Striving for Harmony, Onstage and Off

NEW YORK —  Don’t be confused by his jokes about her being a “part-time single mother,” and resist all temptations to call their joint performing career and their ArtistLed recordings a “mom-and-pop operation.” Cellist David Finckel and pianist Wu Han take neither their marriage nor their music lightly.

In the two seasons since the husband-and-wife duo have become a touring musical item (they play together Sept. 6 in the Ford Amphitheatre’s Sunday brunch series), they’ve also started the classical equivalent of a garage band indie label in their Upper West Side apartment and organized their first season as co-artistic directors of La Jolla’s SummerFest, which begins Wednesday. In short, they’ve become a classical music power couple to contend with, over and above her own solo career and his role as cellist in the esteemed Emerson String Quartet.

“What’s really fortunate in our relationship is that we have such a good musical partnership,” Finckel says. “No matter how rough going the business is, we rarely have any major disagreements musically, and that’s why our whole partnership exists.”

Not that they are always harmonious, they admit. But their differences become strengths when it comes to managing their musical life.

“I’m the adventurous one,” says Wu. “If I see a pool, I jump right in. David has to research all the water temperatures first. I don’t have his organizational skills, but I’m the one who’s always pushing him.”

Except when it comes to the bottom line. “Wu Han is the one with the realistic side, at least in terms of budgets,” says Finckel, “instinctive but practical, always looking at the worst case scenario, and she’s usually right. It’s not always easy doing business with each other, but the end result is usually pretty good.”

The couple met in 1982 at the Hartt School of Music in West Hartford, Conn., where Wu had enrolled as a piano student from her native Taiwan and Finckel was in residence with the Emerson. Wu entered a school competition in hopes of getting to play the Schumann Piano Quintet with the quartet.

“She won hands down,” says Finckel, who personally developed a connection so direct that it carried offstage as well. “It wasn’t just about the music,” he adds. “It was about not having to talk through everything beforehand.”

“Everybody said later that I won the grand prize,” she says.

The two were married in 1985, but Wu, sensitive to being the wife of an established chamber musician, carefully sought a musical identity of her own, spending two summers at the Marlboro Festival and touring nationally with Musicians From Marlboro. Any playing with her husband was done only behind closed doors. “We spent those first few years just learning repertoire whenever we found the time,” she says. “And we were often asked informally to play together, maybe 10 concerts a year.”

Over time, Wu and Finckel began documenting their playing on high-quality digital audiotape recordings with the help of an engineer-violinist friend, Da-Hong Seetoo. The couple had a daughter, Lillian, in 1994, and by the time she was old enough to travel, Wu felt comfortable enough in her solo career to tour on equal footing with her husband. They acquired management, and in two years their recital commitments have blossomed to about 50 per season, nearly half of the Emerson’s schedule.

But at the same time, their efforts to attract a major record company with their home recordings had stalled. Finckel and Wu decided to go it alone, packaging the recordings themselves and setting up their own retail Web site (https://www.ArtistLed.com). They converted Wu’s studio into office space and pressed a thousand copies of each title at a cost of $1.70 each. Although they aren’t giving out sales figures, they do say they’ve recouped their initial costs.

The first four discs feature music by Strauss, Franck, Grieg, Schumann, Chopin and the cellist’s father, Edwin Finckel. Their latest is a two-disc collection of Beethoven’s complete works for cello and piano.

As cellist for the Emerson, Finckel remains the more famous of the pair, which presents a slight obstacle to being viewed as a duo rather than a soloist with a regular accompanist. Conversely, they’ve also had to persuade many chamber music presenters that the “solo” cello repertory is really chamber music.

“We have sonatas by the greatest pianists of all time--Beethoven, Chopin, Prokofiev,” says Finckel, “so it’s not like violin recitals, which are often just virtuoso string playing. This repertoire can only be done by people of equal abilities who really communicate.”

Constant communication onstage and off is crucial to keeping the Finckel and Wu enterprise afloat. They use every means available. They happened to be in Germany together--Finckel on stage with the Emerson, Wu backstage with Lillian--when they got an e-mail invitation from the La Jolla Chamber Music Society to run SummerFest.

“We never thought [running a festival] was out of the realm of possibility, but we never expected the call to come from La Jolla,” admits Finckel, who has played in the festival since 1992. “But then, I know the halls, the town, the people, the food. It wasn’t difficult to feel comfortable there right away.”

If ArtistLed began with Wu and Finckel passing out a few tapes to their friends, their first season of SummerFest seems like inviting their colleagues to a party. All of the musicians on the roster--returning artists like Cho-Liang Lin and Paul Neubauer and festival newcomers like Gilbert Kalish, Kyoko Takezawa and Menachem Pressler--have played with the two of them before. Musical highlights include sister violinists Ani and Ida Kavafian performing Takemitsu’s “Rocking Mirror Daybreak” and the Miami String Quartet, the festival’s ensemble in residence, performing the fourth quartet of Bruce Adolphe, the festival’s composer in residence.

Also deeply ingrained in this year’s festival is an elaborate chamber music workshop modeled on Isaac Stern’s projects in Jerusalem and at Carnegie Hall, which match outstanding young ensembles with artist/coaches in a series of public sessions. These replace the open rehearsals SummerFest offered in previous years.

“Whatever people expect to get out of an open rehearsal they’ll get from the workshops without the inaudible shorthand musicians use among themselves,” says Finckel. “Each SummerFest artist will be speaking in detail about music and imagery and technique. It should be a much more imaginative forum for the public to get to know musicians, not through their instrument but through their ideas.”

Along with that concept of ideas, Finckel and Wu have planned a series of panels where musicians, composers and other musical figures will discuss concepts like education and the future of music. “If you pick up the arts section of the newspaper, you see questions about what music will be like in the 21st century,” says Finckel. “Who’s going to play it, who’s going to write it, who’s going to fund it, who’s going to listen to it? These are important issues, and I think we’d be irresponsible if we didn’t address them, at least informally.”

For Wu, it was more a matter of involving the community in the discussion. “The festival has a human touch,” she says. “‘Artists stay in people’s homes and [the residents] learn how musicians live. If music gives them pleasure and inspires them, then they should be aware of what’s happening in the classical music world, and become more involved.”

Although a logical step would be for ArtistLed to record projects by other SummerFest artists, Finckel says his and Wu’s plate is already too full with their own performing and administrative commitments. “The first reason we can do all this is that we have a very good travel agent,” says Finckel, smiling. “But sometimes we barely make it. Some offers that come in are so wonderful you take the date and figure out how to make it work later.

“But the main reason is because the basis of our relationship is the music,” he adds. “Ultimately the business part is not that important.”

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SummerFest La Jolla, Sherwood Auditorium, Museum of Contemporary Art, 700 Prospect St., La Jolla. Wednesday through Aug. 22. $25-$35. (619) 459-3728 or https://www.ljcms.org

David Finckel/Wu Han Duo, John Anson Ford Theatre, 2580 Cahuenga Blvd. Sept. 6, 10:30 a.m. $20. (213) 461-3673.