Shadows & light

Jorja Fleezanis navigates the world with a particular image of herself. "If we were in a lifeboat, I would be the person getting everyone to stay calm enough to do what we need to do to get out of this situation," she said. "Orchestras are negotiating white water all the time, and you have to keep everyone focused and disciplined and polished."

Behind her, through the condo's windows, you can just glimpse the Mississippi River as it tumbles over St. Anthony Falls. To the left, a freestanding limestone wall of the Mill City Museum looms like an ancient ruin. To the right, a vast white face of an old grain elevator dominates the seventh-floor vista. She and her husband, Michael Steinberg, adore this pockmarked wall, despite every potential buyer asking when it will be torn down so they can see more river.

Selling the condo is one of the transitions Fleezanis must navigate as she leaves her job as concertmaster of the Minnesota Orchestra after 20 years, longer than anyone has sat in that chair. Tonight's performance, Beethoven's moving Missa Solemnis, will be her last notes with her colleagues. Then she's off to help create a new culture of orchestra training at Indiana University, where a position of professor of music was created for her to delve deeply into the teaching she's always loved.

Then there is her husband's illness. Early in 2006, Steinberg learned that he has colon cancer. He was 76, and still at work on his various pursuits as a musicologist, writer, lecturer, critic, teacher, chamber music coach and narrator. A bad reaction to chemotherapy sent them to the Mayo Clinic for a second opinion, which was, in essence: We could keep zapping you, or you could go home and live life on your terms.

"Now I'm doing it on my own, as it were, making the best of a ... " He paused. "Not to say a lousy situation, but a question-mark situation. I could go on like this for weeks, or for years.

"You make a contract with the pharmaceutical companies when you begin treatment of this kind. ... It's like you're being asking to work very hard and you hope to get something to show for your effort at the end of the day, but at the end of the day, we weren't getting anything."

Fleezanis added the coda: "Now that our only investment is in each other and in life as it is around us, that contract not being there is a huge burden lifted."

"The Mayo said, 'The only thing we're not good at is prophecy,' " Steinberg said, adding that his first doctor didn't think he'd last 12 months. Today, there's a job waiting for him in Indiana. "What we'll find in Indiana is who the hell knows?"

An attraction of opposites

It's not that the departure of this musical power couple will create an artistic vacuum, but that certain concerts will be a little less Vesuvian, certain dinner parties a little less witty, certain students a little less bedeviled.

In their two decades here, Steinberg has written several books, including his much lauded trio of "The Symphony: A Listener's Guide," "The Concerto: A Listener's Guide," and "Choral Masterworks: A Listener's Guide," published by Oxford University Press. He just learned that his latest, "For the Love of Music," is being translated into Chinese. He's a regular speaker at symphonies nationwide, and an occasional commentator on National Public Radio. The program notes for tonight's performance are drawn from "Choral Masterworks."

Fleezanis has been a champion of new music -- John Adams wrote his dynamic Violin Concerto for her -- but also has been an archaeologist of classic violin literature. The "Fleezanis stomp" is a memorable moment of some solo performances when she slams her foot down onstage, as if the pressure of an intense passage finally found release through her heel.

That an erudite native of Germany and a fiery child of Detroit's Greek neighborhoods found each other and fell in love is, well, as he said, "Who the hell knows?"

The two met in 1980 when Fleezanis, then 28, was invited by conductor Edo de Waart to audition for assistant concertmaster with the San Francisco Symphony. Steinberg, then 51, was artistic director there and sat in, not quite catching the rather exotic-sounding name of a last-minute addition to the list. "Jorja came in and played the slow movement of the Sibelius Violin Concerto, and that was it for me," Steinberg recalled. "I have to marry this woman."

From Fleezanis' viewpoint, "I was on a one-year contract and was just having a good old time with dear old friends there. I was in a stormy relationship at the time ... "

"So was I," Steinberg said.

