Blogs | Elbow Music

Life in Teaching: Diana Cummings

Diana Cummings comes from a musical dynasty, and her career spans solo, chamber and orchestral playing. Since 1982 has been a professor at the Royal Academy of Music, where she also teaches on the LRAM diploma course, which she helped devise. She is also a professor at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music. In this interview she gave me for the Summer 2016 issue of the European String Teachers Association magazine ARCO, she shares her life experience of teaching I was fairly r

Ariane Todes

Life in Teaching: Stefan Popov

Stefan Popov has been professor of cello at London’s Guildhall School of Music & Drama for 40 years, and before that taught at Boston University and New England Conservatoire. He was born in Bulgaria, and studied at the Moscow Conservatoire with Sviatoslav Knushevitsky and Mstislav Rostropovich. In this interview for the Winter 2017 issue of the European String Teachers Association magazine Arco, he told me about the strengths of the Russian School, and how he’s still learnin

Ariane Todes

Life in Teaching: Thomas Martin

Double bassist Thomas Martin studied with Roger Scott in Philadelphia and can trace a teaching pedigree that goes back to Bottesini. In a career that has combined both orchestral playing in the world’s top orchestras and teaching, he has taught at Guildhall School of Music & Drama and Royal College of Music, and is currently senior professor at Birmingham Conservatoire. In this interview, first published in the European String Teachers Association magazine Arco in Autumn 2016

Ariane Todes

Happy Birthday, Ivry Gitlis!

The charismatic, idealistic, often contrarian and utterly unique violinist is 95 years young today. In celebration, here is an interview I did with him to mark his 90th birthday, for The Strad’s August 2012 issue. The afternoon I spent with him in a Paris café, trying to get him to answer questions rather than turn them back into questions for me, create some intricate wordplay or go into a philosophical reverie, was one of the most exciting I’ve ever spent. On learning reper

Ariane Todes

Pinchas Zukerman on how to change the world

The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra celebrates its 70th birthday in 2016 and for its commemorative anniversary booklet, I had the opportunity to interview Pinchas Zukerman, its Principal Guest Conductor. He was on fine and articulate form, and happy to talk beyond the RPO, about the current state of classical music and his optimism for the future. One of his key concepts was to create a global coalition for music education, crossing all geographic and institutional boundaries. T

Ariane Todes

Interview with Shmuel Ashkenasi

The former Vermeer Quartet leader and Curtis Institute professor discusses the negative sides of Ilona Fehér's 'tough love' school of teaching, and of violin competitions I recently interviewed Shmuel Ashkenasi for ChamberStudio, ahead of his chamber music masterclass for them at Kings Place on Sunday, 10 May. Conversation turned away from his views on chamber music to his past, and below are some of the other topics we covered. Born in Israel, from the age of eight Ashkenasi

Ariane Todes

Songs in the key of life

An understanding of the characteristics of the different keys can help you develop a palette of sounds. So do you know your innocent C major from your gloomy F sharp minor? I recently interviewed cellist Christoph Richter for the ChamberStudio website and among other fascinating things, he told me about Christian Schubart's guide to the various keys and their musical meanings. Richter argues that Mozart and Haydn would have been brought up learning about the differences betwe

Ariane Todes

The unbearable lightness of being Gary Hoffman

Gary Hoffman is one of the music world’s best-kept secrets, a fine and uncompromising cellist whose rare appearances mesmerise. For him, being a musician involves a daily struggle, but he wouldn't have it any other way, as he explains I wouldn’t call Gary Hoffman a great cellist. Not after our conversation at the recent Amsterdam Cello Biënnale. He told me in no uncertain terms what he thinks of the expression: ‘These words are thrown around. Everybody’s “great”. Are they all

Ariane Todes

Eugene Drucker on Beethoven

I recently interviewed Eugene Drucker about his Southbank Centre concert with the Emerson Quartet on Sunday, 16 November, which you can read about here. But he had so many interesting ways of explaining Beethoven’s groundbreaking and difficult Op.130 and Op.132 Grosse Fuge that I ran out of space, so here are some of the broader concepts he talked about, which didn’t fit the piece. Out of this world ‘Because Beethoven was completely deaf he had been forced to imagine and crea

Ariane Todes

Everything you need to know about violin playing (but were never taught)

Musical timing and closure, hearing and thinking for ourselves – just some of the things that teaching often fails to help us with, according to Burton Kaplan This summer I spent two weeks at the Magic Mountain Music Farm Practice Retreat, run by Burton Kaplan. My article about the experience is out now in the September issue of The Strad, and I've written a blog about the experience of being offered such a learning opportunity as an amateur. But in the two weeks of twice-dai

Ariane Todes

A plea on behalf of amateur violinists

Two weeks at a violin practice retreat were life-changing for me, but left me wondering why there aren't enough places for amateur players to fulfil their musical aspirations For two weeks this summer I was taken seriously as a violin player. I was staying at the Magic Mountain Music Farm Practice Retreat in beautiful upstate New York, a course run by Burton Kaplan, and my article about my experience has just come out in the September issue of The Strad. By way of background,

Ariane Todes

Leopold Auer weighs in on the vibrato debate

Responses to my post about Menuhin's vibrato drew a mixture of responses. I’d remarked on it being ‘perfectly shaped’ and ‘fluid’ and many loved it, but some people disagreed, saying it was too tight and fast, and hated it. I wasn’t sure what to think, so I went to the magical library that is the internet to find out. Where better place to learn about vibrato than from Leopold Auer, the legendary teacher of Mischa Elman, Nathan Milstein, Jascha Heifetz and Toscha Zeidel, amon

Ariane Todes

The shortcut to perfection? Or tendinitis?

The British Pathé YouTube archive is proving to be a charming source of films about the violin, in all its forms. Here is a soundless video from 1926, 'Trained Fingers', starring the dashing Albert Sammons. You might start to feel a little queasy around 1:24, when the special Ostrovsky training device comes out and Sammons puts his fingers in. The invention for double-stops looks a little less torturous, but does it really beat good old scales? Or is it tendinitis waiting to

Ariane Todes

An innovative solution to peg turning

I just came across this delightful footage on the British Pathé YouTube channel. It shows a class of 'budding Kreislers' from 1940 learning on a special instrument designed by John Brown, with mandolin like tuning pegs to make it easier for them to tune: rather like the systems that have recently come on to the market. The bows too are designed to make it easier for children to learn the correct position. 'They are becoming masters at what is known as technique,' says the ann

Ariane Todes

How Sheila Nelson made me love the violin

You probably didn’t know that my mother was also a journalist – the apple never falls far from the tree, as they say. She was the Newsweek correspondent at the United Nations in the 60s, as you can read in her compelling 2012 autobiography, Don’t Ask Me Where I Come From. But I only recently discovered that in 1981, she wrote an article about my first violin teacher, Sheila Nelson. Sheila, now 78 and retired, is one of the most respected pedagogues of her generation. Starting

Lili Todes

Sheila Nelson and her work in Tower Hamlets

In the 1980s, string pedagogue Sheila Nelson took her seminal teaching techniques to underprivileged schools in the London borough of Tower Hamlets. In 1981, my mother, Lili Todes, a journalist, visited the project, and here, published for the first time, is what she wrote At nine o’clock each Tuesday morning, half-term and holidays excepted, Sheila Nelson emerges from the back garden path of her home-cum-music academy in a tree-lined street on Highgate’s borders, stuffs the