Violinist Andrew Dawes helped make Orford String Quartet a Canadian institution

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This past summer, the instrument long owned and elegantly played by the great Canadian violinist Andrew Dawes was officially renamed in his honour. The violin was made in 1770 by the Italian luthier Giovanni Battista Guadagnini. When Mr. Dawes’s father purchased the violin for his teenaged son in 1957 it was known as the “de Long Tearse,” after onetime owner Margaret de Long Tearse. Sixty-five years later, fiddle now goes by the “Dawes, de Long Tearse” sobriquet.

Mr. Dawes, the retired co-founder of the internationally acclaimed Orford String Quartet, was delighted with the news. “This is an incredible honour,” he told fellow player Robert Uchida. “To have such a violin bear my name is not something I ever imagined.”

The humble reaction was typical of Mr. Dawes, according to Mr. Uchida. “How could he say he was surprised that they named the violin after him? He had played that violin for over 50 years and was first violinist with one of the great string quartets. But that was Andy, an amazingly modest man.”

Mr. Dawes, a silvery-sounding violinist and the unaffected son of an Alberta rancher, died of prostate cancer on Oct. 30, in Aldearrubia, Spain. He was 82.

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Although Mr. Dawes taught and mentored at universities across the country and played an integral role in the success of the Banff International String Quartet Competition, he will always be remembered as the refined yet intense principal violinist with the Orford String Quartet. For more than quarter century with Canada’s leading chamber music ensemble, he performed on six continents and in every region of this country. The Juno-winning group premiered more than 50 Canadian works, made countless radio broadcasts and released more than 50 records.

The Orford first came together in the summer of 1965 at the Jeunesses musicales of Canada summer music camp at Mount Orford Provincial Park in Quebec. (The classical music academy is now known as Orford Music.)

The four Orford members were still under 30 years old when they made their New York debut at the Carnegie Recital Hall on Nov. 23, 1967. In his review of the Orford’s program of Haydn, Bartok and Ravel, New York Times critic Donal Henahan thought highly enough of the ensemble to add them to a list of a half-dozen “absolutely world-class” young groups currently reviving the chamber quartet species: “Its tone was homogeneous, every man took his rightful turn in keeping the thematic materials flying, and, except for a negligible moment or two, intonation remained pure and sweet.”

For more than a quarter century until the ensemble disbanded in 1991, Mr. Dawes and the Orford kept thematic materials flying, tour itineraries full, and accolades and awards coming.

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Mr. Dawes in particular was known as a workaholic who practised daily for hours even while on vacation. There was a reason why the family camping tent was so tall. “It was like a circus tent, with fringes,” said Adriana Dawes, one of his two daughters. “But it allowed him to stand up as he played.”

In 2002, Mr. Dawes told The Globe and Mail he didn’t ever recall a time he wasn’t nervous before a performance. The admission would have come as a surprise to any musician who had ever played with him. “Before we went on stage, Andy would be out in the hallway doing tai chi, zoning out into some other place,” said Denis Brott, cellist with the Orford from 1980 to ‘88. “He had a peacefulness, an inner strength and an ability to detach.”

The Orford rehearsed intensively. Using a reel-to-reel tape recorder, Mr. Dawes would slow the playback to half speed. “You would hear every single imperfection of intonation,” Mr. Brott recalled. “It was like looking under a magnifying glass. I had never worked that way before – it changed my life in terms of how I practised and how I thought.”

When Mr. Dawes wasn’t fiddling, his hands were busy as a tinkerer who built a cedar-strip canoe. Late in life, he fulfilled his dream to own a sailboat. With Karen Dawes (née Whately), his piano-teacher wife of nearly 50 years, he cruised the coast of British Columbia in a 30-footer.

A contemplative man, Mr. Dawes took a spiritual approach to his vocation. “I often felt that music, if you do it just right, you peek at paradise,” he said in the 2013 National Film Board short Dynamic Range.

In 1990, saying the decision was “one of the hardest of my entire life,” Mr. Dawes announced he would leave the Orford the following year to do more teaching and solo performing. Rather than replace its first violinist, the quartet called it a day after taking its final bows on July 28, 1991, at the Music at Sharon festival north of Toronto.

In an afternoon concert, the quartet reprised the exact Haydn, Prokofiev and Mendelssohn pieces it had performed for its very first concert in 1965. Mr. Dawes and second violinist Kenneth Perkins were the two remaining original members who revisited that inaugural program.

Mr. Dawes had never thought of the Orford as an institution during its illustrious lifespan. “It was always just a group of people who wanted to play chamber music,” he said in 1991. “It’s only now that I see that it did mean more for many people outside the group.”

In 1992, Mr. Dawes and Mr. Perkins were invested as Members of the Order of Canada. Among Mr. Dawes’s post-Orford projects was a well-received 2002 recording of Beethoven sonatas for piano and violin with pianist Jane Coop.

