THE MAKING OF A CELLIST

Having recently celebrated his 85th birthday, cellist and pedagogue Laurence Lesser looks back on his formative influences and recalls some of the iconic 20th-century musicians he worked with

Laurence Lesser plays his 1622 Brothers Amati cello with a 2015 Benoit Rolland bow. He also owns a c.1810 Tourte bow

CARLIN MA

I was born in Los Angeles in 1938. My mother was a piano teacher. When I was very young I was taken to youth concerts and asked if I was interested in any particular instrument. I chose the double bass. My parents thought that was too big for me and instead got me a cello for my sixth birthday. Thus began a lifelong commitment to learn from that instrument how I could find my own voice.

My first teacher of any importance and length was Gregory Aller, a Russian immigrant from Moscow who settled in New York and then moved to Los Angeles in 1931 as a player and teacher. His cellist daughter Eleanor studied with him until she entered Juilliard (in 1934), where her teacher was Felix Salmond. Not long after returning home she met and married the violinist Felix Slatkin, thus forming the Hollywood power couple who created the Hollywood String Quartet.

Aller was an old-school cellist. He taught me scales and arpeggios, and etudes by Dotzauer and Duport. I was asked to keep my left knee behind the cello! He was a warm, caring person and I remember at my lessons there were two toddlers running around his apartment. They were his grandchildren and later they became famous as conductor Leonard Slatkin and cellist Frederick Zlotkin.

At the age of 13, I was in open revolt against my mother, who was forcing me in my cello studies. I simply stopped practising. Aller belonged to a club where chess player Jacqueline de Rothschild Piatigorsky was also a member. Her husband, cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, came often to watch her play. Aller told my parents that he would ask Piatigorsky if he would listen to me and give advice. When my parents told me I was going to play for him, I refused. But the day came and I went unhappily and played with a huge chip on my shoulder. When I’d finished, Piatigorsky asked my parents why I looked so unhappy. They told him that I had not wanted to come there that day because I thought it meant I would have to become a professional cellist. He looked at me thoughtfully and said, ‘Oh, Larry, what makes you think you could become a professional cellist?’ My life’s journey was settled by that question.

Gregor Piatigorsky

Piatigorsky said it was time for a new teacher, suggesting Gábor Rejtő, a Hungarian who had studied with Pablo Casals. The following summer, in 1953, I started working with him at the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, continuing through my high-school years in pre-college at the University of Southern California (USC).

Rejtő was very musical and a warm person. He guided me through repertoire suitable for my age with special care for musical values, and took me through many Popper etudes. He also shared with me technical ideas he had learnt from Casals, including use of expressive intonation, the hammering of the left-hand fingers against the fingerboard and plucking with the left hand while playing a bowed note, the latter two of which Casals believed would set the string in motion. I kept exploring the intonation and the plucking, but later gave up on the hammering. Rejtő also thought it was wrong for me to listen to recordings of the pieces I was studying because he was afraid I would not have my own ideas.

In 1956, it was time to think about college. I was very academic and I applied to top schools in America. I thought I wanted to become a mathematician. I chose MIT, but at that time it didn’t have much to offer a young cellist, so instead I went to Harvard. During my first year there I became very confused about where my life would go – there were math freshmen there of such a high level that I realised my potential was greater in music. I took a year off to sort things out, returning in the meantime to Rejtő at USC. That was interrupted because of a family financial crisis, and I dropped out after only one semester. In spring 1958 I took any work I could get, including a US tour with a pops chamber orchestra – 53 concerts in 63 days. But I got hungry to return to Harvard, so I went back to finish my studies.

During the remaining three years of my degree, I made several trips to New York City for cello lessons with the great Leonard Rose, who had a very Leonard Rose beautiful sound and an interest in technical ideas he had picked up from violinist Ivan Galamian at Meadowmount.

