Twin Cities musical culture will get a jolt at Orchestra Hall Friday night. Expect thunderous applause and perhaps a few tears. Manny Laureano, the Minnesota Orchestra’s principal trumpet for the past 44 years, and one of its most revered and storied musicians, will play his final concert as a member of the orchestra.
A youthful 69-year-old who will turn 70 on Aug. 17, Laureano, besides being a gifted trumpeter, is an accomplished orchestra conductor and teacher, and, though we can’t be certain, he is most likely the only section leader of a major orchestra with a black belt in martial arts — he teaches kick-boxing for seniors three times a week.
“It just seems like the right time,” Laureano said during a recent interview when asked why he’s retiring. He wanted, he said, to stay onboard through the end of music director Osmo Vänskä’s reign and to work at least a year with Vänskä’s successor, Thomas Søndergård .
“The thing is,” he added, “if you ask people about aging, and they answer honestly, they’ll say certain things aren’t as easy as they were 40 years ago. With me, some things are still good: my upper register, my endurance. But other things, like tonguing and flexibility, you realize, OK, for me to stay any longer would simply be a satisfaction of ego. There’s a public that needs to be served. So I think James will be a nice replacement and the public will enjoy him. (James Vaughen, assistant principal of the Detroit Symphony, will replace Laureano in the top trumpet position in September.)
Another sign that is the end of one era and the beginning of a new one is the recent publication of a biography of Laureano. Titled “Agradecido, A Life of Gratitude, The Manny Laureano Story,” the book is an eloquent and warm-hearted chronicle written by two sisters, Christina and Geni Cavitt, that’s available in the Orchestra Hall lobby and at online booksellers.
Praise from his peers
Laureano’s colleagues in the trumpet section offer praise for their section leader. “Manny is playing as well now as when I joined the orchestra,” said Douglas Carlsen, associate principal since 1999. “His family genes and all the martial arts he does keep him young.”
“Manny’s a true legend, and he’s earned that legend,” said Charles Lazarus, who joined the orchestra in 2000. “People say he’s a storyteller when he plays, and that’s true. I’ve been very lucky to work with him for 25 years.
“He leads the section with such integrity and experience,” Lazarus said. “He’s always good-humored, and he treats his colleagues like family. And he’s so informed about the music we’re playing. And that helps him lead the section because he knows the music so well.”
It’s rare that a section of a symphony orchestra retains the same personnel for 25 years. (The other member of the quartet is Robert Dorer, who won the audition to play second trumpet in 1997.) A section whose members have worked together that long becomes almost like a marriage, Lazarus said.
“After a number of years, you start to know a person’s habits, their style, what they’re listening for, what their strengths are. You can anticipate things. There are a lot of things we don’t have to talk about.”
William Schrickel, associate principal bass, who joined the orchestra in 1976, said he thinks of Laureano as a “musical hero.” He recalled the trumpeter’s impressive debut playing the Hummel Trumpet Concerto with the orchestra in 1982. Neville Marriner was conducting.
“Manny had written his own cadenza. At one point in the middle of the cadenza he did a flourish that ended on an E above high C. He nailed it and the audience went nuts. They had to stop. He looked at Neville as if to say, ‘Should we go on?’ Neville nodded, and they went on. In all these years, that’s the only time I ever saw that happen.
“Clearly, he has taken care of himself,” Schrickel said. “You know, we’re all trying to do these things at the highest possible level. A top football player may have a professional life of four years or, for a basketball player, 10, if he’s lucky, whereas musicians are trying to do these things from the age of 8 or 9 until we’re in our 70s or even later.”
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Laureano has a theory that the constant air exchange involved in playing the trumpet has a positive effect on the body. “I’ve noticed that when I go on vacation, that’s when I get sniffles. It’s because I’m not playing. So you better believe that when I’m retired I’m going to keep playing and doing my martial arts.”
Lazarus points that the various martial arts aren’t necessarily for everyone, however. “I don’t know how many black belts Manny’s got, Lazarus said, laughing. “When I first moved here, Manny invited me to come to the gym with him. It was this martial arts form of kick-boxing. He invited me to join. So I said, ‘If I joined, you would try to kick me in the head? Is that right?’ He said, ‘Yeah, pretty much.’ I said, ‘I think I’ll pass. But I’d be happy to come and watch you,’ And I did a couple times. But I guess I’m a lover, not a fighter.”
Getting a start in New York
Laureano grew up in a small apartment in Spanish (East) Harlem, the younger of two boys whose parents were part of the migration of Puerto Ricans to the U.S. in 1948. About 85 percent settled in New York City. The boy was Manuel until a sixth grade teacher started calling him “Manny.” Laureano’s father, Juan Laureano Flores (Papi), on arriving in New York with no job skills, earned meager wages as a dishwasher but soon found more lucrative employment at a produce packing plant, Vita Foods, where he worked steadily for nearly four decades. Laureano’s mother, Pura Pepita Gómez-Laureano (Mami), eventually found work at a nearby school.
