Duet, Sustained

Long after the virtuoso and his student found harmony together, Emanuel and Lenore Vardi are still making music, by string and by brush

Walking into Emanuel and Lenore Vardi’s North Bend home feels like stepping into a scene from Fantasia, with walls full of canvases depicting sonic beauty. Even when it’s quiet in the house, as it often is, it’s hard not to hear music. Lenore focuses on painting instruments, her style drawing on her early dance training, while Emanuel, or Manny, crafts cubist images of musicians in groups with his paintbrush.

Photography by Kyle Johnson

Manny’s Schubert “Trout” Quintet is a perfect example of his style. Punctuated by the exclamation point of a full moon, it features five abstract figures in a circle playing bass, cello, violin, piano and viola against a cityscape. Layered between the buildings, geometric shapes in contrasting shades of orange, brown and blue echo the instruments’ forms. “There’s a relationship between the color of the music and visual color,” says Manny. “I’ve always taught students about the color of sound. You can have a blue sound in playing, and a blue painting. It’s the same thing.”

“They kind of sing,” Lenore says of their paintings. “I think people really respond to that.” That is likely the case, as the couple has sold more than a hundred in the U.S. and Europe since Manny began focusing on painting in the mid-’90s.

It was then, at the age of seventy-eight, that Manny took a nasty fall that cost him six operations and his career as one of the world’s greatest viola virtuosos. He is one of only two viola players to have played Carnegie Hall, and, along with his wife, he has collaborated with Louis Armstrong, Itzhak Perlman, Plácido Domingo, Barbra Streisand, Frank Sinatra and the Beatles. They also worked on the scores for Disney films as well as for Sleepless in Seattle, Blade Runner, Tootsie and Fame.

When that all ended suddenly, Manny had a second career to fall back on. “I just said, ‘Now I’m a painter,’” he recalls.

“Thank God he had the painting,” Lenore says. “Otherwise I think it would have killed him.”

Now ninety-four, Manny seems to have stopped aging decades ago, perhaps because of his harmony with Lenore. The two are instinctively in sync to the point where they finish each other’s sentences.

Since moving to North Bend in 2007, the Vardis’ work has popped up all over, from the Bellevue Jazz Festival to Issaquah’s Revolution Gallery to the Laurel Tree in Duvall. They teach music, make art and see no big distinction between the two disciplines. “We don’t dabble,” says Manny. “We’re serious artists and we’re serious musicians.”
Manny doesn’t listen to music while he paints, and he’s not exactly trying to paint the music. He’s out to capture the musicians’ feelings. That’s why he always paints them with their eyes cast down. “If you look at a musician who is truly feeling it, you’ll notice that his eyes are always closed. I tried to paint them open once and it was creepy. I’ll never do it again.”

Manny was born in Israel to a violinist/painter father who told him, “If you know one art, you should know all of them.” So Manny studied at the Art Students League and the Brooklyn Museum, started his music training at twelve, and left Juilliard at twenty-three. Eleanor Roosevelt invited him to do a solo recital at the White House.

Then he went to Florence’s Accademia di Belle Arti on the GI Bill. Following this training, he worked for Toscanini in the NBC Symphony Orchestra. Manny always refused to accept the viola in its traditional role as second fiddle to the violin. “I loved the sound,” he says, “but it’s never been played the way it should be.” Taking advantage of his sizable hands and lengthy arms, he strove to elevate the heavier, deeper-toned instrument to a virtuosic status. He became the first violist to record all twenty-four of Paganini’s Caprices, collectively one of the most difficult pieces for strings ever composed.

He was one of the busiest musicians in New York by the time Lenore came to him as a student, a young violinist on the rise, thirty years his junior. She grew up in Detroit and went to Oberlin and Sarah Lawrence. “I went straight to the best,” she says of her education.

She also went straight to Manny for instruction, but it was years before their relationship turned romantic. Neither can recall just how and when it actually happened. “It was quite gradual,” says Lenore. “It was just very comfortable, so we kind of…evolved.” They got married twenty-five years ago and plunged into the center of the New York music industry, from chamber music to R&B, from Tony Bennett and Nat King Cole to Diana Ross and the Bee Gees. Meanwhile, Lenore began to hone her skills as a painter, inspired by her husband’s abstract expressionism, the fluid shapes and forms that she had grown to love as a child dancer, and the musical world burgeoning around her.

Manny and Lenore formed a violin-viola duo and gradually made their way from New York to the Midwest and Southwest, teaching privately and at universities, finally landing in the shadow of Mount Si. Lenore continues to perform while Manny has managed to strengthen his once-mighty arm enough to give lessons. He and Lenore often teach a lesson together. Her teaching style shows the influence of her training and of her mother, a professional dancer. “I can look at a student and be able to go into the physical aspects of it and understand movement and grace in playing, and how a certain part of the body will have some tension in it, and it will affect their
whole playing.”

There doesn’t seem to be much tension between Manny and Lenore. He gets a feeling and paints a canvas, and Lenore names it for what the images evoke in her mind. When Lenore has a violin performance, Manny will paint the ensemble she’s going to play with and display it during the show. They created two dozen paintings displayed during the performance of the Greta Matassa Quartet at the Sherman Clay piano showroom. “They say the Renaissance person is unusual, but we don’t think so,” says Manny, “because we do it.”

“Someone once said to me that it’s like a marriage of art and music,” says Lenore, “and I had never thought about it that way. But it’s true. That’s exactly what it is.”