Viola Master Encourages Students to Find Their Own Style

The international reputation of the MSU College of Music attracts some of the world’s leading teachers and performers to its faculty. Students thrive on the personal attention they receive from these outstanding musicians, who encourage them to bring their own ideas to the music they love.

Case in point: violist Yuri Gandelsman, who joined the college’s faculty in 2008.

For Gandelsman, a rock from an earthquake in Uzbekistan set in motion a chain of events that eventually led him to Michigan State.

Gandelsman was a young violin student in Tashkent in 1966. His teacher grew impatient and told Gandelsman he had no talent. So Gandelsman borrowed a viola from a neighbor, hoping to do better with a different instrument.

“I had only been playing for two months when the earthquake came,” Gandelsman explains. The Tashkent quake registered 7.5 on the Richter scale and left 300,000 people homeless, destroying much of the historic old city. It also smashed Gandelsman’s borrowed viola with a shower of rocks.

The quake prompted Gandelsman’s family to move to Ukraine. Along the way, they stopped in Moscow, where they hoped to find a new viola to replace the one that had been destroyed. Instruments were scarce at that time, but the family at last found a seller, who asked Gandelsman to play something.

“I hadn’t touched a viola since the earthquake,” says Gandelsman, but the viola seller was impressed and contacted a music professor he knew. The professor pressed Gandelsman’s parents to allow him to stay in Moscow, where his teachers included Heinrich Talalyan and Valentin Berlinsky.

His music masters, says Gandelsman, were very strict about technique. “In Russia, the focus was very much about taking care of the technical ability. Without technique, there is no base for the style and the talent.”

As a music master himself, Gandelsman tries to combine the best of East and West instruction. While he says students may find him more demanding about technique, he wants to make sure they find their own individual style and learn to appreciate the music in ever-deepening ways.

“I always tell them to come to the lesson with their own ideas and not to be afraid to make mistakes,” he says. “However many people you have, there are that many ways to play. To copy someone else’s style, that’s not interesting.”

Gandelsman remained in Moscow for 25 years before joining the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra in 1990. In 2000, Gandelsman turned his attention to a solo career, chamber music, and teaching. In 2001, he became an artist-in-residence at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.

Gandelsman’s growing international fame coincided with the loosening of political restrictions between the West and Eastern Europe and China. Greater freedom to travel has allowed artists to pursue careers abroad and exchange ideas with musicians from very different cultural backgrounds.

“I think this is a very good thing,” Gandelsman says. “Kids have to work harder because they have more competition from students around the world.”

Does this international exchange endanger distinctive national styles of playing?

“No,” Gandelsman says. “You never lose your national style. That’s in your blood.”

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