It is 9:30 on a Friday evening at the Lyric Opera, about three-quarters of the way through Wagner’s five-hour “Parsifal,” and four women in the orchestra are intently focused on their fingerwork.
Violist Terri van Valkinburgh, flute player Jean Berkenstock, clarinetist Charlene Zimmerman and cellist Barbara Haffner are not making music, however. They are making a quilt.
It is the second 30-minute intermission during “Parsifal,” sometimes called “the Everest of opera,” and in the Lyric Opera Orchestra ladies’ locker room, players are chatting, snacking and stitching, taking turns at a frame stretched with fabric. The object of their attention is a vibrant, star-patterned baby quilt the musicians are creating for violinist Ann Palen, a 12-year orchestra veteran who is on maternity leave with the arrival of her first child imminent.
A quilting bee in the orchestra locker room? Shouldn’t these world-class musicians be meditating to Mozart or thumbing through Opera News?
In fact, the old-fashioned communal handiwork has been warmly embraced by the 31 women in the 75-member orchestra. Twenty-two of them have painstakingly pieced together 24 individual squares and nearly everyone else has sidled up to the frame to do a little needlework.
“You are in close quarters [in the pit],” says Zimmerman, “and your relationships with other people are very important. I think the women have found activities like this to keep fostering those relationships.”
Spartan yet homey
The Lyric’s locker room turned sewing center is spartanly furnished, but it feels surprisingly homey. One half-hour before the 6 p.m. “Parsifal” curtain, the players are changing into their “uniforms” — elegant black dresses, skirts and pants. And here, in the center of the room, are two tables covered with an array of homemade goodies, including violinist Laura Miller Boen’s blueberry cheesecake and violinist Pauli Ewing’s sugar-dusted brownies. Stacked among the sweets are pieces of fabric (in protective plastic bag) and pink-handled sewing shears.
The baby quilt was van Valkinburgh’s brainchild. “It was sort of a surprise to find out Ann was expecting and it seemed like a great idea to get everybody to make a square,” says the 37-year-old musician, who lives in Evanston.
She took her idea to fellow viola player Melissa Trier Kirk, an experienced quilter. The two, along with Zimmerman, spearheaded the project. “It’s a match made in heaven,” says Kirk, noting that both orchestral players and quilters have to be “very precise or it’s not going to work.”
The ladies of the Lyric Orchestra have worked on the quilt during intermissions and breaks between rehearsals. Their progress can be directly tied to the opera schedule, says Kirk, 47, who has two children, 5 and 7, and is married to Lyric contrabassoon player, Lewis Kirk. In late October, with both “Otello” and “Street Scene” running, she and van Valkinburgh bought fabric, and, with Zimmerman, cut it into precisely measured diamonds and squares they distributed to orchestra members.
During “I Capuleti e i Montecchi,” “Billy Budd,” and “Hansel and Gretel,” players pieced together the intricate star-patterned squares. While “La Boheme” was running, they began stitching squares and borders together. “We had two intermissions for `Boheme,'” says Kirk. “That’s a good quilting opera.”
The most productive period occurred when work on “Parsifal” began.
“We would do these Wagner rehearsals,” says van Valkinburgh, “where you rehearse three hours, get a two-hour break, then have another three-hour rehearsal. During the break, you would have a roomful of people working on this, sitting around telling bad jokes. It was just so relaxing.”
By “Parsifal” performance time, the musicians were starting to quilt: that is, to stitch together top, batting and backing. The plan is to place the last stitch by March 16, date of the final performance of the season’s closer, “The Magic Flute.”
Like meditation
By the end of the season, the musicians will have sat through dozens of rehearsals and played for a total of 84 performances. After long periods in the pit playing formidable music (the first act alone of “Parsifal” stretches to one hour, 40 minutes), working on the quilt “is like meditation, like re-gathering your brain,” says Zimmerman. (The men of the Lyric Orchestra, report their feminine counterparts, re-gather their brains playing poker, juggling and staging occasional post-performance malt whiskey tastings.)
Says harpist Cifani, who has missed only one performance in her 34 years with the orchestra, making the quilt has been “an expression of great affection from all of us. We’ve been in the trenches together for many years.”
Adds the musician, who always solos as the only harp player in the pit, “One of the reasons I like doing it is that, unlike music, if you make a mistake you can tear it up and do it over.”
