When the Bronx-bred pianist Zita Carno auditioned for the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1975, she performed quick excerpts from the orchestra’s repertoire for the music director, Zubin Mehta.
“Then Mehta mentioned, ‘Come again tomorrow. I need to hear you play the Boulez,’” she recalled years later, referring to the French conductor and composer Pierre Boulez.
“Well, I mentioned, ‘I eat that stuff for breakfast,’ which made him snort.”
Ms. Carno was employed and spent the subsequent 25 years because the orchestra’s pianist, capping a profession as a broadly praised classical keyboardist (she additionally performed the harpsichord and organ) who was additionally an professional on the music of the revolutionary jazz saxophonist John Coltrane.
Ms. Carno died on Dec. 7 in an assisted dwelling facility in Tampa, Fla. She was 88.
Her cousin Susanna Briselli mentioned the trigger was coronary heart failure. Ms. Carno had moved to Tampa together with her mom after her retirement from the Philharmonic to be close to the spring coaching facility of the Yankees, her favourite baseball staff.
Ms. Carno was referred to as a lot for her eccentricities as for her musicianship.
Esa-Pekka Salonen, the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s music director from 1992 to 2009, mentioned in a cellphone interview that Ms. Carno “had a unprecedented capability as a musician,” including, “She might learn mainly every little thing — not solely Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms however items by Hindemith and Richard Strauss, with all types of complicated transpositions, and play them in actual time and in tempo.”
Mr. Salonen mentioned that Ms. Carno’s skills transcended sight-reading piano items and prolonged to calculating a full orchestral rating in her head. “She had a specific form of C.P.U. that might course of plenty of info in actual time,” he mentioned. “She had that form of uncommon mind.”
She additionally regularly used the phrase “Yoohoo, bubeleh!” — “bubeleh” is Yiddish for “sweetheart” — as a greeting in her booming voice.
“Those phrases got here out of her with startling regularity,” David Howard, a former clarinetist with the Philharmonic, mentioned by cellphone. The two collaborated on an album, “Capriccio: Mid-Century Music for Clarinet,” launched in 1994.
During a rehearsal when Mr. Boulez was conducting the orchestra, Mr. Howard recalled, “He requested Zita to play one thing a little bit bit softer and he or she mentioned, ‘Sure, bubeleh!’
“Boulez was as critical and solemn a music determine as ever lived,” he added. “We needed to grit our tooth to maintain from laughing.”
She additionally used the phrases “yoohoo” and “bubeleh” in musical scores, To Ms. Carno, “yoohoo” denoted a duplet (a bunch of two notes), and “bubeleh” was her phrase for a triplet (a bunch of three).
Joanne Pearce Martin, Ms. Carno’s successor on the Philharmonic, wrote on Facebook after Ms. Carno’s dying that she “by no means erased a single mark of Zita’s in any of the LA Phil keyboard elements. Seeing these ‘Bubulas’ and ‘Yoohoos’ peppered all through the elements brings a particular smile to my face — how might it not?”
Zita Carnovsky was born on April 15, 1935, in Manhattan and grew up within the Bronx. Her father, Daniel, who immigrated from Poland, was a pharmacist. Her mom, Lucia (Briselli) Carno, who was born in Odessa, Russia, was a homemaker whose piano enjoying Zita started to mimic when she was fairly younger — anyplace from 2½ to 4 years previous, relying on the account.
From ages 4 to six, Zita traveled together with her mother and father to Philadelphia, the place she performed duets together with her uncle, Iso Briselli, a violin virtuoso, who additionally coached her, Ms. Briselli, his daughter, mentioned in a cellphone interview. At 10, she completed writing her first fugue.
She graduated from the High School of Music and Art (now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts) in New York and, in 1952, obtained honorable point out for a chunk she wrote for violin and piano in a composition contest carried out by the New York Philharmonic’s Young People’s Concerts.
She attended the Manhattan School of Music, the place she earned her bachelor’s diploma in 1956 and her grasp’s the subsequent yr.
When she made her debut at Town Hall in Manhattan in 1959, the New York Times critic Harold C. Schonberg wrote that she was “definitely one of many main younger American skills, with splendid technical tools, brains and finesse.”
In October 1960, she was the soloist in a program of Romantic music throughout 4 live shows with the New York Philharmonic, with Leonard Bernstein conducting. Mr. Schoenberg referred to as her the “excellent interpreter” of Wallingford Riegger’s technically tough “Variations for Piano and Orchestra.”
In the Sixties, she was a member of the Pro Arte Symphony Orchestra of Hofstra University and the Orchestra da Camera, each on Long Island. She was additionally in demand for recitals and live shows across the United States. She joined the New Jersey Symphony within the early Seventies and stayed till she left for the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
She was additionally intrigued by jazz. (“She was at all times all in favour of cutting-edge music,” Ms. Briselli mentioned.) In 1959, she wrote a two-part article about John Coltrane in The Jazz Review. Explaining his approach, she wrote, “Tempos don’t faze him within the least; his management allows him to deal with a really sluggish ballad with out having to resort to the double-timing so frequent amongst exhausting blowers, and for him, there isn’t any such factor as too quick a tempo.”
Ms. Carno, who was launched to Coltrane by the bassist Art Davis, was capable of transcribe his solos whereas listening to him carry out.
“I used to go outfitted with music paper and some well-sharpened pencils and I might take them down through the performances, which amused Trane no finish,” she informed Lewis Porter, the creator of “John Coltrane: His Life and Legend” (1998).
She wrote the liner notes to “Coltrane Jazz,” Coltrane’s second album for the Atlantic label, which was launched in 1961.
No fast members of the family survive.
In addition to her musical pursuits, Ms. Carno was an novice baseball scholar. She wrote articles for the Society for American Baseball Research (about the pitcher Eddie Lopat) and the Baseball Research Journal (about pitchers who were notoriously tough on sure groups).
She was additionally a science fiction fan and regularly commented on-line in regards to the “Star Trek” tv collection and movies.
In a put up on the science fiction creator Christopher L. Bennett’s web site in 2018, she said that she had been researching the Vulcan mind-meld and the half-Vulcan Mr. Spock’s superior telepathic skills. “As a end result,” she wrote, “I’ve gained an entire new appreciation of the facility of the thoughts — ‘wuh tepul t’wuh kashek’ in Vulcan — and the way Spock was ready to make use of it, particularly when it got here to getting himself, Captain (later Admiral) Kirk and the nice starship Enterprise out of 1 jam after one other.”
Content Source: www.nytimes.com