Remembering Aaron Rosand

Rarely does a day go by when I don't do some Bach. And when I do it it's never the way I did it the time before.

Aaron Rosand (1927-2019)



I never got to meet Aaron Rosand, but I feel like I have known him for most of my life through his recordings and through stories told to me by his friends and colleagues. The Strad has an excellent collection of video links to performances and interviews, as well as links to articles about him and by him. I'm hoping that my friend Daniel Morganstern, who knew Aaron Rosand very well, will write a blog post about him.

My friend Bernard Zaslav, who died a few years ago, tells a story about a time Aaron Rosand visited him in Milwaukee in his memoir The Viola in My Life. I know that Bernie would want me to share this story here, so I will.

My good friend, the violinist Aaron Rosand, stayed with us when he came to town to play an outdoor concert with the Milwaukee Symphony in one of the city's parks. Nomi [Zaslav] and I attended the afternoon rehearsal, which was conducted by Alfredo Antonini. Aaron (his close friends usually called him Archie) stood holding his famous ex-Kochanski Guarneri del Jesu violin of 1741 in hand (perhaps the finest del Jesu of them all) on a platform with two enormous, eight-foot-high loudspeakers on either side of him. Before Archie played a note, the midwest summer breeze sharpened stiffly, and toppled one of the speakers, striking both Archie and Antonini. I ran to help Archie, and was able to grab the fiddle from him before he fell.

We followed the ambulance that carried the barely-conscious Archie with the slightly-injured Antonini to the hospital. When Archie opened his eyes, the first thing he asked was, "How's my fiddle?" (It was fine.) One the way back to our house, we passed a Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Archie had to stop and order a whole bucket after his ordeal.

Then there's another story that isn't in the book which Bernie, Danny, Berl Senofsky, or another friend who knew him in New York told me. In order to have the resources to have a solo career in Europe, Rosand did a lot of commercial work in New York. He did so much commercial work that he would often arrive at recording sessions at the very last minute. When asked how he could do all this his response was, "I made all the lights."

I'm going over explore the article in The Strad I linked to in the first paragraph now. I hope you will too.

And here's his YouTube channel.

More Photos from Paul Hindemith's 1947 Class at Yale

George Hunter's daughter (George is #4) sent me two photos from Paul Hindemith's 1947 composition class at Yale. It would be great if we could use them to help identify the rest of the people in this photo:



You can see the original post from 2010 with a larger numbered photo and lots of comments here.

Oliver Knussen

I read the terribly sad news of Oliver Knussen's death today.

I knew Olly in 1975 when he was a student at Tanglewood. Here's a picture of him I took that summer.



I was in awe of his brilliance, and amazed that he took the time to talk with me. A few years ago he let me know that he read Musical Assumptions from time to time, which made me feel really honored. RIP Olly.

What Sibelius Drank

There's a lot to learn about Jean Sibelius! You can enter his world (and liquor cabinet) through this link.

Bernard Zaslav: A Special Violist in My Life

Bernard Zaslav, who was born in 1926, died yesterday afternoon at the age of 90. He holds a very special and a very permanent place in my heart. I got to know Bernie extremely well, first through his recordings, then through the internet viola list, and later while working with him on his memoir, The Viola in My Life: An Alto Rhapsody.

Shortly after I began working with Bernie on his book I began to wonder if he might know my friend Seymour Barab, who was active in New York at the same time. I casually asked Seymour if he knew Bernie, and Seymour got very excited. He told me that they were in a string quartet together during the 1960s, and that they hadn't been in touch for 50 years (Bernie left New York for Milwaukee in 1968 to play with the Fine Arts Quartet, and Seymour remained in New York for the rest of his life). I gave each the other's phone number, and they renewed their friendship. Seymour read through a draft of Bernie's memoir and made many excellent suggestions. (Michael enjoyed Seymour's comments so much that he used to show pages of Seymour's editing to his college students.)

I have written a lot on this blog about Bernie. He was a remarkable man who, through his playing, his wit, and his kindness, brightened American musical life for much of the 20th century from sea to shining sea (peppered with many concert tours abroad).

You can find the posts I have written about him here, and you can get a copy of his memoir from Amazon, where he tells true tales about the marvelous musical world of the 20th century from the standpoint of one of its brilliant inner voices. The book comes with two CDs that give a musical overview of a remarkable career.