I learnt a lot from him about how to use the bow, and, of course, from the example that his wonderful playing offered. But the infrequency of my visits limited what I could gain. He had a big career and was teaching a lot, and I considered it an honour that he would see me at all. But I also knew that I needed something else.

I applied for and was awarded a Fulbright grant to go to Cologne to study with the great Catalan cellist Gaspar Cassadó. When I first arrived, Cassadó had the impression that I had come as a student of Piatigorsky. That wasn’t true, but Piatigorsky had endorsed the idea of my working with Cassadó, whom he had heard perform in Berlin in the 1920s – when he knew nothing about him but was impressed by his wonderful playing. Another great young cellist in Berlin in the 20s was Emanuel Feuermann. I think all three of these ‘young lions’ wanted to become known as the successor to Casals, who at that time was already about 50. But it didn’t happen that way: Feuermann tragically died in 1942 at the age of 39; Cassadó died in 1966 at the age of 69; Casals himself lived on until 1973, dying aged 96; which left Piatigorsky the only survivor, but only until 1976, when he died aged 73.

In summer 1961, before my Fulbright studies began, I was invited to Casals’ masterclasses in Zermatt, Switzerland. I spent two weeks there and was one of about ten cellists to play for him.

The first piece I and my pianist Ellen Mack played was the opening movement of the Brahms Sonata in F major, marked Allegro vivace. After we played, Casals seemed upset. He said strongly that Brahms was a ‘langsam’ composer and I was playing too fast. He then asked me to play while he played. It felt like I had handcuffs on – he had such a strong will that it was impossible not to follow his lead. I was very unhappy about that, but he, of course, was the great master. In the next class, we played the Brahms middle movements and he was happier. At the last class we played the Beethoven Sonata in C major. When we finished (and in front of the entire group), he said to me, ‘You must thank God for the gift he has given you, but you must not look for success, but be aware that you have a greater responsibility, and that the important thing is to serve music.’ This was unexpected, but it made me happy.

Pablo Casals

I had no real chance to speak with him because the classes were such public events. Interestingly, among the listeners was Elisabeth, queen mother of Belgium, who had also complimented me earlier. When the sessions were over, we all had to travel down the mountain by train. While I was at the station I stood by the train and a window opened. Both Casals and the queen mother reached out to shake my hand, and she said to me, ‘The best for the future!’ I never saw her again. I later learnt that when Casals heard I was going to study with Cassadó he was upset. He wanted me to come to study with him, but I didn’t know this at the time. Also, Cassadó and Casals had had a serious rift because Casals, who had gone into political exile from Spain, had heard that Cassadó was occasionally playing in Italy for fascists (this was probably not accurate) and was using Casals’ name to promote his career (he had studied with Casals in Paris when he was very young and in my opinion was his greatest student).

CASALS ASKED ME TO PLAY WHILE HE PLAYED. IT FELT LIKE I HAD HANDCUFFS ON – HE HAD SUCH A STRONG WILL THAT IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE NOT TO FOLLOW HIS LEAD

Gaspar Cassadò

When I first met Cassadó it was clear that he was jealous of Piatigorsky’s career. He made a point of telling me that as a young man he was known as the Kreisler of the cello owing to his use of portamenti, but that as modern players we should no longer use them – if an oboe could play a beautiful melody without them, we should be able to do the same. I must say that I had never studied with a cellist who had as amazing a technical ability as he. He was a strong player, an emotional player, and could trill with any speed on any finger and play slurred staccatos at any speed in both directions. I remember being enthralled on hearing him play the Debussy Sonata and some movements of Bach in class. He was a demanding teacher who expected a lot of us. I think in that year, not having the pressure of college studies, I practised more than ever before. It was a moment of great growth for me. Cassadó had a lot of ideas about technique which he wanted us to develop. He was very big on the subject of clean left-hand articulation – for him it came from the first knuckles (nearest the palm).

