Remembering Geoff Nuttall

Nuttall’s wife, violinist Livia Sohn, played Manuel Ponce’s nostalgic “Estrellita” and told the audience that Nuttall had not wanted a memorial gathering. When finally talked into it in his last days, he set the condition that there be more music than talking. In truth, the honors seemed about equally split, with talks interleaved between each pair of the 11 musical selections.

The talks gave a vivid picture of Nuttall’s personality and attitudes. Sohn described him as “our biggest cheerleader in life.” For their son Jack Nuttall, he was “the most positive, energetic and passionate” of people. His longtime colleague in the St. Lawrence Quartet, violist Lesley Robertson, found him like “a dazzling but slightly annoying younger brother.” Owen Dalby, violinist in the quartet, told how Nuttall taught him how to find his musical courage. Singer-songwriter Vienna Teng confirmed this by saying that Nuttall helped us “become the most authentic versions of ourselves” and spoke of the abandon he brought to every performance. Composer Osvaldo Golijov, whose memorial song for Nuttall, “The Fire Outlives the Spark” was premiered at the concert, said that Nuttall “showed me through playing how my music should be.” Condoleezza Rice, who as then-provost of the university was vital in bringing the St. Lawrence to Stanford in 1998, recalled that Nuttall would “put his troubles aside through his music.”

The musical selections were chosen as pieces that Nuttall loved. There were no string quartets or other standard chamber ensembles: perhaps that would have been too painful without Nuttall there to play in them. But a larger group, almost a small orchestra, of chamber musicians did perform. It included all three remaining members of the St. Lawrence — Robertson, Dalby and cellist Christopher Costanza. It also included three long-term former members of the quartet — violinists Scott St. John and Barry Shiffman and cellist Marina Hoover. To honor Nuttall’s love for the work of Joseph Haydn, the group played two movements from his “London” Symphony. It also played an arrangement of W.A. Mozart’s “Marriage of Figaro” Overture that clarinetist Todd Palmer prepared for the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina, for which Nuttall was chamber music director. It accompanied countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo in Golijov’s “The Fire Outlives the Spark” as well.

Costanzo also sang an aria by Henry Purcell. Cellist Alisa Weilerstein and pianist Inon Barnatan played a movement from a sonata by Sergei Rachmaninoff. A group of cellists played a movement by J.S. Bach. Paul Wiancko, who arranged the piece, noted in his talk that Nuttall never drew lines between the types of music or the other things that he loved. Tenor Paul Groves demonstrated the eclectic quality of Nuttall’s musical interests by singing not only an art song by Rachmaninoff but by leading the audience in a rousing version of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” with Stephen Prutsman giving a flashy piano accompaniment. And Vienna Teng performed at the piano her “hopepunk” song “Level Up.”

Between them, all these friends of Geoff Nuttall communicated his passions and interest to the large audience of people who have also been moved by his work and wished to commemorate his time among us.