Ellen Cockerham Riccio
It’s noon and unseasonably chilly on this gloomy, overcast spring Saturday. Heavy gray clouds threaten rain.
Ellen Cockerham Riccio sets up her music stand at the edge of a no-frills pavilion with open sides and a concrete floor, a gathering spot for this modest Mechanicsville suburb. On one side an empty field stretches toward distant white-fuzzed cattails. On the other is a small unused playground. Collapsible camp chairs make a ragged line a few feet away.
Time to begin. Her small audience, about a dozen members of the Walsh family, settles into camping chairs.
Riccio raises her violin to her shoulder. It’s her backup instrument, one she’s had since childhood. Her primary violin is too delicate for this sort of thing — at almost 250 years old, it’s a miracle it is as sound as it is.
When the pandemic struck last year, Riccio, principal second violinist with the Richmond Symphony, found herself adrift. COVID-19 meant canceled concerts and shuttered performance spaces. Money was tight. On impulse she decided to hire herself out for solo violin concerts in backyards.
She expected a handful of gigs for well-heeled symphony patrons. Instead, she’s been deluged by requests from people shut off from the world. Elderly couples, families, neighborhood associations, someone making a marriage proposal (successful). Even with a break for winter, in less than a year she has done at least 165 of these outdoor solo performances.
Today is a kind of homecoming. In April 2020, just about a year earlier, the Walshes hired Riccio for a concert. Youngest son Jonathan, then a senior at VCU, had spotted a recommendation on Reddit.
The national lockdown kept some of the family from attending that performance. All that spring it rained and rained. In a downpour the five Walshes — anxious, worried — hunkered on a covered porch in their Mechanicsville home, lit candles and listened to Riccio play.
A year on, Jonathan, graduated and an electrical engineer in Northern Virginia, has set up a return booking. Today all six Walsh kids are here: Mark, Andrew, James, Luke, Jonathan and Madeleine, ages ranging from 34 to 16, from as far away as New Mexico, along with partners and spouses and two little ones and three cheerful dogs.
Riccio plays a backyard concert this spring.
Riccio begins with Tchaikovsky, a perennial crowd-pleaser. Then Shostakovich, who suffered through ALS and poliomyelitis and the homicidal whims of Joseph Stalin.
The family applauds. The baby burbles.
Next, a tune by Florence Price. African American, born in 1887, Price had died in obscurity. Then in 2009 a collection of her unpublished compositions was discovered in a dilapidated and abandoned house. A miracle, musicologists said.
Riccio continues: a haunting 2020 piece by Reena Esmail that draws on Indian musical traditions. It’s hard not to think of India, savaged by this plague that has killed millions. Esmail was inspired by the 14th-century Persian poet Hafez: “When the violin / Can forgive the past / It starts singing.”
The final aching notes die away. One of the Walsh sons whispers, “Wow.”
Concert over, the Walshes rise from camp chairs and head for pizza. There’s more food at this performance than at last year’s, says Laura Walsh, the mom. She works for Hanover County Schools. “And we were still fearful last year.” Vaccines have helped fix that.
Madeleine, at 16 the youngest sibling, says she’s found good in the lockdown. Time with her parents and her baby niece, now 2; every couple of weeks, visits with her best friend.
“I didn’t used to think of myself as much of an introvert,” Madeleine says. Now she’s not so sure. She mostly likes online classes. She might give up ballet, a longtime passion; next school year she will start taking courses for college credit.
Riccio sits at one of the shelter’s wooden picnic tables. She admits that in the opening weeks of the shutdown she wondered if audiences would even miss classical music. In 2013 Riccio founded and led Classical Revolution RVA, a nonprofit that presents classical concerts in nontraditional settings. In April 2018, almost exactly three years ago, she resigned, exhausted and depleted.
But something clicked when she played for the Walshes last April. “I realized I was playing for people who were not Richmond Symphony goers,” Riccio says. “It just reframed what I was doing. I realized that by making music so accessible, possible for people to have in their lives, I was going to be able to reach new people.”
Over the past year performances like today’s have helped her regain faith in the power of music that has survived so long through so much, she says.
“Classical music has the ability to reach right into you and make you feel things you don’t expect,” Riccio muses. “It’s like what it’s like to be human.” It’s not unusual for her listeners, overwhelmed, to burst into tears.
Riccio rubs her shoulder. Earlier in the day she received her second COVID-19 vaccination. Feels fine so far, she says.
The spring day has warmed; the rain somehow has held off. The three dogs are snuffling in the field. The toddler and her young mother are playing in the little playground. In trees bright with new leaves a chorus of birds is singing, singing.
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