It’s an inevitable, unenviable moment in middle age, and Montpelier’s Michael Arnowitt found himself last summer looking ahead to that how-did-I-get-here landmark life event.
“I noticed I was about to turn 50. It’s hard to ignore that,” he says with a robust laugh, adding the prospect wasn’t all that appealing. “Initially, my first inclination was to mope around the house.”
Eventually, he decided on the opposite of moping. If he was going to turn 50, why not celebrate in style? For Arnowitt, an accomplished classical concert pianist and jazz performer profiled in the documentary film, “Beyond 88 keys,” going out with a few friends for dinner didn’t quite fit the ticket. No, Arnowitt found himself thinking a little more creatively, and a lot more ambitiously.
So that’s how, at 2 p.m. on Sunday Jan. 6, at Smilie Auditorium at Montpelier High School, he’ll mark the 50-year milestone with far more than a few friends, celebrating with a 55-musician professional orchestra and a few well-known Vermont soloists, ensconced in front of a Steinway grand performing for (he hopes), a packed house that fills the auditorium’s 570 seats.
Pulling together a one-time orchestra and program is a ridiculous aspiration for one person, legitimately viewed somewhere between daunting and lunacy. But Vermont’s vibrant cultural life has long been sustained and enriched by a general mindset wonderfully resistant to skepticism and open to difficult endeavors – or crazy ideas. Long before his large expressive hands play the first slow, elegant notes of Brahms Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat major, Arnowitt’s 50th birthday gala will already be memorable just for the months of planning he put in to pull the event together.
With his distinctive bottle brush black mustache and curly mop of black hair, Arnowitt is a familiar sight walking through the state capital. Soft-spoken and deliberate in speech, slightly hunched, it’s easy to see in him the archetypal image of a meek piano geek – until he sits down at a piano and commands attention, a transformation many Vermonters have been lucky to witness over the years.
His skills extend beyond the piano to offering witty, well-informed discursions on pieces he plays, such as his performance last winter at Farmers Night in the well of the State House, where he played and talked about the music of George Gershwin’s era.
While he has toured abroad playing both classical and jazz music, recorded CDs and organized other big events, undertaking his 50th birthday gala tops the proverbial cake.
Since June, Arnowitt has been playing a musical rendition of chief cook and bottle washer, which is to say he’s at once impressario, organizer and fundraiser for the performance. He has personally hired the conductor, the orchestra musicians and soloists, and he conceived the music for the program. That includes composing a classical piece, “Haiku Textures,” for three cello soloists and orchestra, and “reverse engineering” Bach’s Italian Concerto from solo keyboard to an arrangement for piano and orchestra.
As if that wasn’t enough, there’s the small matter of practicing the majestic piano concerto – Brahms is his favorite classical composer – a piece he’s never performed before.
“I’m still learning it,” he says, at once both serious and displaying some humor at the task remaining. “It’s something I’ve always wanted to do before I die.”
Sitting at the piano bench in the studio attached to his Montpelier house, Arnowitt admits to recently wondering if he’s “bitten off more than he can chew.”
“I’ve considered that phrase a lot in the last two weeks,” he says, smiling. His 14-hour days are crammed with practicing, finishing his musical arrangements, getting music to the orchestra, and finishing fundraising the $19,000 he needs to pull the concert off (for details and contributions, see www.mapiano.com and clink on the gala link.)
The scale of his undertaking, from email to organizing and playing music, is heightened by one other critical aspect: He is functionally blind, his eyesight gradually deteriorating because of a disease called retinitis pigmentosa.
“Sometimes I can see and sometimes I can’t,” he says, which means at best, his vision is fuzzy. That makes every task far more time-consuming and laborious. “It certainly slows me down a lot,” says Arnowitt. “I have good eye days and bad eye days.”
There is considerable irony in his plight, since he has always been a deft sight reader of music. Now, his vision forces him to laboriously learn pieces like the Brahms one phrase, one page at a time, stringing the notes together in his brain into roughly 50 minutes of immense memorization, using a device that enlarges and enhances the musical score so he can read the notes without hurting his eyes.
Then there is the matter of playing the music, an act that reflects a profound intimacy with the piano keyboard and a connection so strong that his hands can dance confidently over the keyboard’s four-foot span to all the right notes.
There is nothing diminished, by contrast, with Arnowitt’s vision for his musical life, which has grown since he moved to Vermont in 1983, seeking an antidote to the intense echo chamber of the classical music world of New York City.
“I just wasn’t personally well suited for the kind of aggressive nature of people there and frankly, even the way people played music. It was edgy and aggressive and fast,” he says. The musicians were quick “to judge your every move,” and the performances had a “cookie cutter approach” that was more about the performer than the audience.
Raised in Lexington, Mass., where his piano talents were noted at the age of five, Arnowitt went to Yale but dropped out and studied at various conservatories, eventually earning a degree in ecology from Goddard College in Plainfield. The state capital proved an unlikely perfect place to anchor his musical career.
“When I first moved to Vermont in 1983, I didn’t really think it would be particularly possible to be a performer here,” he says.
He discovered otherwise. “Forming my own identity as a musician was easier up here,” he observes, allowing him to follow his own “internal voices on how you should play music.”
Like a flower that blossoms when it is moved into sunlight, Arnowitt’s musical life has thrived and branched out in many directions. His foray as a jazz pianist, whose roots go back to a childhood listening to jazz in pubs with his parents, has taken him abroad, led to recordings, gigs in famous jazz clubs and with a variety of Vermont greats. And then there’s his talent for composing. Included in his 50th gala is a piece he wrote called “Bohemian Hoedown,” which will feature Vermont violinist David Gusakov, a veteran of bluegrass groups from Pine Island to Banjo Dan & the Midnight Plowboys.
Arnowitt admits he’s nervous about the bash now but swears on performance day he never gets nerves. Anyway, the gala 50th is not an ego trip to be nervous over, he explains, but rather a chance to showcase the talents of his many musical friends. It will be an opportunity to make beautiful music with them in the small city he’s lived in for nearly 30 years.
“I was a little worried people might think of it that way (an ego trip), and was pleasantly surprised. The musicians seem really psyched to do it, saying it’s a great way to celebrate and ‘what a great idea’.”
Andrew Nemethy of Calais is a freelance writer, reporter and editor.
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