| 10/15/2004 |
| A New Song for Armstrong |
| By: E.L. Lefferts |
 Will Helen Armstrong make it? Will her name be on everyone's lips? And will she, heart pounding, a grandmother of three, walk onto the stage at the Grammy Awards, lift her violin and wow an audience of punk rockers and street rappers? It could happen. "He's mixing an album for Jennifer Lopez right now, but he's finishing soon, and Oct. 20, I'll be recording with him," she explained. "He used to live in Roxbury and he's heard me play. One night at a dinner party he said, 'The violin is the closest instrument to the human voice in its ability to express the deepest of emotions ... .' So it will be an album of romantic love songs." Already, the pair has started work on classic melodies such as Johnny Mandel's "The Shadow of Your Smile," "Don't Get Around Much Anymore" by Duke Ellington and Jerome Kern's "Once in a Blue Moon," the title track for the album. "I'm classically trained and I've never done anything like this before," Ms. Armstrong noted, "but I've never had a passion for something like I have for this album. It's brought out something different in me." The recording will feature Ms. Armstrong on the violin with help from a possible lineup of stars that includes musicians Sergio Mendez and Carlos Santana, as well as recording artists James Ingram and Kathie Lee Gifford. A music video starring Ms. Armstrong is likely for the song "Smile" by Charlie Chaplin. The video was originally supposed to feature Michael Jackson superimposed on old footage, but the singer decided not to use it. Instead, when the album is released, Helen Armstrong will be seen strumming her violin in a duet with the Little Tramp. "I'll probably be on the road for a year promoting this CD," exclaimed Ms. Armstrong. "My husband said I could never do something like this. I said, 'Oh yes I can.' I get a little stubborn when I believe in something." That stubbornness, coupled with drive and determination, has been the defining characteristic of Ms. Armstrong's life. Her mother, Hannah Spencer Armstrong, was a violinist who gave up dreams of a life in the concert halls to become a physician's wife and the mother of three children. The family lived about 90 miles outside of Chicago in Rockford, Ill. Helen was the middle child. A precocious little thing, she picked up her mother's violin when she was 3 and gave her first concert at 5. She had obvious talent and she loved playing, but it was tough for the child to concentrate on practicing. Her mother got her lessons with a teacher in Rockford, but young Helen often skipped them and rode her bike in the park instead. After years of being rounded up and forced to practice, Helen was confronted by her mother just before her 13th birthday. "I'll never forget it," Ms. Armstrong remembered. "She said, 'Do you want to go on?' She wanted me to be in charge, because then I'd be responsible for rehearsing and practicing." From then on, the teenager practiced six to eight hours a day. One day a week, her mother took her out of school and drove her to Chicago for lessons. "The school was so supportive," Ms. Armstrong recalled. "But I was a straight A student, I was class president, I won everything and I passed all the tests. "One time a teacher gave me a B-plus. I went to ask why and they said it was a mistake and changed it to an A. I'll never forget that," she continued. "They just changed it." In her junior year of high school, Ms. Armstrong and her mother were flying twice a month to New York City for lessons with an expert. By senior year, the aspiring soloist had moved in with a family in Nyack, N.Y., so she could commute into the city and attend classes at the Juilliard School on Saturdays and study with violin master Ivan Galamian. Summers, when other high-schoolers were brushing sand from beach towels and sipping sodas with their friends, Ms. Armstrong and Itzhak Perlman were burying themselves in music at Meadowmount camp in Westport, N.Y. "We practiced the whole day for two months," she said. "There was no recreation. You couldn't play tennis because you might hurt your arm, and you couldn't ... . When I think of those years, I would have to say my upbringing ... but I don't regret it." College at Julliard was no less intense. Her teacher, Mr. Galamian, deliberately scheduled lessons at 7 a.m. on Sunday morning to keep his protégé from going out Saturday night. She was one of the few female students encouraged to try for a concert career, and she would do almost anything not to disappoint. "Ivan was a god to me," Ms. Armstrong recalled. "When I met my husband, I took him to Ivan for his approval. I don't know what I would have done if he didn't like him." With her teacher's blessing, she married Alan Cohen, a Scarsdale building contractor, although Mr. Galamian made her swear she wouldn't get pregnant. Despite her promise, Ms. Armstrong defied her "god" and