It is an exuberant expression. Effervescent — possibly even enraptured.

Which raises the question:

Why is this man smiling?

 One might also be moved to inquire why Rob Diggins sways and swirls so energetically as he performs music written hundreds of years ago. Diggins’ yoga-honed body all but lists as he dances with “Mr. Richards,” his 126-year-old violin. Sometimes his movement is so vigorous that it seems his bow might impale whichever Portland Baroque Orchestra musician happens to be sitting nearest to him.

Why is he smiling, and swinging along with composers who almost certainly did not foresee such musical athleticism?

His face takes on an impish quality. Weeks have passed since Diggins was asked such a silly question.

“Because it’s groovy,” he replies.

(Which raises the question: When did you last hear Bach, Handel, Telemann or any of those other Baroque superstar-dudes described as “groovy?”)

---

            Rob Diggins will be a featured soloist Feb. 15-16 at Portland Baroque Orchestra’s D’amore concert, led by guest conductor and oboist Debra Nagy.

---

Diggins, the youngest of six children raised in Southern California, was 4 ½ years old the first time a violin was officially  placed in his hands. All the other Diggins kids played violin, and evidently little Robbie had had a pass at it himself, for when the pre-kindergartner slid the bow over the strings for the first official time, real music emerged.

By age 7, he was following several siblings to study with the legendary and fearsome piano instructor Alice Schoenfeld, who had emigrated from Europe to Los Angeles. His lessons began each Sunday at 8 a.m., and on a good traffic day, the drive from the Diggins family home in Topanga Canyon (a community now heavily damaged by January’s wave of greater Los Angeles wildfires) to Schoenfeld’s studio in Pasadena took an hour.

Schoenfeld “took mostly prodigies,” Diggins said—young children who demonstrated exceptional ability. She was fierce, requiring her students to practice at least two hours a day, although “most of the kids were practicing way more than that.” Diggins said it never occurred to him to resent the early Sunday mornings or the grueling schedule. He never thought to wonder why other boys his age were out playing baseball or catching frogs while he was studying music.

“I never even questioned it,” he said.

Schoenfeld, who died in 2019 at age 98, was so intense that “she kind of frightened me,” Diggins remembered. Her training was meticulous, focusing on the elusive quality called tone.

“We would spend the entire hour playing four notes over and over again,” he said.

“Higher!” Schoenfeld would command. Or, “Lower!”

Diggins studied with Schoenfeld up until one “rather unfortunate day” when he was 10 years old. He was supposed to be preparing for a recital, but he found Schoenfeld to be more nervous and even crankier than usual. “She was tearing into me,” Diggins said. She ordered her young student to go upstairs and keep practicing until he got the material right.

“As I walked to my violin case, my lips started quivering. The next moment, I was out the door, bawling,” he said.

Omar Diggins, Rob’s dad, felt terrible, his son said. “But he said when you fall off a horse, get back on.” He told his son to show up, play the recital, and afterward they could go get ice cream at Farrell’s.

But soon after that, Diggins switched to a new teacher. Joaquin Chassman, the concert master of the NBC Orchestra, was as kind and understanding as Schoenfeld was harsh and unforgiving. “He was, like, perfect for me,” Diggins said.

“He was about practical stuff,” said Diggins. “Alice was about producing show horses, people who would play solo and win competitions. He was teaching me about becoming a well-rounded musician.”

Embracing that sense of possibility—the notion that in sun-streaked California, his kids could flourish and exceed the limitations of life on an Ontario farm—was firmly in Omar Diggins’ mind when he sold the farm, packed the family into a brand-new 1957 Chevy and headed as far west as the North American continent could take him.  Two of his brothers had already decamped to southern California, where the newly burgeoning aerospace industry was fueling a strong local economy.

“He really had this vision, hoping that his children could prosper in Los Angeles,” said Rob, the only Diggins child to be born in California.

Omar Diggins was a talented trombone player who also played saxophone. His own father, William Walter Diggins, played traditional Celtic tunes on his fiddle. Omar Diggins’ fondness for the recordings of Yehudi Menuhin and Fritz Kreisler may help explain his determination to turn all his children into violin players.  When the Diggins clan was home practicing, “sometimes there were four violins playing at the same time,” Rob remembered.