Remembering Gunther Schuller

When I was growing up in Boston, Gunther Schuller was a giant. When I last saw him two years ago he was 87 and still towering, both physically and intellectually, over most of the musical world. I had the great privilege of writing a review of his autobiography, and have written a few other posts about him in recent years:

Gens and Such: A Ramble about Gunther Schuller
Food for Thought from Gunther Schuller

Frances S. Goldstein

During my first semester at Juilliard I was filled with dread at the thought of my class piano teacher, Miss Frances S. Goldstein. She was very old, very gray, and smoked constantly. One of the two grand pianos in her teaching studio was covered with cartons of unfiltered Camel cigarettes, which she smoked throughout every group lesson.

I remember bringing some Satie to my Juilliard audition, and for some reason unknown to me I was placed in a piano class far above my ability. I didn't know anything about scale fingerings or how to play without looking at my fingers. Frances Goldstein, between puffs on her cigarette, would chant, "tactile, tactile, tactile." She wanted us to feel the keys beneath our fingers as well played scales and arpeggios. I must have failed her class, because the next semester I found myself in a beginner class where I struggled.

I have only shadowy memories of the other teachers I had at Juilliard, but Frances S. Goldstein remains in perfectly clear resolution. I even remember what her hands looked like. Every time I sit at the piano I think of her.

She is a woman of mystery in these internets. All I could find about her was that she was born in New York and began teaching Literature and Materials of Music at Juilliard in 1930. Marvin Hamlish included a description of her in his book The Way I Was that I will share here:

Her name was Frances S. Goldstein. She was an irascible old woman who always had a cigarette in her mouth. She was tough, but she taught me more about music theory than anyone before or since. And when I had finished my scores for The Swimmer and Kotch, I thought it would be wonderful to share them with her. I wondered if she ever went to a movie. Her class at Juilliard was her life, that narrow room in which she kept emphasizing what was good and what was bad harmonically. If she gave you a check on one of our papers, you knew she meant it. If Miss Goldstein said you had done well, it wasn't said lightly to reassure you. You had done well.

I dearly wanted her approval now. I wanted her to know that I hadn't forsaken or betrayed my musical training. I needed that gold star at the top of my homework assignment. With all that was happening to me, I needed her to reassure me I was on the right track. I was hungry for the approval of the heretofore aloof Miss Goldstein and wanted her to see that I was capable of doing serious work.

I telephoned her and said: "Miss Goldstein, I'd love to have you listen to the music I wrote. I really think it's good."

"Marvin, I don't have time to listen to this music of yours. I'm very, very busy."

"But don't you even have time for a cup of coffee?" I asked. "I could bring the music with me."

"No, no, no, no," she insisted.

I was terribly disappointed. I wanted her to know that I understood her values, her virtues, her commitment. She may have been out of touch with the outside world, but in that world she created in her classroom, she believed wholly in what she did. And I was envious of that. I needed to have that in my life. That narrow classroom was an honest place where she devoted herself to the highest standards of music. I needed to get back into that room.

Years later, I learned that Miss Goldstein was in the hospital with cancer. A tiny woman who had always weighed about ninety pounds, she was not expected to live. As I looked down at her frail body in the hospital bed, it was hard to recall the teacher who seemed so tough and formidable at Juilliard.

She told me that her students didn't visit her, and this did not surprise me. She was a killer in the classroom and not immensely likable. Now she could barely speak. Those ever-present cigarettes had ravaged her throat and finally done her in.

We talked of the old days at Juilliard and of my new career. Finally, it was time to go.

"Good-bye, Miss Goldstein," I said, and started for the door.

"Marvin--" she said.

"Yes, Miss Goldstein?"

"I really should have taken time for that cup of coffee."

Since I think about her so often, I would really love to know something about her. Perhaps there are other people with memories of Miss Goldstein who could add something more to the picture Mr. Hamlish paints (yes, I know, with himself in the center), and the one that is in my memory.

Remembering Seymour Barab

. . . as a young man, and through his life:



and as a string quartet player.

