I first met Fontaine Laing in San Diego by way of chamber music, through a mutual friend, violinist Micky Goulian. Fontaine, a fine pianist and avid chamber musician, had secured a regular gig playing baroque music on her harpsichord at Galerie Eclipse, an art gallery in Olivenhain owned by the honorary German Consul to San Diego. In 2004 I was invited to play cello with Fontaine, Micky, and flutist Stephanie Bazirjian for a concert at Galerie Eclipse followed by wine and German cookies. Stephanie, Fontaine and I enjoyed playing together so much that we formed a trio, Trio Fontaine.

Looking back through my collection of concert programs from our performances, Stephanie, Fontaine, and I worked through a lot of the repertoire for that combination, giving around five or six performances a year from 2004 through 2011. Friends got to know about ‘Trio Fontaine’ and actively helped scout out music for our group to play. I remember the thrill of finding Elisenda Fabregas’ ‘Voces de mi Tierra’ for flute, cello, and piano in the bargain bin at Patelson’s music store (sadly, now closed) behind Carnegie Hall on a trip to New York for an Associated Chamber Music Players (ACMP) Board meeting.

Fontaine had retired to Encinitas just north of San Diego only a year earlier from Detroit, Michigan, where she taught and played piano professionally. I don’t know why she chose to move to San Diego but she was an active member of the Swami’s Self Realization Fellowship, and her arrival was the local chamber musicians’ gain. Fontaine still had an active teaching schedule and she slotted her many students in between chamber music sessions in her garden studio behind her house. Fontaine played with so many people and was loved and greatly respected by us all for her formidable talent.

Fontaine was fond of small dogs – when I first met her, she had two little tan ‘girls’ whom she had trained to ‘sing’ (howl) on cue when she blew her pitch pipe. Although Fontaine had a strong affinity for flutists, her dogs did not feel the same way about either flutes or violins and had to be banned from the studio while we were rehearsing to avoid their vocal participation. Happily, my cello did not seem to bother them. After they both passed away, she rescued two more small dogs – one from a woman she met in the parking lot outside the animal shelter and another from a mutual musician friend. She also had a habit of rescuing human waifs and strays – the whole time I knew, her she had lodgers or housemates living in her spare room and later also in her converted garage – people in need of a home whom she had met through the Self Realization Fellowship and generously taken in.

A chamber music session at Fontaine’s always began with tea and elegant pastries from the French Bakery down the road. She had a kitchen cupboard filled with all manner of teabags and one of those Japanese water boilers that delivers water heated to precisely the right temperature for the perfect tea. We would sit around her kitchen table and sip our tea from one of her delicate floral bone china cups and saucers and wipe our fingers on elegant paper napkins. Fontaine’s kitchen was always filled with flowers – she took Ikebana classes for many years. She was very well read – she took the New York Times daily – was very articulate, and a great storyteller with a wonderful sense of humor.

Eventually we would glance at the kitchen clock, push back our chairs, and move into the studio to rehearse. Fontaine was a fearless sight reader – a rare gift – and she also had an encyclopedic knowledge of the chamber music repertoire, having studied with Menahem Pressler, founder of the Beaux Arts Piano Trio. We often had to ask her to slow down a little, especially when we were learning a new piece. Looking back, I am amazed at how much new repertoire we learned and how many concerts we gave, given that we all worked full time day jobs.

Stephanie, Fontaine, and I attended a weekend chamber music workshop in Santa Barbara together during our years as a trio, receiving professional coaching to polish our repertoire before performances. We were also coached once (with partial funding from ACMP) by Tom Stauffer, then cello faculty at SDSU. These experiences much improved our interpretations of the music and our performances

As well as gigs at Galerie Eclipse, we performed at the Encinitas Public Library, the Coronado Public Library, and often in Fontaine’s studio, sometimes for meetings of her Mu Phi Epsilon sorority, other times to an audience of family, friends, and neighbors. I remember a rehearsal in 2005 when Fontaine told us her husband Bob, who was wheelchair-bound as a result of diabetes, had passed away the night before. We were stunned. Remarkably, she chose to go ahead with our rehearsal to take her mind off her sadness. Another memorable performance was when she and I played the Grieg Piano and Cello Sonata for the Mu Phi ladies. The harmonies sounded a bit unusual and I marveled that Grieg wrote such “modern” music. It turned out that Fontaine had accidentally turned two pages in the score and was playing the development in the same rhythm but in a different key! After the repeat, she realized what she had done and skipped to the right place in the music. I don’t think the audience noticed a thing (unless they were just being very polite). Fontaine had an amazing collection of performance attire with tops, scarves, and sweaters in bright jewel colors. No boring black for her!

After seven years of playing together, Stephanie moved back to New York City, and we dissolved Trio Fontaine, which was hard on all of us after so many years enjoying playing together. With flutist Valerie Chereskin, Fontaine and I formed a new trio, ‘Three’s Harmony,’ and I also subsequently gave two concerts with Fontaine and clarinetist Anita Iyer. Fontaine was also an active member of the Klavier Club and enjoyed playing four-hand piano.

I was very involved in ACMP all the time I played with Fontaine, and she was always game to participate in the Play-Ins that I organized, and willing to read whatever music (including Brahms’s fiendish piano parts) was put in front of her. In the early 2000s, she memorably played the harpsichord continuo parts at my annual December “Brandenburg Bash,” where we moved all the furniture into the garden to make space for a chamber orchestra to read through all six Brandenburg Concerti in one afternoon.

A feminist and a Democrat, Fontaine also had a keen interest in performing the music of unjustly neglected women composers. From Clara Schumann and Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, to Marcelle Manziarly, Elisenda Fabregas, and Cecile Chaminade, we enjoyed exploring and promoting this repertoire together. I think the last time we performed together was in a concert celebrating women composers in 2017, when she was 84 years old. Fontaine continued to play the piano into her 90’s, until six months or so before she passed away at the age of 93.

Fontaine will be remembered fondly by all who knew her, and her passing is a great loss not only to her friends, but to the chamber music world. It was a privilege to know her and play with her.