“We were a lower- working-class family, but we never felt poor,” Laureano said. “There was a lot of laughter in our home, a lot of joy, a lot of dancing and singing. Both my parents had beautiful singing voices. Mami was a fabulous cook.” They spoke a version of Spanglish at home, a mix of Spanish and English, though the parents made every effort to speak English in front of the children to encourage them to get along in a country where English was the predominant language.
Manny’s musical life began at summer’s end of his 12th year when he entered Robert F. Wagner Junior High School and was soon moved into an advanced class because of his high reading proficiency scores. At the time it was the only school in the city offering music as a major subject.
“The smartest kids were given string instruments,” Laureano recalled. “I guess I was just dumb enough to play trumpet. So there I was, a 12-year-old gangly kid with glasses and less-than-stellar athletic skills. I was awkward around girls, a misfit. Yet there was this one cool thing I could do: I could play trumpet, and all my energy went into that.”
His biggest influence in those early years was the Mexican trumpet virtuoso, Rafael Mendez, whom he knew only through recordings. “His playing touched something inside me,” Laureano said. “It was the most gorgeous sound. When I was in school, I tried to sound like that.”
He played his first concert as a member of the school orchestra in the spring of 1968. When his parents came backstage afterward to congratulate him, Manny noticed that his father had a little white chord dangling from one ear. He had the Mets game on.
The trumpet became an extension of Manny’s personality and a way for him to communicate with confidence, and right away he showed real talent. Practicing was fun, not an ordeal, and he quickly rose to the top of his junior high trumpet section. In the eighth grade, he was awarded a scholarship to study with New York Philharmonic 4th trumpet Jimmy Smith, who prepared him to win an audition for entrance into the New York High School of Music and Art, a school made famous in the 1980 film “Fame.” He won the audition. By the 11th grade, he was in the school’s top orchestra. A faculty member, Jack Laumer, helped him prepare a successful audition into Juilliard, the renowned performing arts college. He made it.
In high school, Manny met a violinist, Claudette Kostrich, whom he would eventually marry. Claudette says she fell in love with the sound of Manny’s trumpet. “It was one of the most beautiful sounds I’d ever heard.” After hearing him in a rehearsal of “Swan Lake,” she told a friend, “I’m going to marry him.”
Upon graduating from Juilliard, Laureano toured the U.S. with the English progressive rock band Emerson, Lake & Palmer. “It was exciting, the perfect gig for a kid just out of school,” Laureano said. “The first rock concert I attended I played in. The guys, the three soloists, were fabulous players.”
The tour ran out of money, however, and folded in Kansas City. The producers sent the musicians back home to New York on the tour bus. The bright side of that failure was that Laureano, once back in New York, was able to prepare and audition for the principal trumpet position at the Seattle Symphony. He got the job and became principal trumpet at the unusually young age of 22. By then he and Claudette were engaged and planning that they would marry after he had spent a year in Seattle.
He had a lot to learn about doing that job and leading a section, he said. “When I first got the job, I talked too much, but then I learned to listen to people who had been around for a while and knew about the repertoire and many other things. The rest of my musical life has been a balance between knowing when to shut up and when to talk. That’s a prerequisite for any leader of a section.”
A move to Minnesota
Manny and Claudette were married in August 1978. Three years later, Manny auditioned for and won the principal position at the Minnesota Orchestra. When the couple moved to Minnesota, hoping to continue her musical career, Claudette became a freelance violinist and in 1982 she accepted an offer to become orchestra director at the Breck School in Golden Valley. After 29 years in that position, she will retire at the end of the upcoming school year.
The couple’s two children were born during the early Minnesota years: Manuel (Max), who now works in corporate IT sales, and Marcelle (Kiko), an actress and a resident teaching artist at the Children’s Theater Company.
In 1988, initiating a major move in both of their careers, Manny and Claudette became co-artistic directors of the then-floundering Minnesota Youth Symphonies. (MYS). Manny led the 40-piece Symphony, as it was called, and Claudette took on the newly formed Philharmonic. Within three years, the student body had grown from 70 to 300, and soon the MYS was ranked among the leading orchestral youth programs in the U.S. The orchestra’s new president, Isaac Thompson, was in his youth a player in one of the MYS orchestras.
Schrickel was a frequent guest at MYS, coaching the bassists in rehearsals. “When I walked in there I would always see these happy, smiling, enthusiastic faces,” he said. “The bass players always showed up prepared. They knew what they were doing before I said a word, and that’s not always the case when you’re working with students. The number of lives Manny has touched musically is countless.”
Just a year earlier, Laureano had taken on another demanding role, music director of one of the better community orchestras, the Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra, which he led for nine years, finally giving it up in order to spend more time with his kids. In 2012, he took on a similar position with the Bloomington Symphony Orchestra, a position he still maintains.
