Even though I continue to attend the occasional Philadelphia Orchestra concert (most recently on April 11 to hear Mahler 7 and, coming up, Sibelius 5), for me the glory days of my attendance were from the mid-‘80s to the mid-‘90s, when I was there nearly every week, often standing in line for a couple of hours on a Friday or Saturday evening, with a cup of coffee and a friend or a book, in order to score a $2.00 seat in the amphitheater at the old Academy of Music. (The price was later raised to $2.50.) Norman Carol, therefore, will always be the Philadelphia Orchestra concertmaster closest to my heart.
Carol joined the orchestra, at the invitation of Eugene Ormandy, in 1966. He served as concertmaster (succeeding Anshel Brusilow) under Ormandy, Riccardo Muti, and Wolfgang Sawallisch. His retirement in 1994, I remember, came ahead of his scheduled performance as soloist in Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto, the piece with which he had made his Philadelphia solo debut decades earlier. As I recall, he had been playing through excruciating shoulder pain and he just couldn’t do it anymore.
In the years of my attendance, I was fortunate to hear Carol step up from his position as leader of the orchestra to solo in many concertos. One of the most memorable, for me, was that of Benjamin Britten, which, at the time, I had never heard before.
Prior to his position in Philadelphia, Carol had played in the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Serge Koussevitzky (who extended the invitation to join when Carol was 17) and Charles Munch. He was concertmaster with the orchestra, when, under Leonard Bernstein, it gave the U.S. premiere of Britten’s “Peter Grimes” at Tanglewood in 1946.
Following service in the Korean War (André Previn relates playing with Carol and Chet Baker at the Presidio in his book “No Minor Chords”), he became concertmaster of the New Orleans Symphony and then the Minneapolis Symphony, under Antal Doráti and Stanislaw Skrowaczewski. Decades later, Carol would give the premiere of Skrowaczewski’s Violin Concerto in Philadelphia, as Skrowaczewski guest conducted.
As a student at the Curtis Institute, Carol was groomed for a solo career. He went on to record an early recital for RCA. Later, of course, he played solo violin passages on all the Philadelphia Orchestra recordings from the time he joined the group, including Ormandy’s later recordings of “Ein Heldenleben” and “Scheherazade.”
After his retirement, he continued to perform and record with the Philadelphia Piano Quartet. He also taught orchestral repertoire at Curtis. (He was on the Curtis faculty for some 40 years.) His violin, a 1743 Guarneri “del Gesù,” formerly belonged to Albert Spalding. Spalding gave the first public performances of Barber’s Violin Concerto in Philadelphia in 1941.
Carol was old school, tuning the orchestra in evening dress, his wavy hair impeccably Brylled, seemingly unflappable in his reserve. But when he played, he played like the principal of one of the greatest orchestras in the land. I knew him neither as a man nor behind the scenes, but only from my vantage in the appreciative audience. He embodied the traditions of a fabled era. His like will not come again.
Carol, who was born in Philadelphia, died on Sunday at the age of 95. R.I.P.
Carol plays the Nielsen Violin Concerto
Big band Telemann
1958 recorded recital with Julius Levine
Vaughan Williams’ “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis,” featuring solos by Carol, violist Joseph De Pasquale, and cellist Samuel Mayes
Two-part interview with Ovation Press:
Part 1
Part 2
