Gary Karr, a double-bass virtuoso who as a rare soloist nearly from the outset of his long career transformed the underappreciated instrument into a star classical performer, died on July 16 in Victoria, British Columbia. He was 83.
His death, in a hospital, was announced on the website of the International Society of Bassists, which Mr. Karr founded in 1967. The cause was a brain aneurysm.
The double bass normally sits demurely at the orchestra’s side, providing the stolid harmonic foundation for the action above and not calling attention to itself.
Mr. Karr’s idea for it was different. He made the cumbersome bass soar, sing and leap as if it were a violin, becoming one of few bassists in history to successfully pursue a career outside an orchestra.
He played transcriptions of Bach’s cello suites in such a way that they sounded as though Bach had the double bass in mind all along. He performed Paganini with virtuosic agility and a lyrical tone worthy of the 19th-century violin virtuoso himself.
His tone was clear and well-defined, full of vibrato in late romantic works, and eschewed the muddy murkiness typically associated with the bass.
Mr. Karr was the “the virtuoso who has almost single-handedly given the double bass widespread credibility as a solo instrument,” the music critic and broadcaster Robert Sherman wrote in The New York Times in 1981; Mr. Karr’s bass “sings with all the richness of the cello, the warmth of the viola and the agility of the viola,” Time magazine wrote in a 1968 profile.
Major composers like Gunther Schuller and Hans Werner Henze wrote double-bass concertos for him; he performed as a soloist with some of the world’s leading orchestras — the Chicago Symphony, the London Philharmonic, the Montreal Symphony, among others; he made some 93 recordings; and he influenced generations of bass players at the New England Conservatory of Music, Juilliard and other institutions.
All of it was most unusual, a fact which Mr. Karr took in stride with modest pride and undying devotion to his unwieldy bass.
“People expect so little when I come out to play the instrument that, when I do show something, even if they are only a little bit impressed, the contrast between what they had otherwise expected, and that which they witness is marked enough, they think they are being enthusiastic,” he said in an episode of “Camera Three,” an anthology series about the arts, that aired on CBS in 1969.
That was only seven years after Mr. Karr’s breakthrough at a televised performance of Leonard Bernstein’s “Young People’s Concerts,” in which he played Ernest Bloch and “The Swan,” usually a staple of the cello repertoire, from Saint-Saens’s “The Carnival of the Animals.”
“Gary is already at the age of 20 a master of this instrument,” Mr. Bernstein said when introducing him at the concert, in April 1962. “His instrument is a madly difficult and an unusual one for solo playing.”
Mr. Karr’s groundbreaking approach opened up possibilities previously undreamed of, inspiring dozens of bass players, including Larry Wolfe, the assistant principal double bass of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and a former student of Mr. Karr at the New England Conservatory. Mr. Wolfe had seen that concert with Mr. Bernstein.
“All of a sudden I said, ‘that’s what the bass can do.’ It was crucial to me,” Mr. Wolfe said in an interview, adding that the instrument “could play with musicianship, personality, control. Make a statement.”
Mr. Karr’s mastery of a difficult instrument — “the strings are very, very thick in comparison to the others,” Mr. Karr told CBS, and “the pressure we have to exert is enormous” — was often noted by critics. He attributed his physical capacity to athletic abilities inherited from his father, a former semiprofessional baseball player.
Mr. Karr “manages the instrument’s technical problems better than most anyone around, yet, more important, he wants us to take the bass seriously as a musical tool,” Bernard Holland wrote in The New York Times in March 1986, reviewing a recital of Grieg and Schumann transcriptions by Mr. Karr at the 92nd Street Y.
“In both, one felt the range of these transcriptions — in emotion, dynamics and tessitura — and felt them with little sense of compromise,” Mr. Holland wrote. “Mr. Karr makes mistakes in intonation, but they emerge as justifiable chances taken in the name of expressivity.”
A singing tone was essential to Mr. Karr. “The bass, to me, is an opera singer,” he said in a 1993 interview with the music journalist Bruce Duffie. The bass, to me, is the voice that I wish I were. I am a frustrated singer.”
Gary Michael Kornbleit was born on Nov. 20, 1941, in Los Angeles to Joe Kornbleit, who worked in a shoe store and also played the bass in dance bands, and Miriam (Nadel) Kornbleit, who played the oboe and English horn in the California Junior Symphony and in movie studio orchestras. His mother’s family had emigrated from Russia around the time of World War I, and her father was an important early teacher for Gary. In 1944, the family changed its last name to Karr.
Mr. Karr told the BBC in the 1981 documentary “Amazing Bass” that he had come from “seven generations of double bassists,” including his grandfather, uncle and cousins. “I was surrounded by all this double bass sound,” he said.
He attended Fairfax Senior High School in Los Angeles, studied double bass at the University of Southern California with Herman Reinshagen while playing as a soloist with area orchestras in the early 1960s, and attended Juilliard under the tutelage of the famed bassist Stuart Sankey. His instrument — a 1611 Amati — was given to him by the widow of the great double bass virtuoso and conductor Serge Koussevitzky.
Mr. Karr became a Canadian citizen in 1997 and retired to Victoria, where he taught at the conservatory and resided with his lifelong partner and accompanist, the pianist and organist Harmon Lewis. He was diagnosed with inoperable cancer earlier this year and gave his final public performance in March at the opening of the Gary Karr Library in Toronto, where he played Pablo Casals’s “El Cant dels Ocells.”
Mr. Karr leaves no immediate survivors.
Mr. Karr often engaged in restrained self-mocking at the lowly status of the bass, even as he rebelled against that stigma. “We’ve been around a long time,” he told Mr. Duffie, the music journalist, in 1993. “It’s about time we had a little bit of attention.”
Adam Nossiter has been bureau chief in Kabul, Paris, West Africa and New Orleans, and is now a Domestic Correspondent on the Obituaries desk.
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