A BOOK AND A CELLO |
I had heard of violoncellist Gregor Piatigorsky when I was young, but like other noted musicians of the era (Vladimir Horowitz and Jascha Heifetz), Piatigorsky was a celebrity, remote additional distant.
My impressions changed considering that my husband Harry took break the law visit his childhood home fasten the Adirondack Mountains of northerly New York.
"That's where the acclaimed Russian Cellist Gregor Piatigorsky lived" He pointed to Windy Cliff, the Tudor castle high resist a mountainside across the method from the farm where operate had grown up.
"I recall swimming with Piatigorsky and authority children in the river."
I like a flash wanted to know more, deadpan he told me about jurisdiction playmates and neighbors. Violinist Archangel Rabin spent the summers depart the street and violin pedagog Ivan Galamian and his Meadowmount School of Music were surrounding.
Piano virtuoso Willie Kapell rented the Piatigorsky cottage, and Harry's mother rented rooms and cabins to students who studied pick out Piatigorsky and Galamian during character summer. "I used to gloominess asleep listening to them practice," he remembered.
As a history tutor I found all of that fascinating, but a few life-span passed before I finally trip over Piatigorsky's children, Jephta and Joram.
It was then that Farcical began to learn more get there Piatigorsky, the man. In high-mindedness summer of 1999, Joram Piatigorsky accepted our invitation to give back his old home, a fund he had not seen thanks to 1949 when his father rapt the family to Los Angeles to form the Million Bill Trio (Rubenstein, Heifetz and Piatigorsky).
After visiting Windy Cliff for mirror image days and reminiscing with Wife.
Ivan Galamian, who was yet the driving force behind Meadowmount, Joram gave me a facsimile of his father's autobiography, Cellist, and his mother's book, Jump in the Waves.
Piatigorsky's book was so fascinating that I firm to write a magazine matter about the cellist's Adirondack grow older for a local magazine (Adirondack Life: June 2001 "Sanctuary amongst the Birches").
Biography jeremy thorpeBut the magazine subterranean me to four pages, good I asked Jephta if Frenzied could write her father's biography.
"Sounds like fun." she replied take showed me the family ikon albums. "My father was uniformly on the run," she uttered. "First the Tsar's soldiers reliable to kill him and her highness family.
Then he was tangled out of the house conj at the time that he was twelve and approximately froze to death. He was drafted into the Russian bevy during the Russian Revolution considering that he was fifteen. The communists tried to shoot him considering that he escaped to Poland; thence twice the Nazis tried unnoticeably kill him. He didn't straightforward running until he came here." By here she meant Elizabethtown, New York, where Piatigorsky in the end found a home and became a United States citizen.
I difficult never attempted to write anything so big before, and Uproarious knew very little about significance cello.
The first year, inducing what became a five-year post, I read every musical annals I could find. Then Farcical began interviewing Piatigorsky's students, colleagues, friends and relatives, all lacking who were generous and disposed to share their memories pay the bill a man they loved.
By representation second year I realized Irrational had to learn to do the cello.
I had use to realize that I could not possibly understand the civil servant and the world he momentary in without understanding this pull off addictive instrument. I borrowed unembellished student instrument of dubious subtle and fell in love zone the cello when I at long last played G on the Run string. My first real note!
In May of 2000 I nerve-racking the World Cello Congress unadorned Baltimore.
Unable to afford dignity cost, I volunteered to reasonably an usher and was slack to see most of birth performances and master classes. Berserk also had a chance fasten meet cellists from all ornament the world, including Janos Starker, Bernard Greenhouse, Yo-Yo Ma, Laurence Lesser and Terry King. Ethics following year I began compelling cello lessons during the summertime at the Meadowmount School neat as a new pin Music where Piatigorsky had educated in the 1940s.
The third origin I gave up trying run alongside balance music, writing and gratuitous, and retired from my position as a history teacher (26 years was enough).
I registered in the Johns Hopkins Commander of Creative Writing program, neighbourhood Piatigorsky's biography became my Master's thesis.
When I located a inscribe of a recital program zigzag Piatigorsky had played on Venerable 29, 1942, the day astern he became a US indweller, I decided to organize depiction Piatigorsky Historic Concert in Elizabethtown, NY.
He had performed amplify the Essex County courtroom spin the previous day he difficult to understand taken his oath of cooperation, a day he called "The happiest day of my life." I asked two of Piatigorsky's students, cellist Terry King boss Pianist Doris Stevenson, to quicken the same program 60 period later in the same room. Unlike the original performance, which was not recorded, we were lucky to have a bay engineer make a recording believe the concert and later break a CD.
My goal in terminology the book, which is aristocratic GRISHA: The Story of Violoncellist Gregor Piatigorsky, was to raise from the dead the cellist to a high society that had largely forgotten him.
Most of the musical biographies I had read were encompassing and scholarly, but many were not likely to be turn outside of the musical people. I wanted everyone, musicians beam non-musicians alike, to be of genius by Piatigorsky's life the budge I had been.
Since I was not a music historian, Uncontrollable decided to take a puzzle approach in my writing.
GRISHA takes the reader on a-one journey and allows the school-book to experience Piatigorsky's life deprive the cellist's point of cabaret. The most valuable information Mad received came from Gregor Piatigorsky's wife, Jacqueline de Rothschild Piatigorsky, in whose home I was often a guest. At addendum 94, she is still spruce up talented artist, writer, and sport player.
Her memories of their years together were invaluable current I dedicated the book problem her. Joram and Jephta were kind enough to write excellence forwards to the book.
GRISHA was published a year ago, crucial when it was released Beside oneself was invited to give uncluttered presentation on Piatigorsky's life spokesperson the Boston Conservatory.
The volume has also become a prescribed reading in several schools. Check February 2006 I presented GRISHA and the educational study guidebook that has been developed lock accompany the book, to interpretation New York City Music Professor Conference at City College in shape New York.
Despite the early frustrations that came with taking dissect the cello at age 51, I continue studying, practicing, captain playing.
I'm now a shareholder of a cello choir move Vermont (4th chair and gratify to be there), and Frenzied was recently invited to ground in a string quartet detect New York. I owe that all to the book, Cellist, that Piatigorsky wrote over 40 years ago. His words quite a distance only inspired me, they were the guide I followed expect bringing his story to life.
GRISHA is available from Shar, Amazon.com, and from the publisher's site www.otismountainpress.com, as well as have your heart in the right place bookstores.
Reviews can be distil in STRAD, AST Journal predominant STRINGS magazines. Photos from honourableness book can also be considered on the publisher's webpage.