LA JOLLA -- Some brilliantly talented instrumentalists here in their 20s
are getting the benefit of experience and knowledge from musicians three
times their age.

The chamber music workshop at SummerFest '99 paired the three-year-old
Coolidge Quartet with the legendary cellist Janos Starker, 75,
chain-smoking and appearing in the best of health.

"I don't teach so much," Starker told the musicians and audience in St.
James-by-the-Sea Episcopal Church (just across the street from the
festival's home in Sherwood Auditorium, on a cliff over the Pacific), "so
all I do is tell stories." He declined a microphone, and spoke very softly.
A probably incidental consequence (wink, wink) of that was absolute silence
and everybody leaning forward, paying attention to each quiet word coming
through that godforesaken accent.

Tell stories? Sure.  Starker let the Coolidge play through 10 minutes
of the "Grosse Fugue," and then disected the score note by note, dealing
with fingering, the position of the arm, the grip ("whatever you do, don't
grip"), the the pressure of the index finger against the thumb.  "When you
get the mechanics out of the way," he told the youngsters (both fascinated
and somewhat put off by the "elementary nature" of the instruction), "then
you can do what you want to do."

Just before Starker, another cellist (from another generation) took a
different route to coaching, concentrating on interpretation.  Working with
the brand-new Xando Quartet and Beethoven's B-flat Major Quartet, Garry
Hoffman ignored basics and notes, hammering at the need for "rougher sound"
here and "more meaningful silence" there.  After several attempts to have
the quartet play a passage with more contrast and drama, Hoffman
complained:  "I am still not scared," and then came up with the winning
suggestion:  "Think of Beethoven's face!" When Xando played the phrase
again, it came right out of a night-time German forest.

The day also offered Mr. Music Education himself, Curtis president Garry
Graffman, 70.

At the first of Michael Feldman's "Lunchtime Encounters" (with the New
York Philharmonic's Cynthia Phelps and Carter Brey, radio producers,
recording executives, computer experts, etc.  lined up in the next two
weeks), Graffman went all the way back to the opening chapter of his
out-of-print book, "I Really Should Be Practicing."

At age 3, he took up the violin, but "was too awful," so he took up
"what string players call an easier instrument," the piano, at 4.  At 10,
Graffman entered Curtis, little suspecting the beginning of a lifetime
association, culminating in becoming the head of the unique, great music
school.

By 17, Graffman was recording the Rachmaninov Second with Ormandy (who
tried to rattle the youngster before rehearsal by asking him to play the
cadenza -- the concerto doesn't have one, but Graffman still remembers
the incident a half a century later), and the Beethoven Third, with Szell.
One of the most important influences on the young musician was his long
association with Horowitz -- not just as one of his teachers, but as the
"audience" for the pianist's preparation for recording during the long
years when he refused to perform in public.

"He would just play Scarlatti after Scarlatti, the `collected works' of
Scriabin, and so on," Graffman recalled, a witness to countless Horowitz
performances nobody else had a chance to hear.

Graffman's brilliant career was interrupted 20 years ago, when two
fingers in his right hand "froze up," a condition no conventional or
alternative medicine could remedy to this day.  He has taken this major
trauma incredibly well, putting his energy into Curtis and music education
in general, a consuming passion about Chinese art...  and playing the
left-hand repertory.  Thanks to the riches of the Wittgenstein family,
there exists a wealth of such music, commissioned for Paul (brother of
Ludwig) who lost his right arm in World War I.  Left-hand piano pieces by
Ravel, Prokofiev, Britten, Schmidt, Hindemith (lost forever), and Korngold
today allow Graffman to keep performing.

At SummerFest '99, on Sunday, Graffman will be joined by Benny Kim, Philip
Setzer and Hoffman in Korngold's "Suite for Two Violins, Cello and Piano
Left-Hand," Op.  23.

While being very matter-of-fact and quite without regret about the loss of
his career ("it happened after many good years I had; I'd feel differently
if it came at the beginning of my career"), Graffman looked out wistfully
at the sun-splashed affluence of La Jolla, reminiscing about his father's
knack for making terrible mistakes about real estate deals.

Coming from Russia via Asia, with a good amount of money in gold, the
elder Graffman was received by family friend "ladies with cars" everywhere,
taking him around in the 1920s in Honolulu, New York and La Jolla.  The
"ladies with cars" suggested buying very cheap land in Waikiki, on 57th
Street in Manhattan, and right in the heart of of the "Village" in La
Jolla.  He turned down the opportunities -- the Honolulu scene was too
desolate, in New York, there were too many cockroaches (the plot in the
question is where the CAMI building stands today), and heaven knows what
happened right here.  So, with the money eventually gone, Graffman Sr.
went into the "business" of giving violin lessons.  But his son, at a
very early age, took up an easier instrument, and the rest is history.

Janos Gereben/SF
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