Cars, Bikes, & Classical Music: MSO Musicians’ Surprising Hobbies
David Lewellen
PUBLISHED
Tagged Under: MSO Musicians, Off Stage
While the Milwaukee Symphony is on vacation, several musicians will enjoy the summer weather in their unusual vehicles.
Timpanist Dean Borghesani will be tooling around southeastern Wisconsin in his 2007 Saturn Sky Red Line. The sporty two-seater is “a really impractical car,” he said, “but in summer it’s fun to put the top down and go cruising.”
For commuting and errands, Borghesani has a Tesla 3. “I thought the Saturn was pretty quick, but there’s nothing like electric,” he said. “You go back to a car with an engine, and it feels so slow.” He keeps the car in storage during the colder months but brings it out from roughly June to October.
The Saturn was only manufactured for three years, and it’s unusual to see one on the road now – particularly in the shiny condition that he keeps it in. Detailing the car – washing, waxing, re-washing and buffering – is a day-long ritual that “makes the paint look unbelievable,” he said.
Borghesani’s parting words were, “Margaret has the most beautiful Mustang I’ve ever seen” –and English hornist Margaret Butler drives her 2018 candy-apple-red convertible all year round. “In my opinion, you don’t know how to drive a car if you don’t know how to drive stick,” Butler said.
She has loved sports cars since childhood, while usually driving something more sensible, but a few years ago she finally took the plunge. “I do believe in electric cars, and V-8s are going to be a thing of the past,” she said, “so now is the chance. The Ford Mustang spoke to me as the ultimate American sports car and now that I own one, I feel like I found my simpatico – machine and human as one.”
It has enough storage space for “a suitcase, an oboe, an English horn, and a cooler.” She puts snow tires on it for winter use, but “I don’t pick bugs out of its teeth every five minutes or anything like that,” she said. “At the end of the day, it’s a machine, and it serves a purpose.”
The 485-horsepower car is a gas guzzler around town, but on the open road in sixth gear at 80 mph, “it sips gas like a hybrid,” she said.
Driving a powerful sports car, Butler said, is “a part of my personality that I don’t get to be public about. It’s not part of my professional life.” But, she continued, “It takes a lot of confidence to drive a machine like that, and also to play in an orchestra. I carve out space for myself, and I don’t apologize for it. It’s not a wallflower car, and I’m not a wallflower musician.”
On tour in Marinette several years ago, she remembers, principal clarinet Todd Levy showed her how to double clutch – to downshift without losing speed by quickly taking it out of gear twice. “It’s very subtle and suave if you do it right,” she said.
By background, however, Levy is a motorcycle guy, and has been since his father bought him a minibike at age 7 or 8. “There’s a certain freedom about it,” he said. “It’s a little like skiing, because it’s so balance-oriented. When you go around a corner, you don’t use the handlebars much – you use your body weight to turn the bike.”
Most of his riding is purely for pleasure – his motorcycle is impractical for commuting to work, because the storage space isn’t big enough for two clarinet cases. (Why he needs two clarinets for almost every rehearsal is a topic for another day.)
For many years, Levy has spent his summers with the Santa Fe Opera, and he ships his motorcycle out to New Mexico to take advantage of the scenery and open roads. “If you don’t ride for a while, you get rusty,” he said. If he doesn’t have much time, taking his bike up a mountain road and back down feels like doing his scales and exercises.
Riding and music resemble each other, he said, because both are complicated and require developing many skills that work together. “I enjoy it from a mental perspective,” he said. “There are lots of things I have to remember – the shifting, two different brakes, the clutch. It’s an enjoyable hobby because it involves so many things.”
