Hampton Roads prodigy is playing on a bigger stage

NORFOLK

Bruce Ridge stood on the stage at Chrysler Hall looking out into an empty theater, remembering how it used to be. He was on a sentimental tour last month.

He held an acoustic bass and played bits of music by Verdi and Gliere. The sounds came out deep, dark and heartfelt, and resonated in the hall where he first performed professionally.

At age 15, a mop-headed Bruce became the youngest-ever musician in the outfit now known as the Virginia Symphony Orchestra.

“I used to love to walk on stage so much. When I would walk on stage, I’d walk backstage again, just so I could walk on again,” he said, laughing.

“It was so exciting.”

Now 45, Ridge heads a national organization that supports symphony and opera musicians, and he’s bringing players from all the top orchestras to Norfolk this week for a conference. He also plays double bass for the North Carolina Symphony in Raleigh, where he first made his mark as an arts leader.

Roaming the stage where it all began, Ridge was thrust back into his youth, when he was dogged by a frustrating disorder.

Music freed him from that childhood curse. It brought him out of isolation and gave him a voice.

Before he found music, Bruce had a speech impediment. He doesn’t know why. It wasn’t stuttering, wasn’t caused by nervousness or insecurity. He was a high-IQ kid growing up in the Kempsville section of Virginia Beach who had swell parents and made good grades.

“I just couldn’t pronounce words,” he said. It was torturous to stand before classmates and read a paper; the disorder made him shy about interacting. So he stayed at home and read about American history and politics.

The youngest of three boys, he was influenced by his mother’s love of the arts and by a musically talented brother, David.

Ridge said the first song that triggered his fascination with music was “I Am the Walrus,” by the Beatles.

“I am he/as you are me/as you are he/and we are all together.”

“It had all these orchestral instruments, and the complexity of it, and the lyrics,” Ridge recalled. “I just listened to it over and over again and started picking it out on the piano.”

Bruce was 10 and started listening intently to all types of music, including folk songs that championed workers’ rights. He began reading novels about social injustice, such as John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath.”

After he got his first bass instrument, his speech impediment quickly faded.

“Music taught me how to listen and to re-create what I heard,” he explained. He could do it with speech as well as with music. “For me, it just opened up the world.”

He grew more sociable, took up baseball. He found that playing the bass came easily. “I knew how to make it go.”

At Kempsville High, a music teacher put an electric bass in his hands, and Ridge had a knack for that, too. Besides classical, he took up jazz, rock and folk music, began writing songs and soon was performing alongside adults in area clubs.

At 14, he began studying with Carroll Bailey, who played bass for the local orchestra. A year later, Bailey encouraged him to audition for the symphony.

(While in Norfolk last month, Ridge called Bailey, now 87 and still teaching, and told him, “I always thought you were the greatest teacher I ever had, Mr. Bailey.”)

To Ridge, the Norfolk Symphony players were stars; he felt ecstatic to be onstage beside them.

The limelight didn’t unnerve him. “No fear at all. None. Back then, I couldn’t wait to play. It was the most comfortable thing in the world. “When I joined this orchestra, I felt like I had found my home.”

Still, the generational divide was evident. Once, he got on a bus with the orchestra for a concert, carrying a boom box blaring John Lennon. The grownups blasted him: “Turn that off!”

He amused his colleagues by climbing the ladder way up to the catwalk on breaks. After concerts, he’d go to Doumar’s (“where my parents got engaged” and where he later took dates) for a snack, usually a Taylor pork roll, barbecue, limeade and ice cream, exactly what he ordered as part of his sentimental journey in July.

John Lindberg, Virginia Symphony principal timpanist, was in the orchestra then. He remembered that “Bruce was probably the best bass player in the orchestra when he joined.”

Lindberg said it had irritated him that one conductor made Ridge play solos from the rear, “because he didn’t want a kid up front.”

Another conductor, Russell Stanger, who had hired Ridge, had encouraged his young bassist by showcasing him and writing letters in praise of his talent. Ridge visited Stanger in July. He showed up with old scrapbooks, pulling out carefully preserved letters from Stanger dating to the early 1980s, which moved the retired music director to tears.

“I hope you know the effect you’ve had on me,” Ridge told the man he addressed as “maestro.”

“You had an honesty about you that just shone,” Stanger, now 85, told him. “The thing I like about you, you have music running through your veins.”

While in the Norfolk orchestra, renamed the Virginia Philharmonic during Ridge’s time, his parents drove him many Saturdays to Washington, D.C., so he could have two-hour lessons with a National Symphony bassist.

In 1982, he snagged a full scholarship to a top conservatory, the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Three years later, he won a fellowship to play in the orchestra at Tanglewood in Lenox, Mass., summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

For one concert, two classical legends were involved: Leonard Bernstein, conducting Aaron Copland’s music. Ridge, then 21, had several solos in Copland’s “Inscape.”

At concert’s end, while the audience applauded, Bernstein led Copland around the orchestra, introducing him to featured players. When he got to Ridge, Bernstein took his hand and kissed it, then Copland took that hand with both his hands and looked straight at Ridge.

