RUDOLPH VRBSKY

Rudy

My second oboe teacher ever is dead. He was an important one. He was only 72 and had been dealing with Parkinson’s disease for quite awhile. He died six days ago, but I didn’t know until yesterday.

I met Rudy Vrbsky when I was in ninth grade. A nice boy and I both studied with the nice lady local oboe teacher, and I had been with her since seventh grade. The nice boy was quite good (much better than I was) and on track to becoming a professional, and so he moved from the nice lady local teacher to study with Rudy. He was very fancy and went to Interlochen in the summers and spoke very highly of Rudy. It took me a couple months to work up the courage to call Rudy on the phone. I left a message on his answering machine which was probably super awkward. I wanted to play as well as the nice boy, so I went 45 minutes south to Washington, D.C., and played an audition for Rudy. I played him the Mozart Oboe Concerto.

And when I say that I played him the Mozart Oboe Concerto, I mean like all kids do. They say that, but they actually mean the first movement only (or even less.) I played the first movement for Rudy, thinking I was done, and he sat there silently. “Go on,” he said. And I did, even though I wasn’t really prepared to. And then the same thing happened for the third movement. It was the first time I had ever played the piece through, in this audition for Rudy, because I was a total moron.

It was probably pretty bad, but he told me he’d teach me at the end. The most terrifying thing I did was to then tell the nice lady local teacher I wasn’t going to study with her anymore. My mother made me do that even though I wanted her to do it.

I learned a lot from Rudy. In fact, I learned more studying with the combination of him during the school year and Joe Turner in Baltimore during the summers (Rudy would be in Marlboro, VT, all summer every summer) in three years of being 14, 15, and 16 than I did from any other oboe teacher or institution.

My first two and a half lessons were on these 8 bars of the last movement of the Mozart Concerto:

I guess I had not played them well in my audition. But I learned pretty much everything I would need to know ever about technical practice from those 2.5 hours on those 8 bars. Rudy held me to a high technical standard and sloppy playing didn’t fly for him.

Then, we started with the Händel Sonatas. He was very picky and particular about the style and the varied length of notes. He was very particular about the inflections and which notes were important and which were not. We did all the standard repertoire. We even did a little bit of weird shit. We did all the Ferling Etudes and all the Barret etudes and a lot of Bach arias. We did some Bozza and some Gillet etudes. He was concerned with music-making, technique, timing, and being relaxed. He was not concerned with reeds. He would occasionally fix my reeds and often make them very much better when he did.

In what was rather horrifying to me at first, but a teaching technique I now frequently employ, he made me play everything I had prepared down cold at the front of every lesson. Just like my surprise first-ever complete rendition of the Mozart Concerto in my audition. Sometimes this would be 20 or 25 minutes of music. But I couldn’t play for 25 minutes without stopping (this is hard on the oboe) at first. I would try to ask for help with reeds or ask questions to break things up, but quickly learned that would not fly, either. He would only fix my reeds at the end if there was time.

He was in many ways the perfect teacher for me and in retrospect, there could have been no one else who would have done it better. He kept me away from all the oboe-nerd neurotic thinking which is so easy to fall victim to as a young person by making me play a little recital at the beginning of every lesson. I don’t think many people do that. He didn’t care about gouging machines, cane, or shaper tips, and he didn’t talk about them. He made me play on whatever garbage reed I brought, and there’s kind of no way to learn to make reeds better than having to play a bunch of hard stuff in a recital for someone you want to sound good for. He was focused on music and playing the instrument in service of that. He was tough but not mean. And maybe it goes without saying, but maybe it doesn’t in this day and age knowing what we know about the past, but I took lessons by myself in his tiny one bedroom apartment. I played for him by the window of his bedroom and he sat in the bed, drinking coffee. Sometimes he lay down on the bed. He listened to me, sometimes suffering for many more minutes than I was qualified to play, and then taught in a very intelligent way. That was it, nothing said or done inappropriately. The meanest thing he ever said to me was that I’d make a crappy snare drummer, and that was with regard to a passage which he felt I needed to have the rhythm drive rather than everything else, and he thought my rhythm there was crap—and I’m sure he was right. He let me decide what to play the next week and sent me on my way every week. I didn’t realize how lucky I had it until later. He set me up very well, with a foundation I could always rely on even when shit got crazy sometimes later, and he did it without any baggage. He also trashed no one; he was an oboe player who never said a bad word about anybody else.

He moved out of a little house and into a small apartment kind of high up somewhere in DC. I remember lessons there at 10am on Sundays, and driving all the way into DC. (Who lets their kid drive alone into DC? My parents.) Sometimes I would wake him ringing the bell. He’d say “wait a minute” through the buzzer and it would be like 5 and he’d look pretty disheveled, but always be totally on for the lesson.

There was a certain smell of cigarettes, coffee, dirty dishes, and old books in that apartment. He lived there by himself (his family was in Vermont) and his place was pretty messy. He always had books everywhere, huge tomes of Russian novels, and music. Tons of weird music by composers I had never heard of; scores and sheet music scattered everywhere. I thought he was so cool. Occasionally he would play for me and I always thought it was so beautiful.

He talked in a way which was very relaxed and nonchalant. I’ve never met another oboe player like that. We tend to be much higher strung. I had the general impression that he thought I sucked at the oboe, but he often taught me for more than the designated hour, very patiently until I was playing whatever it was to his standard.

Rudy called me one night in March, 1995, after everyone in my house was asleep to tell me I got into Curtis. Dick Woodhams had called to tell him, to congratulate him, I guess, but Dick told him not to tell me. Rudy told me anyway and told me to keep it a secret. My 16-year-old self appreciated him.

I spent three summers with Rudy at the Marlboro Festival and did a few tours with him too. It was an honor to play second oboe next to him. The playing was always honest, intelligent, and artful. He lent me his B-series English horn for a bunch of months so I could take my first job in the Savannah Symphony. I felt guilty, but he said, “Why not? I’m not playing it!” Once, when I was really broke when I was a student at Juilliard for 2.5 months, he got me a great gig playing with him in the National Symphony, which was both exceedingly helpful financially (I had never made that kind of money playing the oboe before) and morale-boosting. He came and visited me a few times in Baltimore after I got employed, but I really now regret falling out of touch with him. We had very pleasant phone conversations every few years is all. He talked a lot about cars and his family.

When I returned once later to Marlboro in 2013, it was the one time I was asked to return as a “senior.” (I think I only got asked because it was an emergency.) Rudy wasn’t playing anymore, I don’t think, but had played there every summer for maybe 45 years or something. He had retired young from the NSO due to Parkinson’s. He also wasn’t feeling welcome at Marlboro, except by a few people, due to some family stuff I think he felt he screwed up but I don’t really know the details of. I didn’t know he was in the audience, but he came to hear me play and greeted me afterward—a complete and total surprise. He was hiding in a corner outside. He gave me a hug and I was all excited to see him. He told me to keep quiet because he didn’t want many people seeing him because he was “persona non grata” now. He had just come to hear me. He snuck off and that was that. It may have been the last time I saw him. I think it was, actually.

I wish I had a photo with him to share here, but I don’t. My time with him was before the era of cellphones. Cheers, Rudy. The world is less good without you. I might drink some vodka in your honor even though I hate it.