Phil’s Retiring Violinist Won’t Stop Fiddling

The month was September, the year, 1946. Harold Dicterow, a former first violinist in the San Francisco Symphony and recently discharged from the U.S. Army, was auditioning for Los Angeles Philharmonic Music Director Alfred Wallenstein. Wallenstein offered Dicterow the post of principal second violin.

“But, maestro,” Dicterow recalls saying, “I’ve never played second violin in my life. I’m a soloist. I’ve always played first.”

Nevertheless, after thinking it over, and considering, as he says now, “that I would move up fast, into the firsts,” Dicterow took the job, even though the thought of playing second violin “was repugnant to me.”

Next Sunday, almost 51 years later, will be Dicterow’s final performance with the Philharmonic--he is retiring as principal second violin of the Philharmonic after the matinee concert in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

“I wouldn’t trade it for anything,” Dicterow says of his years in the job he at first didn’t want. “I’ve been so happy.”

What will he do during the first week off, while his colleagues in the orchestra fly off on a tour of Spain?

“Well, I’ll probably cry a lot,” Dicterow jokes, on the phone from his home in Simi Valley.

Will he put away the violin?

“God, no!” the 77-year-old orchestral musician exclaims.

“I’ll never do that. They’re gonna have to bury the fiddle with me. I love it too much to stop.”

Family and fiddle continue to dominate Dicterow’s life.

He talks about his two sons--Glenn, concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic, and Maurice, a medical doctor who freelances as a violinist--and his daughter, a music lover who works in another business.

He talks about meeting his wife, pianist Irina, in the mid-1940s, when she was a student of Rosina Lhevinne at the Juilliard School in New York. He talks about their six grandchildren, and the chances the impending retirement will give him and Irina to visit one of them, 7-year old Adam, in New York.

What kind of playing will he do in retirement?

“Freelance, which is why I came to L.A. in the first place, all those years ago. Studio work. And lots and lots of chamber music.

“What will I be doing a year from now? I have no idea, but I’m sure I will be playing the fiddle.”