By way of entertainment, Omar and Elsie Diggins hosted chamber music parties — gatherings for friends and neighbors that they called musicales. “My family, they were hams,” said Rob. “I was used to seeing performances at home that were completely burlesque.”

This occasionally bizarre behavior seemed perfectly normal: “I thought that was what everybody did.” He let out a small laugh: “Nothing was sacred.”

Meanwhile, it was not only in music that little Robbie excelled. When he got to kindergarten, his teacher discovered that Rob could already read and write. After she moved him up to first grade, the new teacher threw some arithmetic problems at him, and then swiftly promoted him, at age 5, to second grade.
           

By the time he was about 10, Diggins was placing in the top ranks of international competitions. With his older brothers and sister—and sometimes his dad, who had taken up viola—he was also playing with local orchestras around Los Angeles.

“With one call, they would get three violins and one viola,” he said.

It was at one such concert that his brother Michael gave him advice that continues to serve him. “ ‘Always look at the conductor,’ “ Michael told him, “and if you make a mistake, keep going.’ “

But if we learned nothing else from that well-known philosopher, Puff the Magic Dragon, we know this: A dragon lives forever, but not so little boys.  Adolescence hit Diggins with full force by the time he entered Taft High School. He started playing jazz violin and listening to rock-n-roll. He discovered Frank Herbert’s Dune and devoured the shamanistic works of Carlos Castaneda. He also “got into a lot of psychedelics.” And right about then, his father was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer. He began to question all the strenuous years of musical training. Shouldn’t he be preparing to do something responsible, like becoming a doctor, or a lawyer or a scientist?

 He started attending protests, even playing alongside Jackson Browne at one big rally. He was in the audience when Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda spoke at the Hollywood Bowl.

“I decided that I actually wanted to do something, not just play music,” Diggins said.

So off he went to Cal Poly Humboldt, determined to save the world by studying oceanography. In short order, three things happened: A) He fell in love with Northern California. (Diggins still lives in Humboldt County, maybe 80 miles from the Oregon border.) B) His father died. C) His mother packed up her possessions and moved back to Ontario.

And there was one more momentous event. Music had never fully seeped out of Diggins’ system. He had a couple of elder mentors who told him he should leave all that science-y stuff to other people.

“Use music,” they admonished, “to give back to society.”

Opportunity soon bonked Diggins on the head in the form of two years of studying in The Hague. He played with the Royal Conservatory, with the renowned Belgian conductor Philippe Herreweghe at the baton. He also played under the direction of Ton Koopman (who played a key advisory role in PBO’s early years), alongside violinist Jaap Ter Linden and violinist-violist Sigiswald Kuijken. (Possibly not familiar names in every household, Diggins conceded. “But for people who know early music, they’ll know those names.”)

For Diggins, the experience brought a kind of epiphany.

“We were playing a concert at Versailles,” he began, oblivious both to the rather stunning honor of performing at Versailles, and to the fact that Versailles is a long, long way from Southern California or Humboldt County. “We’re in the royal chapel there, and we’re playing music that was composed to be played there.”

Specifically, “baroque music from 1680.” One important composition from that era was “Membra Jesu Nostri,” composed in 1680 by Dieterich Buxtehude. “Membra Jesu Nostri” is a musical meditation on Jesus’ crucifixion that examines His suffering on the cross by way of different body parts. Buxtehude — born in Denmark, or maybe Germany; borders were fluid in the 17^th century — was so influential that in 1705, Bach is said to have walked more than 200 miles to learn from him.

For Diggins, the confluence of playing deeply religious music in the setting where it was intended to be played was his introduction to “ecstatic spirituality,” the sense of intense connection to a spiritual realm through the power of music. Repetitive chants and hymns are used in many religions to bring about this heightened spiritual state. Sufi music, with its whirling dances, also can convey feelings of euphoria and awe. And then there were the Grateful Dead and Talking Heads, where audiences swore they had a spiritual connection to the sounds they heard. Indeed, ecstatic spirituality can be so all-consuming that a performer becomes part of the music, not a mere conduit.

