Time for a violin lesson with Ivan Galamian. The place is a memento-cluttered study in his Manhattan apartment, where he does all his teaching. Students call it the torture chamber.
Nobody is allowed here who has not already shown talent and promise. Still, it is hard not to be nervous. Autographed portraits of Kreisler, Szigeti, Milstein—all good friends of Galamian's —glare down from the walls. The air seems to tingle with his awesome reputation in the violin world. Isaac Stern calls him "the most effective violin teacher in the country," and he certainly has the alumni to prove it. Most of the brightest young soloists in the U.S. are Galamian products; Itzhak Perlman, Young Uck Kim, Jaime Laredo, Paul Zukofsky and James Oliver Buswell IV. In addition, Galamian has trained top chamber players like Arnold Steinhardt of the Guarneri Quartet and orchestra concertmasters like David Nadien of the New York Philharmonic.
Ultimate Sin. Tall and deliberate, Galamian, 65, sits there in his white wooden chair, taking everything in with stern, searching eyes. His Russian-accented speech is soft, and the softer it gets the more ominous it can be. When a student commits the ultimate sin—wasting Galamian's time by showing up unprepared—they say he whispers a single word: "Leave." Ivan the Terrible,
The piece for today is Lalo's Symphonie Espagnole. Galamian nods and sings along, sometimes snapping his fingers to indicate rhythm. His few comments are deceptively simple. "Intonation," he murmurs, or, "That's it, that's it." When something goes wrong, he raises an eyebrow; the music stops cold. Then he picks up his 1680 Nicola Amati violin and, filling the room with a full, rich tone, shows how the passage should sound. "Mark that," he says.
Oops—awkward bowing there. Galamian is a stickler on that. He teaches all of his students the same technique: the bow parallel to the bridge and the arm extended in a natural sweep. His method is based on mastery of the fundamentals. Paul Zukofsky's first six months of lessons, for instance, were devoted entirely to the A-minor scale.
Galamian's theory is that suffering through exercises liberates a student to go on later and develop his own musical personality. Cry now, play later, is the plan. "Some people say he is all technique and no music," says Itzhak Perlman, "but I say he shows you the way to produce the sound you need. Then he inspires you to have your own ideas." He approaches each student like one of the chess problems he is so good at, and he tailors each solution to individual talents and temperaments. And the students all agree that he is gentle and considerate beneath his seventy. "The most dangerous thing in a teacher," he says, "is dogma."