Getting to Carnegie

BSC president’s wife to play violin in famous concert hall

Sunday, October 10, 2004
MICHAEL HUEBNER
News staff writer
The Birmingham News

An odor of fresh paint lingered last week in the president’s home on the Birmingham-Southern College campus. Most of the furniture in the downstairs rooms of the neocolonial brick structure had been removed as the home underwent a makeover for its new residents. But a few items were conspicuously present.

Dominating the light-strewn east room was a Yamaha grand piano. Next to it sat a violin and a Norwegian folk instrument called a hardingfele. Nearby was a stack of sheet music.

For violinist Karen Bentley Pollick, wife of BSC’s newly installed president, G. David Pollick, all were essential for preparing her recital next Sunday in Hill Recital Hall. Not to mention three concerts in San Francisco and one at Carnegie Hall by mid-November. As with most soloists, daily practice is a necessary routine, even for a college president’s wife.

So how much time does she spend at it?

“Never enough,” explained the attractive, statuesque violinist. “It’s a matter of balancing other things. I used to practice eight hours a day. That’s still possible, but it’s not viable. I’m lucky to get in two or three hours.”

That doesn’t include actual rehearsal time for upcoming concerts.

“Rehearsal is another issue,” she said. “I typically don’t count that as practice.”

Raised in Palo Alto, Calif., Pollick started playing piano at age 5 and took up the violin at 9. She followed the fast career track of a concert violinist, studying with such revered masters as Joseph Gingold, Nathan Milstein and Glenn Dicterow. She earned a master’s degree from Indiana University in 1987. Orchestral positions with the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie, New York Philharmonic, Seattle Symphony and New York Philharmonic followed, along with a number of smaller Bay Area orchestras, the Bolshoi Ballet orchestra and Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project.

But somewhere along the way, Pollick’s tastes turned eclectic. Sprinkled in her resume are names like Barbra Streisand, the Dave Matthews Band, Paul Dresher’s Electro-Acoustic Band and her own ensemble, the New Horizons Quartet. Her intense interest in modern music has led to involvement in numerous festivals, commissions and premieres of new music. Her new album, “Dancing Suite to Suite,” was recently nominated for a 2004 “Just Plain Folks” award.

During her short residency in Birmingham, she has managed to network with local new music mavens Craig Hultgren, Dorothy Hindman, Charles Norman Mason and several others.

And six years ago, she took up a specialty few other violinists have – playing the hardingfele.

“It comes from attending Indiana University,” she said of her wide-ranging activities. “I already had certain listening preferences, but IU really got me started. In my sophomore year I took jazz improvisation classes, then I started composing.”

The new BSC president has an equally diverse background. In addition to being a college administrator, David Pollick has been a philosophy professor, taught emotionally handicapped children, served in a submarine fleet during the Vietnam War, driven a cab and worked as a waiter.

“We’re a match made in someone’s strange forge,” David Pollick said. “We intersect, overlap and diverge all over the place. That makes for a lovely partnership in marriage.”

The couple met four years ago when Karen was performing at Lebanon Valley College in Annville, Pa., where David was the college president. They married two years later in Greece.

“It’s frightful being married to someone who’s more talented than you are,” said David, whose musical interests range from playing in rock bands to singing to Karen’s piano accompaniment. “The nature of my work tends to put me in the front row for so many situations, so you seldom get a chance to enjoy somebody else’s work. Being Karen’s fan is an awful lot of fun. I’m very proud of her.”

Musical ancestry:

Two years before the couple first got acquainted, Karen was delving into the music of her ancestral roots. She first encountered a hardingfele as a youngster in California, where she lived near a large community of Norwegians.

“I’m a quarter Norwegian on my mother’s side, and we had neighbors whose father made a hardingfele,” Pollick recalled. “But this all started in 1998, about three years before I bought the instrument.”

Her hardingfele, which she describes as having a mellow, almost viola-like tone, is made from thickly lacquered wood with mother-of-pearl inlay, a scrolled animal head and nine strings. It was made in 2000 by Oslo instrument maker Erling Aaning. The four bowed strings can be tuned in a variety of ways, and the remaining sympathetic, or vibrating, strings are tuned to reflect the notes of each piece of music.

She will play one hardingfele piece on her recital.

“That’s so I don’t have to retune it,” Pollick said. “I just spent 45 minutes retuning the strings.”

The hardingfele comes from a region in western Norway near a fjord called Hardanger, where it was invented in the mid-17th century. Karen visited the region in 1998 and recorded several tunes on a digital tape recorder.

“It’s one of the few folk instruments that remain,” Karen said. “Most hardingfele players in Norway do not read music, but they have students transcribe the music. If you really want to learn the music, they show you how to tune it.”

The piece she’ll perform was inspired by a Norwegian legend called “Fanitullen.” In the original poem, the devil sits on a beer barrel playing on his fiddle. The music is based on a melody by Odd Bakkerud.

Pollick’s versatility will be put to the test in the rest of the program as well. Beethoven’s “Kreutzer” sonata for violin and piano opens the concert, followed by “Salsa for Karen,” a work composed for her by Danish-Swedish composer Ole Saxe. She’ll also present two 20th-century masters with Schoenberg’s “Phantasy,” op. 47, and Charles Ives’ Violin Sonata No. 2. BSC faculty pianist Adam Bowles accompanies on piano.