BD: What about the different sizes of instruments — you play oboe d’amore and bass oboe...
AK: Yeah, I like to play d’amore and the English horn. I don’t play them in the orchestra a whole lot. Every now and then we need a d’amore, but an extra English horn rarely. I think I’ve only done it once in seven years here. I played once the bass oboe and d’amore a few more times.
BD: As the principal, would you not like to sit yourself second or third chair, just to play that other instrument once in a while?
AK: I would like to, but we are very technically advanced. We have an expert in English horn that has the English horn position. It would feel awkward for me to ask him to move over so I can try the English horn! It’s not something I would consider appropriate.
BD: What about in chamber music — that gives you little more flexibility.
AK: There, I do. I just played a concert where I played oboe d’amore and English horn, and I’ll do it again this summer when I go to the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival late in July. I’ll be playing oboe d’amore and English horn probably on the same night. There’s going to be a beautiful late-Mozart Adagio for oboe, English horn and strings, a Bach Oboe d’amore Concerto, as well as the Bach Double Concerto for Organ and Violin, all on the same night!
BD: So we’re back to being versatile again?
AK: Yeah, I enjoy that, I really do!
BD: Should all young oboe players play oboe d’amore and English horn and bass oboe occasionally?
AK: Technically, yes, it’s nice to learn, but they should follow their hearts. That’s a big problem in education. We don’t really trust our young people to think for themselves.
BD: Why not?
AK: We want to institutionalize things. We get our own agenda, our own curriculum, and impose that on the students because they don’t trust that they can do that on their own. We fear that if you give them too much free time, they’re going to go onto the internet and play games. And I’m sorry to say that! I’m really disappointed.
BD: But if you give them free time, do they not go to the practice room and play?
AK: If their hearts are in the right place, they will. When I was a teenager, when I had free time I went in and practiced. Not all the time; sometimes I wanted to go out with my friends. I have great memories of my teenage years. I went to parties, I went dancing, I went to everything, but I also practiced a lot because I had the free time to do it. I would like to give more time to students to try things on their own. But before we do that, of course, we have to do the basic work of teaching them responsibility, and get them to learn the fun that it is to try new things and explore new avenues.
BD: You teach at Roosevelt University and De Paul University. Are you pleased with what you hear coming out of the horns of the students?
AK: Yeah, I’m very, very happy with my students. I have very good students and they’re very dedicated. It is an interesting process. As much as is necessary, I try to teach them the technical aspects, then I try to concentrate on the art of music. It means digging into people’s emotions and helping them find a channel to bring it out. It’s very easy to play an instrument. You play it in tune and you play the right notes. If you practice and repeat it long enough, anyone off the street can play an instrument. That’s not hard! The hard thing is to turn sound into emotion so that you hear three or four notes and the word “sad” comes to your mind, or the word “happy.”
BD: Is that something you can teach, or must that be in the heart to begin with?
AK: It must be in the heart, but the teacher must teach them how to open the channel, how to create the channel, so that they know exactly how to aim their emotion so that it’s going to come out the end of the instrument. That is the big challenge for me as a teacher. Sometimes I feel happy with the results, sometimes I don’t. It depends on the relationship. Circumstances with privacy are such that I can’t openly discuss with a student, “Okay, this piece is very sad; it talks about death. Let’s talk about sadness and death,” during a lesson! It’s not that easy, because it often brings up terrible emotions in people; they’re going to miss a grandfather who died, or something. I don’t want to get into that, yet I do want to give them the tools to explore the music and find those emotions.
BD: And yet you, as a professional, might have to get up onstage and play something sad the night your grandfather dies.
AK: Yeah. Or, I have to remember my grandfather when I play. Take, for instance, the Bruckner Ninth we’re playing this week. It’s unfinished; he didn’t even put a fourth movement in there. We only have three. At the end of the third movement, there is a passage with the strings — we’re talking about the last minute or two — that is descending chromaticism. I listen to that, and the word death, or fear, comes to my mind. I’m getting this message from Bruckner that he’s catching his breath, he is worried. He’s seeing the end of his life and he transferred that into the page. When we play it, those thoughts come alive again and they touch me! Invariably I’m going to listen to that as well as think about my own mortality.
BD: And then you have to transfer that into your instrument.
AK: Exactly. If we do that well, then we’re good artists. That is the challenge.
BD: That’s what you strive to be — an artist?
AK: Yeah, so that people can get an emotion out of my playing every second that I play. If I don’t do that, then I’m not succeeding.
BD: Do you usually succeed?
AK: I get an emotion; I put an emotion into everything I play. Whether people get it or not is out of my control. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. What’s fun is when I see it and feel it. Take the slow movement of the Strauss Concerto. It’s very lovely and serene; eternal. I remember one particular performance I was thinking of that as being a long trip through a beautiful land. At the end of the concert, a member of the audience whom I did not know, came to me and said, “You know what, Mr. Klein? When you played the slow movement, I thought of this long travel through this eternal place,” which was almost verbatim to what I was thinking!
