 3, so it’s fair to say that Silverstein, whose 70th birthday celebration kicks off with a performance of Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” tonight and Friday at the Rockport Opera House, brings the experience of a lifetime with him to the stage.

“When I look back now, outside of the usual childhood daydreams of appearing as a soloist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, I had no particular goals,” said Silverstein.

But goals tracked him down nevertheless. A native of Detroit, Mich., Sliverstein studied with Efrem Zimbalist, the great American violinist, at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. He went on to join the string sections of the Houston Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Denver Symphony, where he was also concertmaster and assistant conductor.

In the 1950s, Silverstein signed on with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. During his earliest years there, he won two prestigious awards – the Silver Medal in the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels and the coveted Naumberg Prize. Soon after he was moved from last chair in the second violin section, to third chair in the first violin section, to concertmaster of the BSO, a position he held for 22 years.

After leaving the BSO, Silverstein took up the baton for the Utah Symphony Orchestra in Salt Lake City, where he and his wife still have a winter home and where he is now conductor laureate.

While Silverstein, whose violin is a 1742 Guarneri del Jesu, has loosened many of his full-time professional ties, he still has an active performance schedule. During this year of special birthday tributes, he will not only travel in Europe performing, but will appear in concerts dedicated to him at Alice Tully Hall in New York and with the Utah Symphony, which is now under the leadership of Keith Lockhart.

Silverstein’s repertoire is broad, but he has specialized in music of the Baroque period. Still, he has seen many industry changes in a career that has spanned half a century. Indeed, he has watched as classical music has entered the realm of the “crossover artist” and of “modern trappings.”

“Anybody who has really followed the development of musicology over the past 50 years would have had to be seriously influenced by all the information we have available to us now,” said Silverstein. “Certainly when I play Vivaldi today, it’s totally different from how I studied it years ago. We old curmudgeons look at young performers and say, Why are they doing that? But Liszt, Paganini, Rachmaninoff all did it, as did Mozart. They took the popular music of their day and wove it into something of their own making. The trappings of modern performances have only heightened the variety of expression an artist can have.”

But when Silverstein begins to talk about the music itself, his language reverts to a comfortingly traditional tone that exposes nothing short of a poetic vision.

“When I play Vivaldi, I want to be able to evoke for the audience the images of nature Vivaldi tried to depict in a small group of string instruments,” said Silverstein. “I want to depict birds and storms and ice and falling on the ice. And I want to do all that without the trappings of the modern orchestra.”

Joseph Silverstein will perform Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” as part of the Bay Chamber Concert Series, which will include the Vermeer Quartet, 8 p.m. Aug. 16 and 17 at the Rockport Opera House. For information, call 236-2823.