Borromeo Quartet, from left: Nicholas Kitchen (violin), Mai Motobuchi (viola), Yeesun Kim (cello) and Kristopher Tong (violin). In the Gardner Museum stairwell. Richard Bowditch photograph
This happens when you listen to informed people.
Violinist Nicholas Kitchen of the Borromeo Quartet serves as artistic director of the cross-disciplinary Heifetz Institute, six weeks of summer training for some of the best students in the world, with some of the best musical instructors.
This past January the Heifetz brain trust had a meeting, formulating the annual schedule for the Staunton, Virginia institute.
“We planned out our usual six weeks of activities,” Kitchen says from his Jamaica Plain home. “When we were done, one of the board members, who deals in infectious diseases, said, ‘That’s all great. But sorry, I won’t be there,’ and then explained what was starting to happen around the world.”
Now, eight months later, everyone knows what was starting to happen. But back in January, almost nobody else responded like Kitchen and the Heifetz staff.
“When we understood the gravity,” Kitchen says, “we decided to go entirely online. By February we had made our plans.
“It was enormous—100 students, 40 faculty, nine time zones. And frenetic—completely frenetic. We just had our 50th concert broadcast in the last six weeks. Podcasts, Facebook, YouTube—everything that normally happens in the institute actually happened. All the students were engaged, and all the faculty were employed.” (You can see the performances from the summer sessions at heifetzinstitute.org/rubato.)
As most musicians who teach have found out, transferring from real-time to online instruction can be frustrating, with little nuance—in fingering, pedaling, timing—possible because of delays and other virtual shortcomings. Planning helps with that too.
“We had six studios operating every day,” Kitchen says. “It was all done with layered recordings, passing files, GarageBand and REAPER.
“First I tested some of the layered recordings—I wondered if it was a musical event, or a technical stunt. I had to play something listening to a bass line through headphones. You have to listen intensely, and I found it incredibly musical.
“Some of my students may hate me, but this was no waste of time. They were engaged in what they were doing, and getting better at it.
“Honestly, even in a non-pandemic world,” he says, “I would tell students to tape themselves and listen carefully. No one likes it. And nobody would argue that we don’t want to get back together. But these techniques are good.”
Kitchen and the Heifetz staff didn’t just move the musical instruction online. “We also usually have people supervising student life at the institute,” he says. “Cooking, watching movies together. That happened, and some participated in it every single day. It was a rich six weeks, clearly more intense than we thought it would be.”
Borromeo itself has adjusted to the new performing world with a steady stream of recording and virtual contact. A scheduled Tanglewood appearance for a Beethoven series—another of Kitchen’s great passions—moved online smoothly. The group records weekly for the Library of Congress, where Kitchen has a long relationship. A fall festival in Oregon, and a teaching residency at Arizona University, will be online.
And the upcoming semester at New England Conservatory, where Borromeo has been resident quartet since the 1990s, will be virtual—“they had elaborate plans to open in person, transforming the dorms and using hotels,” he says, “but eventually they said they couldn’t.”
Every assumption has been challenged for the performing arts.
“It’s all an invention in progress, isn’t it?” Kitchen says. “Kind of an earthquake environment. But even though our board member painted such a bleak reality—which, as it turned out, really happened—well, I am still hopeful we will develop some kind of new routine that will carry us through.”