Remembering David Nadien

I first heard of David Nadien (March 12, 1926 - May 28, 2014) from Julius Baker, who held him as his living musical ideal. Due to the miracle of video recording, we can hear them both in this 1967 set of Rosenkavalier Waltzes, and remember how beautifully it is possible to play:



My father likes to tell the story of Leonard Bernstein asking David Nadien how it is he has such a gorgeous vibrato, to which Nadien responded, "fear."

Here's a great collection of David Nadien's recordings (with sample sound clips).

Sergio Fiorentino's Bach

My friend Dan Barrett introduced me to this extraordinary recording of Bach's Partita No. 1, and I'm sharing it with you. The pauses between movements are a bit long, but the wait is worth it.



Here's Fiorentono's obituary, and a link to all of his recordings on YouTube.

Here's one where he plays whatever comes to mind, including the beginning of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, "Some Day My Prince Will Come," a bit of Gershwin, and some Paganini, followed by a paraphrase.

Carlos Kleiber Conducting Beethoven 4 and 7

Music making rarely gets better than this!



Here's a link to all things Kleiber on YouTube.

Masumi Per Rostad Interviews Bernard Zaslav on WGBH

You'll need flash to listen to this interview with a real mensch. After hearing it, you'll certainly want to read his book and hear the two CD recordings (one filled with viola and piano music, and one filled with chamber music) that come with it.

Julius Baker Plays the Poulenc Flute Sonata and Villa Lobos Jet Whistle

These performances come from an early 1960s television broadcast. It is interesting to note that the pianist, Vladimir Sokoloff, made recordings with Baker's teacher, William Kincaid.

Advice for Musicians From Their Teachers

I put the following comment on Noa Kageyama's Bulletproof Musician Post (that he presents as a contest). I prefaced my comment with note that my comment is not an actual entry--just a comment.

It's about Julius Baker. I began this blog with a post about Julius Baker, and couldn't resist revisiting my memories of him when I saw Kageyama's question.

I studied flute with Julius Baker for four years (1976-1980) at the Juilliard School of Music. I met Julius Baker when he was in active recovery from a heart attack, and at a time when he was full of a kind of second wind (no pun intended) for living life to the fullest and embracing the idea of good health. He was, at that point, an example for a lot of people. He would get up at five in the morning and jog (he was in his early 60s at the time), and then drive from Brewster to Manhattan (about an hour, if the traffic wasn't bad) for a full day of rehearsing and teaching, and would have a performance at night with the New York Philharmonic. His teaching time was more "social time" than hands-on teaching. Lessons consisted mostly of meeting him for lunch in the faculty part of the cafeteria, and then going as a group to his studio and having masterclass-type lessons. From those classes I learned that it was important for a woman to dress well and look good, it was important to be extremely competent, and that if there were technical problems to be tackled, he was not the person to ask to solve them. He was an extraordinary player who taught by example (he advised his students to jog, for example). He showed us that social skills were of maximum importance, and that you should always be friendly to people, even if you didn't like them much. He always considered himself a "regular guy," and tended to relate to the "regular guy-ness" in people. He would talk to strangers with the intention of brightening their day.

It was very rare to have a private hour-long lesson with Julius Baker. In four years I may have had five or six. One moment in one lesson stands out in particular.

I was working on an etude by Marcel Bitsch. The Bitsch etudes are more like studies in writing for a solo line than they are technical etudes. There were a bunch of notes that made up a lyrical motive, and I suppose I just didn't "get" the sense of how they worked in relation to one another. Julius Baker played the passage for me, and it made a certain kind of sense. Then he likened the passage to playing a jingle (Prior to being the principal flutist for the New York Philharmonic, Baker had been a big freelance recording musician, and made a great living playing radio jingles), and told me that even if the jingle you are playing is not particularly interesting, it is your job to make those notes, those few seconds of music, as beautiful and as interesting as possible.

From that statement I understood that it was applicable to all music. That the job of a performing musician is to make every note and every phrase beautiful and interesting, regardless of the quality of the passage or even the piece. Now that I am older (much older), and know a great deal more about music than I did when I was a Juilliard student, I can apply Julius Baker's lesson in expanded ways. When the music is great--when a passage in question is a gem, your playing has to meet the expectations of the passage so that it can be as beautiful as it should be.

After I made the permanent switch from flute to viola (and violin), my family and I went to Brewster, New York to visit the Bakers, and Michael took this picture.