Afterward, Ridge felt other hands on his shoulder. The bassists were “congratulating me that this amazing thing had just occurred.”

Ridge’s face reddened at the recollection. “That actually meant a lot. And here’s the kicker. My parents had driven up to see the concert, so they saw that. That made it even better.”

Ridge then attended the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, where his brother David also studied. (Dave Ridge is now principal bass trombonist for the San Francisco Opera and records for film soundtracks at George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch.) Both brothers played in the Charleston (S.C.) Symphony in 1986.

The next year, with several offers to consider, Ridge joined the North Carolina Symphony, partly so he could stay in the mid-Atlantic region he loved.

Even as a teen, Ridge was intrigued by the behind-the-scenes running of a symphony. So he got involved. He became a member of the orchestra committee, which represents players in meetings with managers. Before long, he chaired that group.

While he was involved, that committee won improved benefits and substantial salary increases.

In 2001, he was named chair of a search committee for the symphony’s new music director. Usually a board member is at the helm. Only one other musician is believed to have ever headed such a search in the United States, said David Chambless Worters, president and CEO of the North Carolina Symphony.

“In hindsight, that was one of the best decisions we ever made,” said David Chambless Worters, president and CEO of the North Carolina Symphony. Ridge possesses “an ability to bring people together. I firmly believe that, if Bruce had not been our chair, we would not have succeeded in selecting Grant Llewellyn as our music director.”

After Llewellyn guest conducted, Ridge felt strongly he was it, and worked hard to pull together the committee to make an offer. Ridge made everyone feel as if their opinions were heard, Worters said.

Five years since Llewellyn started, “I’m still pinching myself with our good fortune,” Worters said. “He’s the consummate musician. The audience loves him. He’s articulate and charismatic.”

Ridge soon let himself be prodded into running for chair of the International Conference of Symphony and Opera Musicians.

The organization is not a union but is devoted to supporting the rights of musicians as workers. Contrary to its name, it is solely an American group.

Since Ridge took the job, his late father’s work ethic has stayed in the back of his mind. It’s not rare for Ridge to log 20-hour days communicating with the 4,000 or so musicians in the 51 member orchestras, which include the New York Philharmonic, National Symphony and the Virginia Symphony.

The position is unsalaried, though he gets travel expenses and an honorarium. “I want to do it,” he said. “I need to do it.”

“These musicians need to know they are connected to a network of over 4,000 friends who stand together.” Even when he’s onstage, he feels connected to musicians across the nation who also are playing.

“They have entrusted Bruce to be the spokesperson, the voice and the face of the major symphony orchestras in America,” said Lindberg, who has headed the local musicians’ union for 17 years. “It’s a big deal.

“He has gone from this humble kid to the leader of all the major symphony orchestra players in the country. And I am so proud of him.”

Ridge considers it a perk, and a priceless opportunity, to get to hear so many of the nation’s finest orchestras in their own halls. He visits beleaguered orchestras, giving pep talks at rehearsals and mediating conversations between players and bosses. The trick to mediation, he stressed, is in listening.

He pushed for his group to begin staging its annual conferences in cities where member orchestras need a boost. That’s why the group is in Norfolk this week, to bring positive attention to the Virginia Symphony, which has had a serious cash-flow problem.

“I sometimes wonder if people in Hampton Roads understand they have one of America’s greatest orchestras in residence,” Ridge said. “Artistically, they’re at the top. But their salaries are near the bottom.”

Other cities that hosted conferences include Minneapolis and San Francisco. Next year, the group heads to Houston.

“It’s the Virginia Symphony that puts Norfolk in the context of those other cities,” said Tom Reel, a bassist with the local symphony and local coordinator of the conference.

Don’t get Ridge started on the reasons to support our nation’s symphonies and how he thinks they can survive, or even thrive, during this recession. He’ll go on and on about how musicians are a vital part of the community, and how orchestras give more than they take, in every respect.

Since he’s been chair, his organization has started a call-to-action initiative. If a group is in trouble, all members find out. In late 2007, when players in Jacksonville, Fla., were locked out of work, musicians across the country collected $100,000. A few months later, when the same thing happened to musicians in Columbus, Ohio, another call pulled in $130,000.

“They did not anticipate that every musician would ride in like the cavalry,” Ridge said.

“This is what we do,” he said, grinning widely. “We show up.”

In March, he spoke before Congress; his talk about the economic and educational values of the arts can be viewed on YouTube.

Last year he traveled to Berlin and spoke to the International Federation of Musicians.

As his speech wound to a close, he sounded like Tom Joad, a character in “The Grapes of Wrath” who advocated for the oppressed:

“Wherever an orchestra is in trouble, let us all respond.

“Wherever a musician is in need, let us all respond.

“Wherever a negative image of the arts is produced, let us answer with a positive message of hope.”

Back in Norfolk, seated in a coffeehouse, Ridge leaned back and said: “I just feel like everyone needs a voice. And everyone in every industry needs a voice.

“Right now, with the symphony workers of America, I am able to give them a voice.”

Teresa Annas, 446-2485, teresa.annas@pilotonline.com