MED professor Jeffrey Berman plays clarinet for a cause
MED professor Jeffrey Berman plays clarinet for a cause.
Jeffrey Berman, a professor of medicine at the School of Medicine, taps into his musical talent at the end of the workday by playing clarinet with the Boston medical community’s Longwood Symphony Orchestra. The orchestra’s musicians are health-care professionals as well as people from the teaching, business, and arts professions. They perform four annual concerts at the New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall and a summer concert at the Hatch Shell on the Esplanade.
The proceeds of each performance are donated to a greater Boston medical charity through the orchestra’s Healing Arts of Music program. The season’s second concert, on Saturday, December 3, at 8 p.m. at Jordan Hall, is slated to benefit the Massachusetts Consortium for Children with Special Health Care Needs, a program of New England SERVE. The performance will feature works by composers Arthur Butterworth, Johannes Brahms, and Benjamin Britten.
“I am continually amazed at the incredible talent of people who are avocational players with demanding vocations,” says Berman, who is also the director of the Sarcoidosis Clinic at Boston Medical Center, where he facilitates research on lung immunology. He is the chief of pulmonary medicine and associate chief of medicine at the Boston Veterans Administration Hospital as well. In his free time, he enjoys sculpting metal on his brother-in-law’s farm.
Berman regards the orchestra as an oasis. The “atmosphere is amazingly pleasant and unconservatory-like,” he says.