Orin O’Brien is the daughter of Hollywood stars, but she never craved the limelight herself, opting instead for a life of anonymity as a humble double bassist. But when, in 1966, she joined the New York Philharmonic under the baton of none other than Leonard Bernstein, she was the only woman in the orchestra, at which point the spotlight was unavoidable. Director Molly O’Brien, Orin’s niece, profiles her aunt in the Oscar-nominated short film The Only Girl in the Orchestra (Netflix).
Orin was taught bass by the celebrated bassist Frederick Zimmerman and played with the New York City Ballet, the Metropolitan Opera, and the American Symphony Orchestra before joining the New York Philharmonic. She had male friends already in situ in the orchestra who “watched her back,” director Molly O’Brien stresses, but the orchestra (and the world of classical music in general) was, at that time, a hotbed of sexism. “If she is attractive I can’t perform with her. If she is not, I won’t,” one orchestra member is quoted in the film. Even the revered conductor Zubin Mehta stated that “I just don’t think women should be in an orchestra,” adding that “she [a female player] is just not as good at 60 as a man is at 60.”
Yes, Orin O’Brien was determined and doughty, but also modest and reflective. “Everybody can’t be a general – somebody has to be a soldier,” she tells Molly in the film. “And to me, part of the pleasure of playing in an orchestra is that you can enjoy what everybody else is doing.”
“The orchestra is 50% women now, at least – if not more,” Molly adds. “But I do think that the survival skills of a woman in 1966 are going to be different than they are now. As you get older…you become more confident and you’re not afraid of not being liked as much. You just prioritise a little bit better when you’re younger. I don’t want to speak for Orin, but I think I can say that she needed to navigate things very carefully and be like water around the rocks and be in the background when she had to, and sort of just skirt controversy.”
Orin’s parents were Hollywood stars George O’Brien and Marguerite Churchill and she lived a peripatetic life, attending 10 different schools by the time she was 11. In her teens she had to suffer the divorce of her parents, and found succour in the music of Bach and Beethoven. “Music helps us organise our emotions,” Orin says in the film. At the age of 16 she asked to join her school orchestra and was told there were four double basses in the school cupboard. If she learned the bass and practised every day, then she could play with her fellow pupils. At which point her future trajectory was determined.
Molly initially wanted to make a feature documentary about Orin’s story back in 2015, when she planned to follow her for a year, shooting her at work. So she packed all of her equipment in to a “50-pound backpack” to accompany Orin on a European tour across numerous capitals. But a decade ago, the business of being a full-time musician on the road, with all the attendant responsibilities, as well as teaching commitments at three conservatoires (including the Juillard in New York), proved too much for Orin. “She never allowed me to take the camera out of the backpack,” says Molly of her aunt’s request to suspend filming.
But Molly was determined to one day tell her aunt’s story. “I was waking up every morning with a voice in the back of my head saying, ‘I am going to make this film.’”
The opportunity to tell that story came during the pandemic. “The last concert she played, she didn’t know it was the last concert she played,” says the director. “During the pandemic, she didn’t go on stage for over a year and decided then to retire at 84. And that’s the point when she said ‘yes’ to me…I was [then] able to conceive a film about that transition from being a full-time professional musician to retiring. She continues to teach, but how do you leave the stage? How do you create a meaningful and purposeful life after your professional career is over? And I think for her, that’s teaching. So there’s a big element in the film about teaching and legacy and passing on what you know.”
The Only Girl in the Orchestra is also a celebration of the double bass, which we see played in ensemble on stage or in close-up during duets, or gracing living rooms and musical showrooms like magnificent wooden sculptures. We also hear its sonorous voice throughout the film in the magnificent slow movement of Beethoven’s 7th symphony and the Largo movement of Dvorak’s New World Symphony.
The director remembers when, aged 11, she visited Orin in her New York apartment. “Walking in there were these six broad-shouldered [instruments]…to me, they looked like handsome Italian men,” she says. “I mean, they’re just gorgeous. The Duke, which is her broadest shouldered instrument, is English. It was made when King George III was around. It is older than the United States of America. It’s remarkable.”
But a double bass is taller than it is wide, and therefore not so well suited to regular cinema and TV aspect ratios. “It would almost be easier to make the film for TikTok,” Molly laughs. At first she had what the “misguided idea” to lock the camera onto a tripod make the film a study in elegance. But together with cinematographer Martina Radwan she decided upon an altogether more sensuous approach, to “liberate the camera…to move across the bodies of these beautiful objects.”
“There’s something about the double bass. You don’t just hear it, you feel it. It vibrates. You have to feel it, otherwise you’re not really hearing it. So there’s a physicality to it,” she adds. But it is also an instrument that refuses to demand the limelight, unlike some of the more skittish or self-absorbed instruments of the orchestra. “It does take a back seat. So this film isn’t an attempt to push it out into the spotlight. I mean, metaphorically, we’ve all had to play the double bass. And it feels good when you’re acknowledged, even though you’re not the soloist.”
Now the film is nominated for Best Short Documentary at the upcoming Oscars.
“It’s remarkable. I feel like I won the lottery,” says Molly. “We made a film about an 87-year-old woman who plays the double bass. I never ever in my life thought that it would be resonating with so many people and speaking across the generations. You’re not the only person who’s told me that you are watching it with your daughter, or your mother or your grandmother. I set out to make a film about Orin’s philosophy of life and her philosophy of music. I didn’t think it would resonate this widely. And I’m absolutely thrilled that it has. It means that that little niggly thought in the back of my head in the morning saying, ‘make this film, make this film, make this film’ was correct. I’m glad I listened to it.”
