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Tony Manzo, Bassist Why did you decide to audition for the NCCO? Being the only bass in a chamber orchestra is about as close to a career in chamber music as a bassist is ever likely to come. I was lucky enough to live that dream over in Germany for nearly 7 years while I was Solo Bassist with the Munich Chamber Orchestra - where Iris Stone was a friend and colleague. My wife is a cellist with the National Symphony in Washington. We spent a few years of criscrossing the Atlantic before choosing to settle in DC, which unfortunately meant giving up the job in Munich. Iris and I had kept in contact after she left Munich for San Francisco, so when she mentioned New Century's bass opening, I jumped at the chance to do that kind of playing again. You live in Washington, DC. Is traveling with a bass complicated? What's involved? Is there a risk of damage to your instrument? Simply put, air travel with the bass is a royal pain. I've been traveling with it regularly since about 1994 and I still find the most stressful part of a concert tour is getting the bass on the aircraft! I have a very good hard case for the bass for when it has to be checked, but there's no getting around the fact that it's simply huge. Oversize and overweight charges are the norm, and the fear of it getting trashed never completely goes away. The NCCO position and the travel it will entail actually has me considering having a radical new kind of surgery done to my bass, in which the neck is made removable so that it all fits in a specially made rectangular box! Tell us about your musical background. I grew up in Winter Haven, Florida and I started bass at 13. I went to college at Boston University where I studied with James Orleans from the Boston Symphony. After a couple summers as a fellow at Tanglewood, I went to the New World Symphony in Miami with Michael Tilson Thomas for three years. From there, I crossed the pond and played for a year with the Bergen Philharmonic in Norway before landing the position in Munich. Since moving back to DC, I've been doing a lot of chamber music with groups like the Smithsonian Chamber Players, the Folger Consort, and out at the Garth Newel Music Center, as well as substituting regularly with the National Symphony. I still get back a couple of times a year to play with the orchestra in Munich. What do you do for fun? Play in a chamber orchestra!! But I'm also an avid cyclist, canoeist, and sailor, as well as a volunteer EMT. Rachel and I have a son named Adam, who is a constant source of joy. He just turned one last fall, a few days before the NCCO audition! |
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