" ... but a friend there, she was the matchmaker. I could tell she was very excited to introduce us. I knew of him by reputation," she said, noting how in her early association in Cleveland with conductor James Levine, he would talk of this Michael Steinberg fellow. "Suddenly I was face-to-face with you and I think it was one of my first realizations of how life is full of circles."

"It hangs by a very thin thread, this determination of when you meet people," Steinberg said. A few months later, they drove up the coast to attend a concert together.

"A quartet concert," she said.

"All Haydn," he added.

"Being with someone who knows music, yet sees it in a very different way from me was just exhilarating," she said. This was not talking technique with a fellow musician, but with someone who wrote about how music is influenced by the culture of the time, by a composer's circumstances. "It was so deeply moving for me." In 1983, they were married in the matchmaker's home.

Teaching the future's leaders

Fleezanis arrived in Minnesota in 1989, brought in by de Waart, who had moved from San Francisco to Minneapolis. She became the orchestra's youngest concertmaster, and also had to cope with her predecessor remaining in the section. Today, younger violinists are seeking their chance. "I've felt the heat," Fleezanis said. "When I came here, I was the youngest one in the section with others 20 and 30 years older than me. Now I'm among the oldest."

Yet it's the quality of these younger violinists that finally spurred her to respond to Indiana University, which had been pursuing her for years. Twenty years ago, she explained, an open position in the violin section would attract 20 or 30 applicants. "We now easily get 100," she said. Yet, Steinberg observed, "you wouldn't have to take on so many auditions if they were trained better."

This past year, when Indiana approached her with the idea of leading an orchestra training program, it was the chance she'd been seeking to teach students not only how to play, but how to lead. A concertmaster is the conductor's first lieutenant. She develops an ensemble's particular sound and makes the technical decisions for the section about how to negotiate the bow through certain passages.

Steinberg calls the job grueling, but Fleezanis counters: "One of the things I want to do is show people that leadership is gratifying. It's not about how many jobs they will get, but how to be good citizens in the profession."

This is when the lifeboat analogy comes up, which led to the incident from the orchestra's critically acclaimed performance last month in Carnegie Hall. Guest soloist Leonidas Kavakos was in the final robust movement of Sibelius' Violin Concerto when the chin rest on his violin came loose. Fleezanis quickly handed him her violin and set about trying to fix his instrument, doing what needed to be done to get that lifeboat into a safe harbor.

Noted the New York Times: "After the performance, during the enormous ovation, Mr. Kavakos gave a big hug of contrition to Mr. Vanska and a big hug of solidarity to Ms. Fleezanis."

The play of shadows and light

Michael Steinberg is, perhaps for the first time, looking his age. Always a bit on the stout side, he now is slim, maybe too much so. He sighs about being creaky. They have been quite private about his illness, but were candid with Indiana when the university wanted him to teach two classes, one on writing about music, another on 19th-century symphonies. "Upon reflection, my health isn't dependable," he said. "The present state seems to be figuring out what I can do without it being every Monday from 8 to 4."

He and Fleezanis recently did a series of pre-concert talks for the San Francisco Symphony, "and I think we did well, which is not an easy admission to get out of me." So well, in fact, that they've been asked back for next season. "We were just looking at the concert calendar for next year."

His medical regimen is what the doctor ordered, living life on his own terms, which does not preclude mojitos on their deck, from which they can glimpse the new 35W bridge.

It may say something about this particular couple that the typically valued views -- the river, the bridge -- are on the margins. Instead, they rhapsodize about how the shadows and light do a languorous tango across the white wall of the grain elevator that fills the floor-to-ceiling windows.

"I can watch it for hours," he said.

"There are lots of stories there," she said, then smiled at him. "I realize my life would have been so different had I not met Michael. It was a little wiggly, being confronted by the entire cavalcade of your life, the formidableness of yourself. But it was like we were right there," she said, cupping each hand to make a circle.

He smiled back. "We have a way of filling each other's gaps very effectively."

The lifeboat bobs in the waves, everyone calm, yet readying themselves, keeping their eyes on the far horizon.

Kim Ode • 612-673-7185