After 50 years with the NSO, violinist Desi Alston finishes strong (2024)

A virtuosic player with a magnetic presence onstage, Alston prefers to think of himself as part of an orchestra that’s grown from good to great under the batons of five music directors. “My retirement concludes for me a 50-year glorious epoch in the National Symphony Orchestra,” he tells me.

That epoch was launched by a bit of good fortune in a fourth-grade classroom in Philadelphia. Alston was 8 years old when a man came in with a question for the class: “Who wants to play the violin?”

“Nobody knew what the violin was,” Alston recalls in a phone interview. “We’d never even heard the word. But everyone knew was ‘play’ was.”

Young Desimont joined every other boy in the class in raising his hand — and survived his first-ever round of orchestral cuts: “He literally said you, you and you. I was one of the you’s.”

Alston isn’t eager to revisit his childhood in “not the greatest neighborhood” in Philadelphia — he’d rather not run the risk of sounding “hackneyed or trite” recounting the hardships of his youth, the police who mistook his violin case for something else, the streets that taught him how to run for distance. (“Most bad guys weren’t going to chase you more than a block,” he says.)

But he does reserve a special fondness for one aspect of his upbringing. At age 9, Alston began violin studies with Edgar Ortenberg, a teacher and mentor who would guide Alston all the way up to his graduation from Temple University in 1974.

Ortenberg, a Ukrainian-born violinist who fled Russia in the 1920s to escape antisemitism, fled Berlin to escape the rise of the Nazis in the 1930s, and fled Paris for New York in 1940. He spent a decade playing in the Budapest String Quartet before taking up teaching positions at Philadelphia’s Settlement Music School, where he met the precocious 9-year-old and promptly poached him from his original instructor.

He would remain Alston’s teacher through his entire adolescence, and Alston would follow Ortenberg to Temple, where the latter served as head of the string department at the Boyer College of Music and Dance.

In a 1988 Washington Post story chronicling Alston’s “double life” as a violinist and runner, the 88-year-old Ortenberg confirmed the profundity of their bond: “We never had any children of our own, and Desi is like our own child,” he said. “That’s the highest compliment I could pay to anyone.”

Alston says Ortenberg taught him to immerse and invest himself in the music, to keep his head together and focus, and to believe, beyond any doubt, that “if you really want to do something, you’ll find the time to do it.”

“I had to learn how to navigate the mean streets and going to my lessons,” Alston says. “[Ortenberg] gave me so many free lessons in addition to the one that was paid for weekly, and I think he did that just to get my mind off all this other stuff not related to music I had to deal with. My mind would be so focused on what I was doing musically, that I didn’t have time to think about the pernicious side of life that I had to deal with once I left to get home.”

Ortenberg’s guidance led Alston to his first (and second and third) orchestral auditions, which often defaulted to a similar refrain: Alston’s playing was good, but he had no orchestral experience. It was NSO music director Antal Doráti who went out on a limb to give the 21-year-old Desi a spot in 1974.

“I was just this intrepid kid,” Alston says. “I didn’t let anything bother me. I was fearless. I call it young and dumb.”

In addition to inspiring Alston’s life of musicianship, Ortenberg, who died at 96 in 1996, is also the namesake of the Edgar Ortenberg Bowed String Instrument Scholarship Fund, a scholarship Alston created at Temple in 2023 for “students who maintain a 2.5 GPA and demonstrate financial need.” (At a recent gathering honoring retirees, the second violin section of the NSO pitched in $1,000 toward the scholarship.)

NSO principal second violin Marissa Regni sees the Temple scholarship as a natural extension of a generosity of spirit that extends beyond the orchestra.

“I think it’s so amazing that he did this, but I’m not at all surprised,” she said. “Desi is incredibly generous, especially when it comes to the promotion of young people and supporting their goals.”

“Not to sound boring,” Alston says, “but my main precept in life is what we do for ourselves dies with us, what we do for others lives on forever. I don’t know who wrote that, but that’s how I live my life. A lot people helped me, and I needed every penny. I wanted to pay it back. I want to give tribute to my teacher. How lucky I was to have him involved in my life.”

On tour in Europe with the NSO this past February, the professional affection and musical admiration earned by Alston among his cohort was clear at every stop. Entire logistical plans were constructed with consideration of his abiding aversion to texts, emails, smartphones and technology in general. (Alston is additionally not thrilled about the unreliable fiber-optic cables that have sullied his home landline.)

“Maybe I’ll come out of the dark ages in the future,” he tells me. “But for now, I’m blissfully happy with the way my life is.”

That trend is likely to continue as Alston relocates to Hawaii, where he’s had a place since 2000. His hope is that the finish line of retirement will deliver the same rush of joy, accomplishment and catharsis as a good run.

“I’m profoundly grateful for the myriad memories of world travel, wonderful music making and the cherished friendships spawned along the way,” he says. “I’ve had a good ride, but now it’s off to my idée fixe, my soif de vivre.”