Mr. Dawes was diagnosed with focal dystonia in 2006. The neurological condition affected his hands and ended his 59 years of performing.

In 2009, the New Orford String Quartet was formed as an all-star pick-up ensemble named to honour Orford Music and the original quartet. For New Orford violinist Jonathan Crow, the old Orford with Mr. Dawes was a “huge inspiration” to a kid from British Columbia.

“We hadn’t had a group that had been famous on the world stage as they were,” said Mr. Crow, concertmaster with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. “Andrew and the quartet were trailblazers, and without them there wouldn’t have been someone for us to look for to see how it is you can make that kind of career.”

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Andrew Albert Dawes was born Feb. 7, 1940, in High River, Alta., to Arthur and Lena Mae Dawes (née Hill). His father was a cattle rancher and his mother was a homemaker with a passion for music. All three of their children would become professional musicians.

Growing up on a ranch, Mr. Dawes developed a life-long love of horses. He even rode one to a one-room schoolhouse in Midnapore, Alta. “There’s actually a kind of affinity or similarity between working with a horse and working with a violin,” he would later say. “In each case, you cannot dominate it.”

He started playing the violin at age seven when his mother enrolled him in music classes at Mount Royal University in Calgary. He studied with Clayton Hare initially in Calgary and later in Portland, Ore. In 1957, he moved to Saskatoon to live and work with Murray Adaskin, head of music at the University of Saskatchewan and conductor of the Saskatoon Symphony Orchestra.

On the advice of the great Polish-American violinist Isaac Stern, Mr. Dawes completed his training in the early 1960s with Lorand Fenyves in Geneva, where in 1964 he received the Prix de virtuosité with the highest marks awarded to that date. One year earlier, he and his pianist-sister Marylou took third prize in the Munich duo competition.

Mr. Dawes followed Mr. Fenyves to Orford, where the Orford String Quartet was formed with the encouragement of the Orford Music founder Gilles Lefebvre. The group was comprised of violist Terence Helmer, cellist Marcel Saint-Cyr and second violinist Kenneth Perkins (who had also studied with Mr. Fenyves in Switzerland).

Despite the quartet’s considerable success over its 26-year career, the members survived on their teaching salaries at the University of Toronto. String quartets are an expensive undertaking in Canada because markets for chamber music are spread over great distances. “In a good year, they each made $35,000 or so from performances,” said Peter Sever, who managed the group in the late 1970s and 1980s. “Andy made a good middle-class living.”

A portion of the quartet’s income came from the Canada Council for the Arts. “Canada was good to the Orford, and the Orford was good to Canada,” Mr. Sever said.

With financial sustainability came sacrifices. Once, when his wife was pregnant, Mr. Perkins was still expected to be on the road when the birth took place – “no question,” Mr. Dawes said later.

For the Orford, illness was an inconvenience, not a cause for rescheduling. The quartet cancelled just one performance in its time together, according to Mr. Dawes. “I remember one concert when [violist Mr. Helmer] was so sick, that at the end he burst into tears immediately after and went straight into the infirmary.”

In the 1980s, the Orford released an acclaimed series of compact disc recordings of the complete Beethoven quartets on the Los Angeles-based Delos label. The recordings took place in a pair of Toronto churches, including one in the city’s Beach neighbourhood where Glenn Gould had practised as a child. The sessions were meticulous, laborious undertakings, often happening from midnight to dawn to avoid traffic noise. Because of repeated takes, it could take as much as an hour to record two minutes of music.

After the Orford dissolved, Mr. Dawes enjoyed a decade-long musical partnership with Calgary-raised Ms. Coop, who found that the sophisticated violinist had a grounded sensibility. “I think because of his cowboy upbringing he had a bearing about him that was so lacking in artifice,” the pianist said. “We’d be rehearsing, and he’d say, ‘Okay, Jane, let’s run ‘er again,’ but then he would pick up the violin and play like a god.”

At a performance with Ms. Coop in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley, Mr. Dawes fell while stepping down from the stage during intermission. “He instinctively curled his body around his violin to protect it,” Ms. Coop recalled. “The audience gasped in horror, but he picked himself up, went backstage and later played the second half of the concert.”

In 2013, Mr. Dawes was given the Governor General’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Five years later, he sold his violin. It is now played by Mr. Uchida, concertmaster of the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra. Corresponding regularly with his fellow violinist by e-mail, Mr. Dawes would ask about his old instrument. He even travelled to Edmonton to watch Mr. Uchida play it in person. This summer Mr. Dawes sent him a note:

“Did I tell you that when I heard you play, I realized that I didn’t own the fiddle, but I was allowing it to come to life, and that it needed fiddlers like you and me to do so? It is a true symbiotic relationship: One needs as much as the other.”

Predeceased by his first wife, Mr. Dawes leaves his second wife, Isabel Vila; daughters, Debra and Adriana; and three grandchildren.