That, in fact, is Rob Diggins, who subsequently began including the phrase “devotional musician” in his official biography. Whether he is playing jazz or music from Buxtehude’s day, “my favorite experience is performance, whatever the genre, where I lose myself, as it were. It is thrilling to feel the various parts of the piece move through me.”

Diggins may be the most visible — or visceral, as he prefers to call it — of the PBO’s 14 or so string players, but whatever powerful force is driving him is definitely contagious. PBO musicians often nod or smile at one another. With artistic director Julian Perkins turning to face featured musicians or waving a hand in the air for emphasis — all the while playing his harpsichord — it is almost as if they are sharing some secret story.

“I think everybody has fully committed themselves to what we are doing,” Diggins said. “We are absolutely thrilled that each of us is playing a part in this glorious thing.”

When he trades glances with Perkins, “I can see from his face, this is no longer Julian and Rob. It is like, this is what the music looks like.”

Which could be a more roundabout explanation for why Diggins looks so other-worldly-happy when he is performing.

 “I think I can’t keep myself from smiling,” he said. “It is about preserving joyfulness and remembering that this music is bigger than all of us.”

Diggins joined PBO in 1995, long before his pony tail and beard had turned gray. He was recruited by former artistic director Monica Huggett, “who knew about me from Europe.” For the last 29 years, his life partner—he prefers the term “sweetheart”–has been fellow PBO violinist Jolianne Einem. Together, they have a 25-year-old daughter, March Adstrum. Diggins also has three children and two grandchildren by a previous marriage.

Diggins and Einem both play with other ensembles, and both also teach and mentor violin students. Together they sometimes appear as a “string duo plus” called The Flying Oms.

In the highly unlikely event that there is even one uninformed reader out there, the “Om” derives from Diggins’ near-lifelong yoga practice. He thinks he was about 14 when he first discovered Integral Yoga. He continued studying in the Himalayan tradition with assorted swamis. By the time he was ready to go for his own yoga teacher certificate, his teacher required him to perform a service activity. Diggins started teaching regularly at an adult assisted living facility, “teaching people in wheelchairs, people on oxygen.”

Not surprisingly, one of the Humboldt County sheriffs was also part of Diggins’ yoga community. She connected him with several other co-facilitators who began hosting weekly meditation sessions with county jail inmates. After a year or two, the same sheriff told Diggins that the inmates wanted him to teach Hatha Yoga.

“Four days a week, when I was not on tour,” he said, “until the pandemic shut things down. But I’m still doing the meditation.”

In 2017, Diggins spent part of the summer teaching in Kurdistan, in northern Iraq. His course was called “Mindfulness and Movement Awareness.” Among his other distinctions, Diggins was featured as a viola soloist in the 2013 film Giacomo Variations, starring John Malkovich.

“Mr. Richards,” a copy of the “Alard Stradivarius” made in Albany, Oregon, in 1899 by H.S. Richards, has been with Diggins since he was 10 years old. Eventually he had some work done on it, “to baroque it, as it were — things like swapping out the fingerboard and adding a wedge,” among other de-modernizations. In addition to Mr. Richards, Diggins has two electronic 5-string violins that he made himself. One of them is named Burly.

“In our house, we probably have over 20 violins,” he said. “I’ve lost count.”

There is no master plan, no grand Next Step, said the man who never stops smiling when Mr. Richards is under his chin.

“I feel like I am, to a great degree, living the dream,” Diggins said.

 Naturally, as he said this, he smiled.

PBO’s ‘D’amore’ concert

• Program: Antonio Vivaldi, Concerto for viola d’amore in A Major, RV 396; Johann Sebastian Bach, Concerto for oboe d’amore in A Major, BWV 1055R; Georg Philipp Telemann, Concerto for viola d’amore, oboe d’amore, and flute in E Major, TWV 53:E1.
• Saturday, Feb. 15: 7 p.m., Sanctuary Hall at First Congregational Church, 1126 S.W. Park Ave., Portland. Tickets.
• Sunday, Feb. 16: 3 p.m., Kaul Auditorium, Reed College, 3017 S.E. Woodstock Blvd., Portland. Tickets.