Violist Peter Liepman has been a member of this orchestra from the beginning, when Thomas Rarick—taking the model of Sir Adrian Boult’s London Promenade concerts—created the Berkeley Promenade in 1969. He is one of a handful of current members who played in the legendary 1972 concert at the Newman Center when the power went out. “It was our first Strauss waltz night,” remembers Peter. “Mozart’s
Eine kleine Nachtmusik was on the program, and just before we were to play it, the lights went out. But we were in a church, so there were candles, and members who weren’t playing the Mozart held the candles. It created a magical atmosphere, and when the lights came back on the audience groaned. But in the second half, people started dancing to the waltzes, which is what Tom had wanted all along. The candlelit performance loosened people up to actually dance.”
Peter was born in Akron, Ohio, but grew up in Ann Arbor, where his father was a professor of aeronautical engineering, then moved to Southern California when his father took a job in the space technology industry. On his father’s side of the family, his uncle was a violinist and chairman of the music department at MIT, and both of his mother’s parents were violinists as well, so Peter would get violin lessons whenever he visited his grandparents in Boston. He began studying seriously when the family moved to California, and it was then that he switched from violin to viola. The next time he visited his uncle, he gave Peter his grandfather’s viola and told him to “keep it in the family, and use it as long as you continue to play.” He also has two violins from his maternal grandparents that he uses for playing American fiddle music.
Peter is one of the talented amateurs who play beside the professionals who make up most of the Berkeley Symphony, but music has always been at the core of his professional life. He began working in the record business at Discount Records in 1973, and after a short stint at the Sunset Bookstore in San Francisco, became manager of the Musical Offering, just across Bancroft from Zellerbach. In 1986 he moved on from the record store business to become a sales rep for Telarc. He was subsequently named northwest regional manager for Angel, EMI and Virgin Classics (which was then Maestro Nagano’s label) and is currently northwest sales rep for Harmonia Mundi.
All the while he has played in the Berkeley Symphony, and for most of the eighties he was also the orchestra’s music librarian. Peter has touched the orchestra in countless ways. When Olivier Messiaen and Yvonne Loriod came to the Bay Area for the Symphony’s performance of Des Canyons aux Etoiles, Peter chauffeured them around the area. He was one of the original members of the Board/Orchestra Liaison Committee and was instrumental in bringing John Danielsen onto the Symphony board. (The two of them knew each other from the Musical Offering and ended up sitting in adjoining booths at Saul’s Delicatessen one night. Peter knew that John was a fan of the orchestra and asked him if he’d ever considered joining the board. A few months later, John was president of the board.)
It’s been a win-win experience, says Peter. “The challenge of learning new music makes the experience of playing in the Berkeley Symphony much more alive than playing standard repertoire all the time. I was a big fan of Frank Zappa and loved being librarian for our big Zappa concert. I understand music better for playing these works that you couldn’t play anywhere else. And it’s helped me know how to sell contemporary classical recordings to my accounts.” —Richard Reynolds
—Richard Reynolds, December 2001
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