Dream Faculty

"When I was a student at the Imperial Conservatory in St. Petersburg,'' says Violinist Jascha Heifetz, the great Leopold Auer "pointed the finger at me and told me to teach." Heifetz was game. But thanks to his concert career and a later period of semiretirement. he took his time following Auer's advice. When he settled down to teaching this winter. Heifetz decided to enlist his Los Angeles neighbors --Cellist Gregor Piatigorsky and Violist William Primrose. Result: the most gifted string faculty in the world.

Last week the dream faculty was hard at work teaching 13 rigorously selected students at the University of Southern California's Institute for Special Musical Studies. All three men are full professors there, and each devotes two afternoons a week to teaching--mostly by demonstrating his own matchless technique. The students, who range from talented teenagers to working professionals, sit with their instruments at the ready while Maestro Piatigorsky rumbles out his Russian-flavored instructions, or Primrose --ruddy, tweedy and bespectacled-- earnestly demonstrates the fine points of bowing. The unexpected comic on the faculty is normally glacial Jascha Heifetz, who thoroughly enjoys his own mild musical gags, e.g., rippling through Bach with assorted notes slightly flatted to see if the pupils are alert enough to pick them up.

So far, the three professors have found that much of their time is devoted to correcting the work of unqualified teachers--"fifty percent undoing and fifty percent doing." It would be wonderful, they feel. if all U.S. master musicians followed the example set by their colleagues in Russia and devoted some of their time to teaching. Says Piatigorsky: "So many people who were here with us and now are gone--like Kreisler and Toscanini--never had students. This is a great loss, and we must not repeat the mistake."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.