Jorja Fleezanis

Violinist and pedagogue Jorja Fleezanis died last weekend at only 70. She was associate concertmaster of the San Francisco Symphony, then went on to be concertmaster of the Minnesota Orchestra for some 20 years. John Adams wrote his first violin concerto for her. She retired in 2009 after the death of her husband, the musicologist and program annotator Michael Steinberg, and began teaching at Indiana University.

David Allen's NY Times obituary has this choice bit in it:

Ms. Fleezanis at first looked likely to break barriers at the San Francisco Symphony, which she joined as a second violinist in 1980, becoming its associate concertmaster in 1981. Sharing the first stand with Raymond Kobler, she played so “splendidly,” the critic Robert Commanday wrote in The San Francisco Examiner in 1988, that she struck observers “as the stronger of the two, and often the real leader of the section.”

In a decision that Mr. Commanday described as “not very defensible,” the San Francisco Symphony’s music director, Herbert Blomstedt, stuck with his man, even after it became clear that the cost would be Ms. Fleezanis’s departure. She accepted the overtures of Mr. Blomstedt’s predecessor, Edo de Waart, who was eager to bring her to his new ensemble, the Minnesota Orchestra.

Right you were, Bob. (It took MTT a few years to dislodge Kobler and then a couple more to hire Alexander Barantschik, who remains the concertmaster of SFS.)

I heard Fleezanis in her associate concertmaster role in the 1980s, but I had virtually no awareness of who the individuals in the orchestra were or how important the upper seats of the violin section are. I heard her in chamber music once, a great performance of the Brahms piano quintet at Music@Menlo in 2005 in which she was the first violinist. The other players were Ian Swenson (2nd violin), Cynthia Phelps (viola), Ralph Kirschbaum (cello), and Wu Han (piano).

• Remembering Jorja Fleezanis (Minnesota Orchestra)
• David Allen, NY Times
• Janos Gereben, SFCV