Category Archives: Ghosts

I was deeply saddened by the news that the great violinist, Aaron Rosand, died last Tuesday (July 9^th). The last time I spoke to Aaron was on his birthday, March 15^th, when he turned 92. On more than one occasion, he told me that he could still outplay all of his Curtis students. So, I asked him whether he could still do it. His laconic reply, “…Most of them.”

I first worked with Aaron in 1965 when he played the Bruch G minor Concerto with the American Ballet Theatre. At 38, Aaron was very handsome and played the violin like a god. Hearing him from barely 10 feet away was a revelation. In 1968, he returned to the American Ballet Theatre to play the very crucial violin solos in Swan Lake. One of those solos included a big cello solo with a violin obligato. So, I had the opportunity to play one-on-one with him. Aaron said that he really liked my playing and wanted to recommend me to his friend, Elliot Magaziner, to be the cellist in the Reston Trio. This introduction opened up a chamber music career for me that probably never would have happened without that experience.

Over the years, I played for him on a number of occasions, and he was never less than brutally honest about the fact that I needed to improve my detache and vibrate on my first finger. Additionally, he gave me a lot of great advice. He said to practice in front a mirror a certain amount every day to make sure that my form was good and to record much of my practicing, but only listen to 5 minutes of it every day. Those 5 minutes would surely reveal everything I needed to work on. He told me that you need to be 200% prepared in order to play 100% on the stage. That was great advice for me, because my nerves often reduced my capacity to well under 100% of what I could do under the best of circumstances. He told me about the time he snuck into Carnegie Hall three hours before a Heifetz recital. He observed Heifetz walk on stage and practice a small phrase over and over until he was satisfied. Then Heifetz walked off stage. When he walked back on to play his recital, every phrase sounded like the one he had practiced. This was particularly useful to me as a principal cellist. I would often take one bar of a solo that was coming up and work it until I was totally comfortable and sure enough, the whole solo usually sounded pretty much the same at the moment of truth.

I attended recitals Aaron did in Carnegie Hall of entirely virtuoso violin music. His command of the violin wizardry required was truly breathtaking. More importantly, the wonderful sound and soulfulness he brought to the melodies always touched my heart in a way I have rarely heard since. Watching his extraordinary career which he made, without the help of Sol Hurok and Arthur Judson, helped me and my wife June create our own management and take our destiny into our own hands.

Aaron Rosand performing the Malaguena from Sarasate’s Spanish Dances:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRUvZjhXO90

Most gratifying to me was the opportunity I had to recommend him to International Music Company as their principal violin editor. The list of his editions is:

For violin and piano:

• 3654 WAGNER, arr. WILHELMJ: Album Leaf (Romanza)
• 3684 MOZART: Concerto No. 1 in B Flat Major, K. 207 
• 3584 GLAZUNOV: Meditation in D major, Opus 32 
• 3625 SZYMANOWSKI: Notturno and Tarantella, Op. 28, Nos. 1 and 2
• 3590 BRUCH: Romance in A minor, Opus 42 
• 3714 ELGAR:  Salut d’amour, Opus 12  
• 3650 DONIZETTI: Sonata (1819) 
• 3685 RESPIGHI: Sonata in B minor 
• 3700 BRAHMS: Sonatensatz, Opus Post., Scherzo 
• 3620 SARASATE: Spanish Dances, Opus 26, Nos. 7 and 8 
• 3689 SAINT-SAËNS: The Swan 
• 3755 PAGANINI: Three airs varies on the Fourth String 
• 3760 SATIE: Three Pieces: Choses vues a droite et a gauche (sans lunettes)

For two violins and piano:

• 3701 SARASATE: Navarra: Danza Espagnole, Opus 33

I attached the letter he wrote to me in response to Bill Ryden’s (editorial director of International Music) inquiry about whether he would be interested in doing violin concerto practice tools, like those in my edition of the Tchaikovsky Rococo Variations. His warmth and generosity radiates from the page (see below).

Over the years, I’ve come to accept the fact that if you like where you are, you shouldn’t complain about how you got there.

I held onto a cassette tape of a concert played by my Juilliard teacher Luigi Silva for more than thirty years, but I only recently listened to it for the first time. Silva was a brilliant man who spoke four languages fluently. He was a gifted pianist and an accomplished composer and arranger, who transcribed all 24 Paganini Caprices and 42 Kreutzer etudes for cello.

The last time I listened to any recording of Silva was in 1976. The American Chamber Trio was working on the Schumann D minor trio, so June went to the library and got out a recording by the Mannes, Gimpel, Silva trio. Silva always bragged to me about how fast he could play the dotted rhythms in the second movement of the Trio, and sure enough, it was very fast. However, in the gorgeous solos in the third movement, he sounded out of tune. He didn’t use vibrato on long notes, and made disgusting slides. It epitomized the sentiment behind two things he told me: that The Flight of the Bumblebee takes one minute to play; with feeling it takes two minutes, and that there is no difference between the opening of the Bach C major suite and a descending C major scale. I basically discounted everything about him because of this.

The recital recording that I listened to was from the early 1950s and took place somewhere in in Tennessee. Silva played his old standbys: his transcription of Della Ciaja’s “Toccata and Canzone.” the Boccherini A major Sonata, the Strauss Sonata, his transcription of the Bartok Romanian Dances, the Paganini Moses Variations (his transcription where he tuned his A string up half a step), his transcription of the Mendelssohn Spinning Song, and the Popper transcription of the Chopin E-flat major Nocturne. I did not love his sound or sentiment, but I did recognize that he was a true virtuoso in the Feuermann category, and that I was very lucky to have had his undivided attention for at least one of the two and a half years I studied with him.

Luigi Silva died within weeks of his 58th birthday, and my feelings about him were those of a seduced and abandoned twenty-year-old with a technique left in ruins from the tension of practicing Greutzmacher for eight hours a day. For decades I held a great deal of resentment towards Silva for the damage I believed that he did to my playing. I now understand that he was a man inundated with the difficulties of trying to establish a career as a soloist while teaching in four of five different schools, and, at the same time, was trying to create a comprehensive methodology of cello playing (a lot of his material in the archives of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro). He was a well-known philanderer who to seduced (often successfully) many of his female students. With all this and his health problems, I don’t know how he managed to accomplish anything.

I now recognized that a lot of good come out of my studies with him, but by screwing up my playing he forced me to delay any solo possibilities until I was thirty. If I had decided to present myself as a serious cellist earlier than thirty, it could very likely have been premature. Sometimes life does not give you what you want but rather what you need.

Silva was an excellent teacher of what he taught, but what he taught was like music in the form of crude oil. Crude is absolutely necessary to make gasoline, but it is not gasoline in itself.

Silva permanently fixed in my hard drive open position (having a whole step between the first and second fingers and half steps between the rest of the fingers). This was immensely helpful to when I played Wagner and Strauss operas because if I held the open position constantly and shifted on half steps, I could use fingerings like a violinist instead of having to jump around the cello. Through the many very difficult and virtuosic etudes and pieces I studied with him I learned to play thirds and octaves reliably. Silva taught me the value of fingering fast-moving passages rhythmically, and it was from him that I learned to play on the inside of the A and D strings, which gave me absolute security in the higher positions.

When I worked with Silva, the position of my left hand fingers was way too high, and my right hand was extremely tight. Therefore any effort I made to play cantabile passages was futile. It was not until I was able to reposition my hands with a lower center of gravity that I was able to become a fine cantabile player. Unfortunately, Silva did not realize that on the cello you are as good a player as you sound playing The Swan.