had two children, both when she was still in school and barely in her 20s. Perhaps to make it up to Mr. Galamian, one week before her first baby, Debbie, was born Ms. Armstrong soloed with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. No one knew she was pregnant, least of all her teacher. The day after she left the hospital with her second child, David, she took her final exams at Juilliard. "I wanted to have my children while I was at school," she explained, "because then I knew I'd be home rather than on a concert tour." She was lucky. Her understanding husband surrounded his ambitious wife with a house staff that freed her to get a master's degree, and, following that, engage in concert work. In fact, the day they moved into a new home in Scarsdale, she left her husband and the two children to tour in Europe for a month. "I can't believe I did that," Ms Armstrong said with a guilty giggle. In the 1970s, however, her ideal life was shattered. Mr. Cohen, who had affably answered to "Mr. Armstrong" half of the time, contracted cancer. He died after a long illness, and his wife was left to fend for herself and their children with nothing more than her wits and a fiddle. "I have to say my best friend is my violin," Ms. Armstrong said, shaking her head. "That was a rough period. "I think it was hard for my children because I think they thought I didn't care," she continued, "but I wanted to show them that life goes on." She had been as far up the concert ladder as most women ever get, but when her husband died she had to rely on teaching as well as a solo career, and her name slipped gently from the top rung. About two decades ago, she was married briefly to a pianist who encouraged her to move with him to Washington. Solo life as a soloist with grown children was lonely, so Ms. Armstrong started inviting her musician friends up. Naturally, the gatherings gravitated toward music. Eventually, these impromptu sessions got so good that they decided to open them to the public. Now in its 21st season, the Armstrong Chamber Concert series produces top-notch classical gatherings for area audiences. Ms. Armstrong has further extended the organization's purpose to include enrichment programs that send exceptional music teachers into about 20 schools twice a year. For the first time since the concert series began, it will be held in the First Congregational Church in New Milford and partly reprised in the Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall as well as in Greenwich, where Ms. Armstrong's third husband, Ajit Hutheesing, lives. The couple met 16 years ago, and true to her independent course, it took Ms. Armstrong nine years to say yes. On their wedding day, she was offered a solo at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. After two days of deliberation, Ms. Armstrong declined the gig. That time, her commitment to her marriage won over years of trained absorption in her career, though Ms. Armstrong and her husband each maintain their own home. She couldn't give up Washington, the chamber series, the student enrichment program and her solo career. Mr. Hutheesing couldn't part with his Greenwich manse and International Capital Partners, the Stamford investment company he founded. The recording of "Once in a Blue Moon" will now heap another layer of competition for Ms. Armstrong's attention. "Bruce [Swedien] has a vision," Ms. Armstrong said, the excitement mounting in her voice. "If it takes off, he's thinking it will be number one, but this album is so different for me. It's putting an element of classical music into these well-known love songs, but I have to improvise. It's a whole different language for me." During a recent recording session, Ms. Armstrong recalled that she just "couldn't get in the right groove." Mr. Swedien was in the sound booth. A long-haired musician who couldn't read music was sitting next to her, and the pressure was mounting. Unable to reproduce the sound Mr. Swedien wanted from the written notes, Ms. Armstrong had to take the years of strict training with a god-like teacher, the missed dances, the lost summer vacations and the nights alone in a hotel room waiting for the curtain to rise, and throw them all out the window. When she returned to the sound stage, she started to play "Don't Get Around Much Anymore" and suddenly the music clicked. "I looked up and Bruce gave me the thumbs up," Ms. Armstrong said, as if she'd witnessed a miracle. "He says I'm a natural." The New Milford Armstrong Chamber Concerts will be held Oct. 17, Nov. 21, April 10 and May 22 at 3 p.m. in the First Congregational Church on the green. Admission is $20 per person and reservations can be made by calling 860-868-0522. The Oct. 17 concert includes Beethoven's "Sonata No. 8 in G major, Op. 3," Charles Koechlin's "Quatre Petite Pieces," Alec Wilder's "First Sonata" and Brahms' "Horn Trio in E flat major, Op. 40." |