[Julius Baker, his wife Ruth, and the 39-year-old me on July 18, 1998]

James Dean and Opus 111

From an obituary in the New York Times:

Earlier in life Mr. Hirshbein had taken up auto racing, as a consequence of his friendship with James Dean, a racing enthusiast. The two had met when Dean was an unknown young actor.

Dean was sitting on Mr. Hirshbein’s doorstep one day listening to him practice while waiting for a neighbor to return. When Jessica Hirshbein invited him in, Dean asked Mr. Hirshbein whether he could play Beethoven’s Opus 111 Sonata.

“That piece really swings,” Ms. Hirshbein recalled Dean saying. “ I love those syncopations."

After Dean was killed in an automobile crash in 1955, Mr. Hirshbein gave up auto racing at his wife’s insistence.

Who knew?

I imagine the syncopations Dean liked are the ones that begin at 3:33 and really start to swing at 5:13 in this recording by Wilhelm Kempff, one of the rare recordings on YouTube that has the whole movement!



What a treat it has been to graze through the Opus 111 offerings there.

The Viola in My Life--in My Life

I spent the last couple of years helping Bernard Zaslav write The Viola in My Life: An Alto Rhapsody, and a copy of the book finally arrived in today's mail.

I have been a musical memoir junkie for most of my life, and a deep-seated goal of mine has always been to help someone write a memoir. Now I have done it, the book is in print, and everyone can enjoy Bernie's stories as much as I have enjoyed them. I feel very proud for having served as sometime editor and sometime muse for this project.

Bernie began his musical life as a violinist. Immediately after graduating from Juilliard, he made the permanent switch to viola when he got called to play in Raymond Scott's band for the summer. He studied viola for a year, and landed a job in the Cleveland Orchestra under George Szell. Eventually he returned to New York, and after a nine-year hiatus (selling plumbing supplies!), he began playing in Broadway shows. In the late 1950s he began his career as the violist of a series of important American string quartets, including the Composers Quartet in New York (sort of a prototype for the Kronos Quartet), the Fine Arts Quartet, the Vermeer Quartet, and finally the Stanford String Quartet.

Bernie describes the personalities of many iconic musicians (mostly conductors, composers, pianists, and string players), and he also describes the personalities of the luthiers he knew in New York (he hung out at their 57th street shops between gigs). He gives the surprisingly entertaining details of his quest for the perfect instrument (which he finally found), and elaborates on his obsession with bow collecting. His "fermata" (he calls some of his digressions "fermatae") called "Fiddlesticks" (my personal subtitle is "confessions of a bow nut") makes for wonderful reading. In addition to collecting bows during his adventures and travels, Bernie collected lifelong friends (including me). His life as the middle voice of many string quartets has been full of all sorts of wonderful musical and personal joy, and I think this "view from the middle" will resonate with other people (like me) who love to play the viola in chamber ensembles and orchestras.

The book comes with two terrific CDs that are tucked into each of its covers. One has viola and piano music, and one has string chamber music. There is an excellent index, a thorough discography, and lots of pictures. You can get it from Amazon.

They don't let me out very often: things I learned on my summer vacation

Since Michael and I live such a bucolic life in our year-round vacation home in Illinois, our summer vacations away tend to be one-week-long over-stimulation festivals, bookended by dawn-to-dusk driving. We do the same thing every year: see family and close friends in New Jersey, Boston, and New York. It is basically a "same time next year" affair, yet each year is distinctly different.

We saw signs (complete with actual signs) of the Recovery Act everywhere. There were projects in progress, and smooth-riding evidence that projects had been completed. The construction projects on I 70 didn't cause any real delays for us, though going slowly through the awesome bridge building projects is actually a pleasure. The delays on I 80 were not very pleasurable, but they could have been much worse (they were for the westbound travelers.)

We also saw even more signs of kindness among the inhabitants of Manhattan's Upper East Side, and its West Village than we noticed during our last visit to the city. The bustle and commerce of the West Village, and the renovation of Chelsea Market (and the awesome transformation of an elevated railway into an urban park) makes me reconsider the merits of capitalism. Here's a picture of me and Seymour Barab, my favorite inhabitant of the Upper East Side.