Once when I drove him to the airport (he lived in Florence, Italy) – it was a simpler time at airports then – he invited me to a really wonderful lunch, and afterwards, as he was about to go through passport control, it looked like he was waving goodbye to me, but he wasn’t. His left hand was in the air, and moving his fingers from the first knuckles, he pointed at them and said in a loud voice, ‘Articulation!’

He was a man of great warmth but was equally petulant and upset when somebody wouldn’t do as he asked – I would describe him as essentially a grown-up little boy.

When my Fulbright time was over I returned to Los Angeles, just after the Cuban Missile Crisis. I thought I would be drafted into the army, but Piatigorsky invited me to join his class at USC, where he had begun to teach while I was in Europe. That was the beginning of a life-changing period for me. It started in January 1963 and lasted until I left to teach in Baltimore at the Peabody Institute in 1970.

Piatigorsky’s approach to teaching was quite different from anything I had experienced before. He never brought his cello to class and always sat behind a small desk, listening intently to the student’s playing and sometimes following a score.

Laurence Lesser in 1978

LESSER PHOTO WILLIAM STRUHS

I HAD NEVER STUDIED WITH A CELLIST WHO HAD AS AMAZING A TECHNICAL ABILITY AS CASSADÓ. IT WAS A MOMENT OF GREAT GROWTH FOR ME

I would say his impact came from two main sources. First, he often grabbed the student’s cello to demonstrate, and I would change where I was sitting so I could watch how he approached the instrument. Because he was such a natural player it seemed like a wonderfully powerful source of information just to learn from ‘how he did it’. His tone was resonant, which was something I could relate to Rose’s approach to using the bow like a heavy paintbrush. The contact of his bow was always on the sides of the string, pushing and pulling sideways rather than pressing down on it; that was accomplished by flexibility in the fingers of his right hand. He didn’t actually say ‘do it this way’ – it was enough to see him do it and hear the wonderful result. I noticed that his left-hand fingers generally pointed to the floor. This was different from Casals, whose fingers tended to be perpendicular to the fingerboard. He had many technical suggestions of a specific nature, but these were not central to his teaching.

CASALS AND PIATIGORSKY: A RARE ENCOUNTER

The only time I saw Casals and Piatigorsky together was at the 1967 Casals Festival in Puerto Rico. It was my first time there and for the two great artists it was a reunion after maybe 35 years. They were not close, either as artists or as people, but each had high regard for the other. During that season they played the Schumann Concerto with Casals conducting (bitly.ws/39Vu4). Because I was a young newcomer to the orchestra, sitting at the back, I didn’t play in the reduced cello section. But I had a camera with highspeed black-and-white film and would roam around taking pictures. The one I caught of them sitting on a sofa together with Martita Casals, just before Piatigorsky went out to play the Haydn Dmajor, was a lucky catch. When I later showed it to Piatigorsky, he said that there were three people sitting next to one another, but they couldn’t be further apart in their thoughts. The following season I brought a copy of it to the festival and Casals was kind enough to sign it. Back home, I asked Piatigorsky to sign it as a gift to my parents. It is an iconic photo and possibly the only one ever signed by both artists.

Gregor Piatigorsky, Pablo Casals and Martita Casals in 1967

The second element of Piatigorsky’s teaching was psychological – he would get a result by just changing how we listened or what we thought as we were playing. I clearly remember a fellow student whose sound was very pushed inwards and therefore tight. Piatigorsky told him to try again, but to look out of the window to his right while doing so. The change in sonority was immediate and astonishing. It not only loosened the player’s shoulders but compelled him to hear the sound he was making rather than looking down at his instrument.

Piatigorsky was also an amazing and charming storyteller – very often the point of his story was the key to a musical solution. That invited me to seek an approach myself which was intuitive, and I came up with one that is connected to listening as one sings a phrase before playing it. I still think that way.

Equally important with Piatigorsky was his interest and care for each of us as individuals. He taught generally in studio format, but sometimes he would invite us alone to come for a lesson at his house. Those sessions lasted never less than two hours.

