Plaintively Perfect

Kari Caldwell is a relatively rare and definitely fortunate musician. It's her "day" job -- and always has been. Although the cellist has taught -- at the University of Tulsa and Oral Roberts University -- and kept a flourishing private studio, "my first career has been as a performer," she says.

This weekend, she'll be the featured cellist when the Symphony of Northwest Arkansas plays Faure's Elegie, described by Caldwell as "plaintive."

Explaining that she has been playing it since she was a youngster in Northport, N.Y., "there is definitely a story in that piece for me," she says.

Caldwell grew up in a musical household. Her father taught middle school band and private clarinet lessons, and her mother studied voice in New York City and performed regularly. She and her sister were known to sing Bach arias in the sandbox, she adds.

Cello, however, was a pragmatic choice.

"In the public schools there, there was a beginning program for about a month in the summer. I had learned piano when I was young, had sung in little church choirs, picked up the clarinet at home. But in the summer after third grade, I could start a stringed instrument, or I had to wait until summer after fourth grade to start a wind instrument. My mother suggested the cello."

Caldwell did play alto saxophone in the jazz ensemble in high school, but improvising was not her style.

"My teacher had to write it out for me," she says with a laugh. "I love listening to other music -- and I have done some music for the contemporary service at church," she adds. But it's classical music that holds her heart. "It's the complexity of classical music. The beauty of it is beyond what you can say in words. I find it to be constantly challenging. It doesn't matter how many times you've heard something or played it, it's still magical."

Caldwell graduated from the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., and won fellowship positions with the Aspen Music Festival and the Tanglewood Music Festival, where she played in a master class for Mstislav Rostropovich, and was winner of the Piatagorsky Prize. She's also played with the Des Moines Opera Festival and the Oklahoma and Long Island Symphonies and is currently the principal cellist with the Tulsa Symphony, the Tulsa Opera and the Sunriver Music Festival in Sunriver, Ore., in addition to being principal cellist for SoNA.

"With the reformation of any orchestra, you kind of start from scratch," she says. "When SoNA reformed, the musicians came from all over the region. I love going to Fayetteville -- it's a great town -- and I enjoy the musicians there. I enjoy working with that orchestra. And it's fun to get away from the day-to-day laundry and phone and routine for a few days."

But that means much of Caldwell's preparation time is spent alone, before bringing her work to the orchestra for three or four rehearsals.

"It's just like running your lines by yourself and doing the things you have to do in theater to be prepared for the real deal," she compares. "Then you come together and make this whole."

Gabriel Faure's Elegie, written by the French composer in 1880, is "really beautiful, kind of a dark, sad piece well suited for the cello," she describes.

"As a performer, my hope is I bring something of joy or pleasure or meaning to somebody who is there to hear it. That is my purpose as a performer," she says. "I always hope I can bring something to that performance [a concertgoer] wouldn't be able to get sitting in their living room listening to a recording of it."

Also on Saturday's program for Masterworks I: "Looking Back, Looking Forward" are Brahms' Variations on a Theme by Haydn and Dvorak's Symphony No. 9, "From the New World."

NAN What's Up on 11/06/2015