And here's a photo of me with Seymour's wife, Margie King, my other favorite Upper East Side inhabitant:


Boston and its suburbs have become much more international. What a treat it was to sit in a coffee shop and hear two sets of conversations in two different languages (I understood neither one). New York also seemed a lot more international than I remember it being, and the expansion of the term "International" from the European-dominated 20th-century into the fully global 21st is very exciting.

It also seems that classical radio has improved greatly over the past year. In Ohio and Pennsylvania there were actual live in-house radio announcers, who played interesting music. There was a recording of the Prokofiev Classical Symphony with the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Ormandy, and a recording of the Schoenberg transcription of Johann Strauss' "Roses from the South" played by the Boston Symphony Chamber Players (I got to hear my father's famous pa pa coming after each um). There was even some vocal music on the radio: some Byrd performed by Chanticleer, that was on a program that followed Phil Schaap's week-long dissection under a microscope (with lots of repetition) of one day in the life of Charlie Parker (I think it was February 11, 1949). Too bad the Columbia University student who announced the Byrd didn't say anything about the Byrd-Bird connection. Who could pass up a radio moment like that?

Eight things I learned this year:

1. Old friends and old friendships get better with time and age.
2. Places change, and sometimes they change for the better. Progress is often a good thing.
3. Classical radio is still alive and well, and it seems to be sharing an audience with Jazz in some places.
4. Whole Foods makes the most extraordinary baked sesame tofu, and it makes terrific picnic food.
5. It is possible to travel well without stopping in a single fast-food restaurant, as long as you bring a large insulated cooler bag on your journey.
6. It is preferable to travel (as long as the weather is good) without stopping in a single fast-food restaurant.
7. Just because a museum is famous and highly regarded, you can't count on it to exhibit contemporary art that is worthy of the visibility.
8. It really doesn't matter anyway, because so much of New York's art is not found in museums: it's found on the streets and in the people.

Dichterliebe (a song cycle about love)

Maybe Robert Schumann's Dicterliebe is my favorite song cycle because the material, both musical and literary, is something that every singer (and every pianist) can relate in a deeply personal way. I love (and know every nook and cranny of) both Wunderlich-Giesen recordings, but I also love this totally different interpretation by Hermann Prey and Leonard Hokansen that I discovered today on YouTube, and want to share here with you. Here are links to translations (in many languages) of the poetry by Heinrich Heine. You can see (and follow) Clara Schumann's edition of the score here.

Ervin Nyireghazi

Thanks to YouTube I can get an instant musical affirmation/illustration of the very strange and completely over-the top pianist Ervin Nyireghazi, who I am reading about in Kevin Bazzana's biography Lost Genius.

I met some old friends in the book: Richard Kapp, a record producer and pianist who died recently, told me about "discovering" Nyireghazi years ago. I also "met up" with one of my favorite American writers, Theodore Dreiser with whom Nyireghazi shared a friendship and a girlfriend. The tabloid escapades of celebrities of today pale to those of Nyireghazi. It is still shocking to read about the details of his disfunctional childhood, his ten marriages, his addictions, his grandiosity, and his enormous musical personality (which you can hear above).

From reading about the contours and crevices of Nyireghazi's bizarre personality, I can understand why he would have identified with Dreiser's characters, particularly the main character in The "Genius". I can also imagine why Dreiser would have been drawn to him: he was (while he was alive) like a Dreiser character that had suddenly come to life.

Erica Morini

I have been spending far too much time obsessing about and listening to recordings of Erica Morini (1904-1995), a Viennese violin virtuoso who would have had a career like that of Jascha Heifetz or Nathan Milstein, (both acknowledged her greatness and considered her a peer) if only she hadn't been a woman. She found it terribly frustrating not to be taken seriously by people in the managerial side of the music business. She did manage to have a career, but it was not the kind of career that a person of her tremendous ability and musicianship should have been able to enjoy. After she stopped playing she lived in semi-seclusion in New York. She died shortly after her instrument, the Davidoff Stradivarius, along with her scores, photos, and letters, had been stolen from her apartment. The instrument has yet to be recovered.

You can listen to her play the first movement of the Beethoven 7th Violin Sonata on this page, and read more about Morini here. The performance, of course, is not from 1928 (there's a mistake on the page), but there is a performance of a Brahms Hungarian dance on the same CD from 1927.