In Michigan: The Music Fades

By B. Russell Leavitt

When Misha Rachlevsky was ten years old, he and his violin were escorted by dark-suited security agents into an ornate Moscow hall where he was told to play a solo in a concert.

It was his first real performance. To this day, Rachlevsky has no idea of who was in the audience. "Unfortunately, I don't know whom it was for," says Rachlevsky, now 41. "My father was in the back where the security guards were. He could see me, but he was prevented from seeing who the people were down there."

That concert was several continents back. Since then, Rachlevsky has lived in Israel, Canada and the U.S., but in some ways the violinist, now bearded and barrel-chested, is still squinting into the audience to discern the identity of his benefactors. Lately, it seems, they are as elusive as his long-ago Moscow audience.

On Saturday, April 9, Rachlevsky led the New American Chamber Orchestra as it played its final concert. Rachlevsky had established his beloved chamber group as a part-time orchestra in 1978 after stints with the Moscow and Israel chamber orchestras. For Misha Rachlevsky the violinist (even while he was a violinist for the Detroit Symphony), creating his own chamber orchestra was a chance to become Misha Rachlevsky the impresario.

It is a role to which he adapted almost instantly. "As you can see," he says as he pores over one of his orchestra's advertisements, "I have become quite the capitalist."

The orchestra became Rachlevsky's consuming passion. He gave up his job at the Detroit Symphony in 1984 to create a full-time chamber-music society. And he spent 20-hour days dunning corporate chiefs for money, cooking borsch for winter concertgoers, and arranging for a towing service to be on call for orchestra patrons whose cars failed to start on concert evenings.

"Rachlevsky has put his heart and soul and lifeblood in this to make it go," says Madeleine Phillips of Grosse Pointe Farms, who has attended the concerts for seven years. "He's the artistic director, the manager of the outfit, the principal violinist. He did it all -- legwork to advertising. He almost cloned himself."

"Misha would work right alongside us," recalls Carole Fuller, a procurement clerk-typist for the Army who late in life discovered a passion for chamber music and became a volunteer for the orchestra. "We'd work until 2 or 3 or 4 in the morning sending out tickets. Sometimes Misha got so tired he'd fall asleep with his head on a desk."

But it was not enough. In a city where the symphony is struggling to keep its head above water, the odds against a smaller group were evidently just too long. Although the ensemble plays more than 100 concerts a year and tours Europe annually, it needs help to meet the annual tab of about $500,000 for keeping its eleven musicians playing.

"We have never had an angel," Rachlevsky says, sitting in an office above Orchestra Hall and looking for all the world like a miniaturized Pavarotti. "The responsibility was always on my shoulders."

"In Detroit," he adds, "all the corporate money is basically controlled by a small group of people. I do have a certain bitterness that we were not supported in Detroit with enough money to allow us to become part of the community."

Yet to many, a dearth of support for chamber music in Detroit is not a cause for wonder. Orchestra Hall is located in the city's deteriorating inner city, in a neighborhood more accustomed to crack than Mozart. Detroit is a city that circulates ethyl in its veins, and Rachlevsky's kind of music, they say, is not the top priority.

Others reject that kind of thinking. "It's absolutely incredible," says Lloyd Fell of Cheboygan, Mich., "that a city the size of Detroit, with all the money here and corporations, can't support a group of this caliber.

"It would cost less to keep this group here," adds a miffed Fell, "than one of these sports teams pays for any forward or offensive tackle."

Fell can be forgiven a bit for his anger. Former Detroit residents, he and his wife moved to Cheboygan three years ago. But that didn't stop them from attending the chamber-music concerts. For three years, the couple have driven some 500 miles round trip just to take in the New American Chamber Orchestra.

Their dedication isn't unusual. At Saturday evening's concert, Suzanne and Marc Winkelman of West Bloomfield, a Detroit suburb, turned out as mourners. The couple had been hosts to six New Year's Eve parties in their bookstore to raise money for the orchestra. Marc Winkelman was awed by Rachlevsky's energy. "If there had been capitalists in Russia," he wonders, "who knows where he'd have been."

Robert L. Plummer also found himself charmed by the Russian emigre. He and his wife began attending the concerts from "before day one," as he says, and soon found themselves putting up visiting musicians in their suburban home for three months at a stretch and stuffing mailings into envelopes. "Misha is quite an individual," says Plummer. "Besides being a musician, he's an entrepreneur. There's going to be a void here when he's gone."

But those encomiums were scarce consolation to Misha Rachlevsky in his first violinist's chair that recent Saturday evening when the early breezes of spring were on the reluctant Michigan air. He had decided, he said, to put the orchestra up for sale. He has launched a nationwide hunt for a city that will support the New American Chamber Orchestra. He has no particular place in mind, only the conditions that its citizens be willing to turn out to listen and that its civic coffers provide a bit of support.

Rachlevsky will be sad to leave Detroit, he says, even though the city's image is not, perhaps, the country's best. "When I talked this fall and winter to people in the industry about my prospective move out of here," he says, "I was shocked. After I'd say what we'd done here -- 1,300 subscribers, 1,000 contributors, our 1,001st concert, European tours -- I was shocked that no one would say, 'You're crazy -- you have put so much there. Why would you want to leave?' Instead, as soon as I said that we wanted to move out of Detroit, everyone said, 'Sure, who would not want to move out of Detroit?' "

A man who has brought accountants to Orchestra Hall to finish the taxes of audience members during an evening concert on April 15, Rachlevsky is not to be underestimated. "I know that they are too good just to let them die," he says of the orchestra members. "We are much too devoted to what we're doing to dissolve it, to forget about it."

On Saturday, the night of the final concert, the impresario was at his best. During the intermission, he told the young chamber musicians as they stood together backstage in the footlights one last time, "Tonight we don't want to kill it, but we'll take no prisoners." He raised his hand in a clenched fist.

The musicians went back to their seats. For the last number, Haydn's Symphony No. 45, the so-called "Farewell" Symphony, the musicians stood one by one as the piece concluded and blew out candles burning beside their music stands.

At the last, only Misha Rachlevsky and his second violinist sat playing. Then they too blew out their candles, and the hall went dark. For a moment, there was silence. Then the applause began, building and rising until the audience was on its feet, applauding the musicians, who were gone, and the music, which was over.