Word: cellistic
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...best thing a musician can possibly do after he has acquired a great deal of experience," says Cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, "is to pass it on to younger musicians. So many people are now gone-Kreisler, Toscanini, Rachmaninoff-who never had students. This is a great loss." It is also a sad fact that few celebrated performers have much interest in teaching-and fewer still have any talent for it (Rachmaninoff, for example, was a dour, retiring man, hardly cut out to be the Mr. Chips of the keyboard). Fortunately for a few lucky cellists, however, Piatigorsky, 61, has both...
...master's class come to his big house in West Los Angeles and form a semicircle in his living room. Piatigorsky slumps his big frame (6 ft. 3½ in.) into an easy chair, and one by one the students play a solo. Now the old cellist closes his mournful eyes in repose, now he nods his head enthusiastically, now lurches forward to demonstrate a point on his cello. He saws the air with an imaginary bow, sings in his rumbling borsch-accented voice: "Dom dom pah pah dom." Scowling, smiling, grimacing, clenching his fists and waving his arms...
...playing ponderously: "It's very important not to play very importantly. If you begin to play a fairly easy, gay and amusing piece with great importance, then the piece becomes less important than the player. If the piece is simple and gay, then the cellist must be simple...
...dining room for sandwiches and coffee and Piatigorsky's reminiscences from nearly 50 years of concertizing. When a pupil complains about preperformance jitters, he confides that he himself has found no easy remedy: "I try looking in the mirror and saying 'You're the greatest cellist in the world.' " But alas, he adds sadly, "I don't believe me." Or he will tell of the evening he dined with Amateur Fiddler Albert Einstein...
...scientist asked Piatigorsky how he liked his violin playing. The cellist hesitated. It was probably the first time that Teacher Piatigorsky was at a loss for ready analysis of someone's playing. But only momentarily. "Eh," he finally spluttered, "relatively well...