Klarinet Archive - Posting 001168.txt from 1997/09

From: "Dan Leeson: LEESON@-----.edu>
Subj: Re: David Peck
Date: Fri, 26 Sep 1997 09:42:46 -0400

I have a wonderful David Peck story (since a question arose about him,
one that was answered on this list).

I was called to the San Diego Symphony about 10 years ago to play
the Gran Partitta. Tony Pay was conducting (and also playing the
Weber 1st concerto, and very beautifully, too). While there, I
heard that they had hired David to play principle but that his
arrival was delayed because the manager of the Houston SO would
not release him before the conclusion of his contract which had
another year to run. So the SDSO used a number of very fine
LA players to fill in while they awaited David's arrival. The
manager of the Houston SO is a man named Toeplitz. (For those
of you with mathematical backgrounds, he is the grandson of
the man for whom "Toeplitz's spaces" were named.)

About three months later, I had business in Israel due to a large
international computer show being held there, and while there I
contacted Uri Toeplitz, formerly first flute with the IPO, now
retired, and, as it happens, the father of the Houston Toeplitz.
My wife and I were visiting Uri and his wife at his home in
Tel Aviv when the phone rang during dinner.

It was the son calling from Houston to say hello. And at the end
of the call, Toeplitz father said to Toeplitz son, "he had some
guests for dinner so he had to cut it short" at which point I
yelled out so that he could hear me in Houston, "Why not let
David Peck go to San Diego?!"

To which he replied (and reported to me by the father), "What??
How does somebody in Tel Aviv know that David Peck's beginning
of his work in San Diego is being held up here in Houston?"

The father put me on the phone with the son and I said, "Oh, I
had just received the request through a psychic." And Toeplitz
son said, "Psychics be damned. He is staying here until his
contract is over. Where am I going to get a player good enough
to replace him???"

As a post script to the story, when Peck was finally permitted to
leave at the conclusion of his contract, he spent only one season
in San Diego because the orchestra went bankrupt and was out of
commission for quite a while. David returned to Houston and the
rest is history.

Toeplitz son left Houston and became manager of Pittsburgh where,
I believe, he still is.

Cute story.

=======================================
Dan Leeson, Los Altos, California
Rosanne Leeson, Los Altos, California
leeson@-----.edu
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