Mr. Howard's Opus

SPCO principal cellist retiring from day job, but continuing with first love

By MATT PEIKEN
St. Paul Pioneer Press; March 25, 2004©

Peter Howard seems to recall every student who ever took private cello lessons from him over the past half-century, down to their hobbies, families, class rankings and SAT scores.

There's the high-school soccer captain who studied medicine at Valparaiso, the kid who became a pilot for Northwest Airlines and the daughter of a Nigerian chief. There are competition winners and the rare few who, like Howard, grew into professional cellists.

Howard attends their hockey and football games and graduations and stays connected long after they put down the cello, in some cases for decades. Then, there's the student who married him, 35 years ago last week.

"When I take a student on, I'm interested in the whole person," he says. "I try to tell every one of them, 'When you get on that elevator marked aspirations and dreams, push the button for the top floor.' "

Teaching is so central to Howard's spirit as a cellist that his career with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra is a relative sidelight, despite a span of 29 seasons.

Howard's impact on one student is so profound the student's wife arranged to commission composer Paul Schoenfield to create new music for Howard. That piece, debuted two years ago by Howard and Schoenfield as a duet for cello and piano, has grown into a three-movement concerto. Howard sits in the soloist's chair when the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra premieres the concerto Friday and Saturday at the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts.

The orchestra sees this as a celebratory sendoff for Howard, who is making this his final season with the SPCO. But with a plan to take on more students, Howard sees it as anything but retirement.

"I'm perhaps much more experienced and wiser than I was before, but I'm not the sprinter I used to be," he says. "I want to retire when I want to retire, not when they -- the public, my colleagues, the management -- tell me to retire. I want to go out playing my best."

CLOSER TO PERFECT

The St. Paul Chamber Orchestra is wrapping up rehearsal on a late weekday morning, but as others pack up their instruments and trickle off the stage, Howard stays behind, cello between his knees. He plays a snippet of music, dark and angular, and stops with a chuckle.

"Damn, it's hard," he says.

This is Schoenfield's concerto, with which Howard has toiled for nine months -- not enough time, the cellist says, to brand into his skin.

"The real goal of the performing musician isn't to be perfect but to be expressive," he says. "But I'd like to be a little closer to perfect than this."

Howard looks like the prototypical grandfather -- salted hair, glasses, an unbuttoned green sweater with leather patches sewn into the elbows, olive pants held up by suspenders slung over a khaki shirt and a gait that's slightly hunched. He speaks with the clear, graveled baritone of a broadcaster and isn't shy about sprinkling expletives into his conversation.

"I taught some ----ing losers," he says at one point, referring to the nearly two decades he spent on the music faculties of Oberlin College and Bowling Green State University. "I liked 'em, every one of 'em, but sometimes it was like pushing a boulder uphill."

Howard left university life for the freedom to select his own students, and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra presented the first opportunity to land a principal's chair with a full-time orchestra.

The day of his first rehearsal in St. Paul, Howard noticed the SPCO slogan, "Minnesota's other great orchestra," and wanted to erase what he saw as an inferiority complex. It led, he says, to a new slogan: "America's chamber orchestra." Howard also recalls, in the wake of the orchestra's flirtation with bankruptcy, playing a role in conversations resulting in building the Ordway as the orchestra's official home.

He spends most weeknights practicing and, to squeeze in more time on his own, often is first to arrive at the Ordway on concert night. But in any conversation about his career, gravity drops Howard back into teaching, and he speaks of his students with the same pride he expresses in his five grown children.

"So many bright, successful people, and music has been such an important part of that," he says. "Most of my students will never play professionally -- I know that and they know that -- but they put it to good use."

A STUDENT'S GIFT

In Howard's Highland Park living room, pieces of carpet are worn through the pad from the stabs of cello pegs, a dehumidifier and a couple of electronic metronomes sit on the floor, and yellowed and frayed sheet music rests on the couch and a dining chair.

One piece of music has held Howard's attention for the better part of a year -- Schoenberg's concerto. It's the gift of Paul Redleaf, who has studied the cello with Howard for a decade, and Redleaf's wife, Rhoda, who conceived the idea of commissioning the piece to honor her husband's 70th birthday.

Redleaf is a retired doctor and option trader, onetime board member and longtime subscriber with the orchestra. He had dabbled with the cello under other private instructors and didn't expect Howard "to be any more willing to take me on." But he and Howard developed a friendship alongside their student-teacher relationship, and Redleaf soon found himself practicing the exercises, etudes and scales that had so bored him before.

"I've never had a teacher who put up with me like he has," says Redleaf, who still goes to Howard's house for weekly lessons, as their schedules permit.

"We're contemporaries -- he's interested in my thoughts on various issues, like politics -- and he doesn't set a clock," he says. "The lessons are almost always over an hour, and we'll probably talk for 15 minutes before we ever get to playing."

"Nocturne for Cello," the piece Howard and Schoenberg performed at Redleaf's 70th birthday party, has become a cello concerto that Howard regards as a highlight of his performance career.

"I've been very lucky, getting breaks, lots of people encouraging me, not my family necessarily -- they didn't want me in music," he says. "My students have taught me as much as I've taught them, and that's still the case. I'll keep doing this as long as we are both learning."