Gregor Piatigorsky in 1972

CASALS FESTIVAL 1967 PHOTO LAURENCE LESSE

HEIFETZ INVITED ME TO A SESSION DURING WHICH HE COACHED THE DOHNÁNYI SERENADE. WHAT ENSUED VIRTUALLY TAUGHT ME A NEW WAY TO LISTEN

Apart from the aforementioned main cello teachers, another huge impact on me during those magical years of the 1960s was frequent contact with Jascha Heifetz. I want to give two examples from the long list of what I learnt from him.

Heifetz taught in studio format and would never allow outsiders to listen. I was therefore surprised and excited when I learnt he had invited me to take part in a session during which he coached the Dohnányi op.10 Serenade for string trio. I also wasn’t expecting what happened next. He wanted to play with us, so he took his student’s violin and we played the variation movement. To say I was focused is no exaggeration. What ensued virtually taught me a new way to listen. At one moment I was holding a long note while he played a very fast run. As he started the bow stroke, with great intensity, I couldn’t hear my own note. Then, as if it were hit by lightning, his sound couldn’t be heard any longer. I knew he believed that one mark of a virtuoso is how quickly they can make a diminuendo, but I had never thought much about it. I went home and listened to a lot of his recordings. What I learnt was that he was playing with an enormous range of dynamics and quicksilver inflection. I began to experiment and learnt that that was accomplished mostly by changing the speed of the bow. No teacher had ever talked to me to think about that.

A legendary duo: Jascha Heifetz and Gregor Piatigorsky

LESSER PHOTO LUCINDA HUTCHISON. HEIFETZ AND PIATIGORSKY PHOTOS LOS ANGELES PHILHARMONIC ARCHIVES

The other experience came when I was recording Tchaikovsky’s Souvenir de Florence sextet as second cellist to my teacher Piatigorsky. In the slow movement, my part was often to play a simple pizzicato accompaniment while Heifetz was playing the main theme. I tried very hard to keep up with him. He stopped, with some dismay in his voice, and said ‘Don’t try to follow me; just play in time. I’ll do the rest.’ He wanted to weave in and out of a steady beat for greatest effect.

The other important source of my growth as a player and artist was to listen to great singers. There are two in particular who come to mind. One is the famous Russian bass Feodor Chaliapin, who befriended the young Piatigorsky and in one exchange with him suggested that he should listen to Piatigorsky to learn how to sing and that Piatigorsky should listen to him in order to learn how to make his cello speak. The other is the Italian Beniamino Gigli, who for me is the greatest of the bel canto tenors. He used a variety of intensity in a way similar to Heifetz but he also had an amazing sense of freedom in his singing, sometimes holding a high note longer than anyone felt could be possible. For the right music, this is a wonderful example of how to use time. I sometimes ask students to try to copy his singing to see what they can learn.

Although I barely studied with Casals, I consider that he and Piatigorsky had the greatest impact on my development. From Casals, an artist who could hold the shape of an entire work in his mind as he sculpted its details, I learnt to think of structure. He was also so convincing in what he presented that it could not be denied by the listener. Piatigorsky was a phenomenal natural player with the uncanny ability to make each person listening feel he was playing to them individually. In anything melodic he was so intuitive, and while the shape of his music was just as honest and disciplined, its source came from his inner voice. In short, Piatigorsky was a storyteller, whereas Casals simply showed what he felt. Gradually, I was able to find my own voice. I came to realise that a musician must know that their role is to play for the listener, to make the message of the composer come alive. You will succeed if you can do that. But Piatigorsky used to say, with a smile, that you should never play for the cellists in the audience; they always have a different idea. I have been extraordinarily lucky to sit at the feet of great masters, but the conclusion is that we are each an amalgam of influences from many sources. Our task is to meld them with our own nature, so we emerge with one voice – our own.