For Lindsay Deutsch of Take3, her love of violin began with Sesame Street. “When I was two years old, I saw a famous violinist named Itzhak Perlman on Sesame Street. He was playing the violin with Bert and Ernie. There was something about the sound of the violin that really got my attention, even at that young age. I begged my parents to get me a violin, and they ended up buying me a tissue box strung with rubber bands.”
Lindsay chuckled as she remembered, “I would kind of pluck around on that, and finally, when I was five years old, I got my first violin. It was a tiny violin, about five inches long, and I was completely mesmerized. I think it was kind of predestined that I would play the violin for a living. I worked at it every day. To this day, not that much has changed in terms of my relationship to the violin. I still wake up every morning to practice the violin, and try to become just a little bit better each day.”
Lindsay has quite an impressive resume. According to her manager, Jean Schreiber, “TAKE3 was created by violinist/vocalist, Lindsay Deutsch, Yanni’s featured violin soloist, with whom she has toured throughout most of the 7 continents. Ms. Deutsch began her career as a classical soloist, performing concerts with symphony orchestras around the country. Her performance of Astor Piazzolla’s “Four Seasons of Buenos Aires” with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra conducted by Jeffrey Kahane, was selected for NPR’s Symphony Cast Program. Ms. Deutsch has become an ambassador for the Violins of Hope project, performing on violins saved in the Holocaust in venues around the country, including the Soraya center in Los Angeles and with the Livermore Symphony in San Francisco. Ms. Deutsch can be heard throughout Netflix’s popular show, The Witcher and the Hulu series All About Pam. Her performances on these Sony soundtracks reached No. 1 on the Billboard charts and received millions of streams worldwide.”
This Saturday, April 13, our Valley will be in for a treat when Lindsay and her “genre defying trio,” Take3, grace the stage at Carnegie Hall at 7 p.m. I spoke with the delightful Lindsay about her music, and what attendees of this exciting show can expect.
What’s the history behind Take3, and what kind of music do you play?
Quite soon after receiving that first violin, I was practicing four to five hours every day on classical music and developing my chops. At that time, I had no clue that you could play pop music on a violin. I thought the only music you could play was Bach, Brahms, and Beethoven. My family and I moved from Houston Texas to Los Angeles where I could study at the Colburn School under Robert Lipsett. I continued to grow, and at a certain point, something kind of shifted. I started slowly developing a taste for more modern music. I realized you can actually combine pop music with classical music, and in fact, if a song like, say, a Justin Beiber song, has the same chord progression as let’s say, a Bach violin sonata, you could, in fact, merge the two.
That’s how Take3 started. We started doing what’s called “mashups,” where we play a classical song and a pop song at the same time. That’s how we started, and the rest is history. We went from doing two shows a year to performing 300 days of the year all over the U.S., and now, all over the world. It’s been quite a ride.
What’s your favorite thing about what you do?
I love that there’s no rule book anymore. I love the fact that the more you break the rules, the more success you have. I also really love the fact that you can create your own career. With Take3, every day we can be creative with the music that we play, with the performance aspect. There’s nobody telling me that I can’t run around the stage, that I can’t jump up and down, and that I can’t run into the crowd. So I feel like I’m able to kind of push boundaries and break rules. After 25 years of having to be so strict and follow every rule (in classical music) and being placed in this tiny box, it is so freeing. Every day I feel like I can push more boundaries and have more creative ideas about how we want to present this product to people, which will give them the most satisfaction and enjoyment. Because it is entertainment. I think of myself as an entertainer first and a violinist second. When you think that way, really, the sky is the limit.
What would you like the readers to know about Take3, your albums, and what you’ll be doing this Saturday at Carnegie Hall?
We have three albums. We have a Christmas album. We have a crossover album which was actually our debut album, which has pieces like Game of Thrones and Pirates of the Caribbean. Our most recent album is “Skies of Blue,” which is named after one of my favorite songs, “What a Wonderful World.” It’s a little bit more intimate, something that would be more calming than our normal blockbuster hits.
For our performance at Carnegie Hall, we have a little bit of everything! We have a little country, like “Sweet Home Alabama,” and “Orange Blossom Special,” which we mix up with a few different songs. We also have Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee,” and we also have Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata.” That’s an example of our mashups. We’re also going to be playing “Natural” by Imagine Dragons, but we’re going to combine it with the opera, “Carmen.” Of course, we have our favorite movie genre, like Pirates of the Caribbean and Game of Thrones, and then like, “Despacito” by Justin Bieber, Neil Diamond’s “America.” We’ll have a lot of oldies, a lot of modern.
It’s a fun show. We don’t take ourselves too seriously. We like to have a lot of banter with the audience. The more that I’m doing this, the more that there’s something about getting to know the audience. In between songs is what I’m getting so much joy from lately, because I feel like when we first started Take3, we would come out and perform. Now, to be able to feel comfortable having that banter between my colleagues and myself on stage, banter with the audience, that’s lately what I’m having the most fun with: laughing along with the audience and letting them get to know who we really are as people, musicians, and entertainers.
What’s the main thing you’d like us to know about what you’re doing this weekend at Carnegie Hall?
Well, I can’t tell you how many times we play a show, and people approach us and say, “You know what, I didn’t want to come to this show, my wife dragged me here kicking and screaming. I saw the picture of the violin and the cello, and the piano, and I thought, ‘this is going to be the most boring show ever.’” And those people tell us, “This was my favorite show that I’ve seen in this venue for twenty years.” Our goal for every show is that someone comes up to us and tells us it was their favorite show that they’ve heard in all of their seasons coming there. If we can accomplish that in Carnegie Hall, then we’ve done our job.
Do you have any advice for aspiring musicians?
I think the most important thing for musicians is to get the initial technique in order. I wouldn’t be able to do one thing that I’m doing now if I didn’t have the ten-thousand hours of scales, arpeggios, and thirds and twenty years of blood, sweat, and tears. Once you have that, you can create your own genre, you can do your own thing. So my number one advice is: start early, work hard, get the nuts and bolts, get that technique, and then once you have that, then break the rules and express yourself and create something unique.
Tickets are $32 for adults and $10 for students. To purchase tickets, contact Carnegie Hall Box Office at 304-645-7917, visit www.carnegiehallwv.org, or stop by 611 Church Street in Lewisburg. The Box Office is open Monday through Friday, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