Over the years, Manny played on all the Minnesota Orchestra recordings from 1982 to 2024 and toured with the orchestra to Europe, Cuba and South Africa. (He always took a single room in hotels so his practicing at all hours wouldn’t disturb others.) Leonard Slatkin, the orchestra’s former principal guest conductor and the founder of Sommerfest, says in “Agradecido” that over time Manny “changed the entire approach of the brass section,” giving it a more “graceful sound.”
“I guess that’s true, though it didn’t happen quickly,” Laureano said. “If I did anything over the years, it was unifying the sound. It was less the sound of individuals and more collective, and I really like that. I’ve always loved that about brass playing.”
Another admirer of Manny’s was Doc Severinsen, the charismatic former music director of “The Tonight Show” who became the orchestra’s pops conductor laureate in 2007 after 14 seasons as principal pops conductor. Interviewed for “Agradecido,” Severinsen said “Manny and I aren’t just comrades in arms. We’re personal friends who share a passion for fearless performance technique, a commitment to physical fitness and a dedication to helping and teaching others.”
“Doc has been a presence throughout my life in terms of the kind of player I always wanted to be,” Laureano said. “Once he started coming here, I learned of his great dedication to making sure he was at the top of his game. The warm-ups, all that stuff, used to drive people backstage out of their minds.”
“Doc’s a fitness fanatic,” Lazarus said. “When I was in college I went to a trumpet conference to do my first audition, and as I was driving in — it was real early in the morning, like 6 a.m. — there was Doc, shirtless, jogging along the side of the highway.”
In 2003, Severinsen and Laureano collaborated on a memorable performance of the premiere of Stephen Paulus’s Concerto for Two Trumpets. “Can you imagine,” Manny recalled, “what it was like when they asked me, ‘How would you like to play a duet with Doc on the premiere of this concerto by Stephen Paulus?’ I said, ‘Am I dead? Is this heaven?’” The result was one of the highlights of that season.
Laureano worked with five music directors during his years with the orchestra. He thought Neville Marriner (1979-1986), who hired him, never quite adjusted to the union rules that guide American orchestras and that, as Marriner himself admitted publicly, he didn’t have it in him to fire one or more of the weaker players. But Laureano liked Marriner personally.
Orchestras and their boards, when looking for a music director, tend to seek and hire the opposite of what they have. If Marriner wasn’t tough enough, his successor, Edo de Waart (1986-1995), was.
“Musicians were afraid of Edo,” said Laureano. “A lot of retirements happened during his time. It wasn’t him so much as his reputation. They saw him as an ax-wielder, and that’s, of course, why the management hired him. Edo challenged you, and I had to respect that. But he was moody. Sometimes he was like your favorite cousin or uncle. Other times, it was like he was angry about something, and he’d take it out on the wrong people. Sometimes he’d take it out on me, and I’d let him know that I didn’t appreciate it. He got the message and then we actually got along quite well.
“And people do change. Think of (Stanislaw) Skrowaczewski (1960-79) who, you know, led rehearsals that drove the musicians nuts sometimes, but later on his role became this elder stateman to be respected. I was happy to see that.”
Eiji Oue (1995-2002), next up, unlike De Waart, didn’t demand much from the orchestra. Standards slipped. “Eiji and I got along very well,” Laureano said. “He left a lot of the technical things like dynamics up to the orchestra to figure out. I think he was a work in progress that never went to fruition.”
Oue’s successor, Osmo Vänskä (2003-2022), was, again, the opposite, demanding almost obsessively about technical and stylistic matters. Under his reign, the orchestra made highly regarded recordings, launched bold tours and achieved the kind of high visibility and renown that surpassed even the acclaim the former Minneapolis Symphony achieved in the ‘30s under Eugene Ormandy.
“Osmo got us an exposure that made people sit up and take notice,” said Laureano.
Thomas Søndergård (2023-present), the current maestro, is a “master manipulator” in Laureano’s view, and he means that as a compliment. “Thomas is capable of getting you to do precisely what he wants while making you think the whole time that’s what you wanted. It’s a gift. Plus, he’s daring. Think of that big, wonderful ‘Turandot’ he did here last spring.”
Laureano plans to be fairly busy during his “retirement” years. For one thing, he wants to work more on martial arts. “For all the reasons I love music, I also love martial arts,” he said. “And I hope to keep on teaching trumpet, and I’m hoping to continue for as long as I can be effective with the Bloomington Symphony.”
As a special gift, on Aug. 18, the day after Manny’s birthday, two of his partners in the trumpet section — Charles Lazarus and Douglas Carlsen — will take their leader to a place he’s never been before: Las Vegas. (A fourth player, Robert Dorer, can’t go.) “It’ll be a blast,” Lazarus said, “and we’re hoping that, as they say, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.”
Carlsen added a final thought about Friday’s concert. “One of our section traditions is to shake hands at the end of every performance. It will be tough when we shake hands for the last time. I know there isn’t anything Manny wouldn’t do for us, and vice versa. It’s been a great ride.”