The official website
http://www.aaronrosand.com/home
Aaron Rosand The Last Romantic Short Film
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=6&v=kpv41M5ikvg
Violinist Aaron Rosand on why memorisation is key to interpretation
http://www.thestrad.com/latest/blogs/violinist-aaron-rosand-on-why-memorisation-is-key-to-interpretation
Violinist Aaron Rosand on how to practise effectively
http://www.thestrad.com/latest/blogs/violinist-aaron-rosand-on-how-to-practise-effectively
Aaron Rosand on finding the perfect set of strings
http://www.thestrad.com/latest/editorschoice/aaron-rosand-on-finding-the-perfect-set-of-strings
Aaron Rosand on how to produce a beautiful tone
http://www.thestrad.com/latest/blogs/aaron-rosand-on-how-to-produce-a-beautiful-tone
Aaron Rosand on how to produce a good vibrato
http://www.thestrad.com/violinist-aaron-rosand-on-how-to-produce-a-good-vibrato/
Aaron Rosand on finding the correct bowings and fingerings
http://www.thestrad.com/latest/blogs/aaron-rosand-on-finding-the-correct-bowings-and-fingerings
Aaron Rosand on portamento
http://www.thestrad.com/aaron-rosand-violinist-portamento-bring-piece-to-life/
The Lost Art of Violin Recital Programming
http://www.theviolinchannel.com/vc-masterclass-aaron-rosand-curtis-institute-lost-art-violin-recital-programming
Aaron Rosand on improving bow technique
http://www.thestrad.com/latest/blogs/violinist-aaron-rosand-on-improving-bow-technique
Aaron Rosand on how to succeed in competitions and auditions
http://www.thestrad.com/cpt-latests/violinist-aaron-rosand-succeed-competitions-auditions/
‘Every bow movement should be calculated,’ says violinist Aaron Rosand
http://www.thestrad.com/cpt-latests/every-bow-movement-should-be-calculated-says-violinist-aaron-rosand/
I discourage my students from using a shoulder rest, says violinist Aaron Rosand
http://www.thestrad.com/cpt-latests/i-discourage-my-students-from-using-a-shoulder-rest-says-violinist-aaron-
rosand/
Correct posture can significantly improve your playing, writes Aaron Rosand
http://www.thestrad.com/cpt-latests/correct-posture-can-significantly-improve-your-playing-writes-aaron-rosand/
http://www.aaronrosand.com/home
Aaron Rosand The Last Romantic Short Film
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=6&v=kpv41M5ikvg
Violinist Aaron Rosand on why memorisation is key to interpretation
http://www.thestrad.com/latest/blogs/violinist-aaron-rosand-on-why-memorisation-is-key-to-interpretation
Violinist Aaron Rosand on how to practise effectively
http://www.thestrad.com/latest/blogs/violinist-aaron-rosand-on-how-to-practise-effectively
Aaron Rosand on finding the perfect set of strings
http://www.thestrad.com/latest/editorschoice/aaron-rosand-on-finding-the-perfect-set-of-strings
Aaron Rosand on how to produce a beautiful tone
http://www.thestrad.com/latest/blogs/aaron-rosand-on-how-to-produce-a-beautiful-tone
Aaron Rosand on how to produce a good vibrato
http://www.thestrad.com/violinist-aaron-rosand-on-how-to-produce-a-good-vibrato/
Aaron Rosand on finding the correct bowings and fingerings
http://www.thestrad.com/latest/blogs/aaron-rosand-on-finding-the-correct-bowings-and-fingerings
Aaron Rosand on portamento
http://www.thestrad.com/aaron-rosand-violinist-portamento-bring-piece-to-life/
The Lost Art of Violin Recital Programming
http://www.theviolinchannel.com/vc-masterclass-aaron-rosand-curtis-institute-lost-art-violin-recital-programming
Aaron Rosand on improving bow technique
http://www.thestrad.com/latest/blogs/violinist-aaron-rosand-on-improving-bow-technique
Aaron Rosand on how to succeed in competitions and auditions
http://www.thestrad.com/cpt-latests/violinist-aaron-rosand-succeed-competitions-auditions/
‘Every bow movement should be calculated,’ says violinist Aaron Rosand
http://www.thestrad.com/cpt-latests/every-bow-movement-should-be-calculated-says-violinist-aaron-rosand/
I discourage my students from using a shoulder rest, says violinist Aaron Rosand
http://www.thestrad.com/cpt-latests/i-discourage-my-students-from-using-a-shoulder-rest-says-violinist-aaron-
rosand/
Correct posture can significantly improve your playing, writes Aaron Rosand
http://www.thestrad.com/cpt-latests/correct-posture-can-significantly-improve-your-playing-writes-aaron-rosand/
Rebel with a Cause
At 70, Aaron Rosand is busier than ever. But if his reluctance to conform has affected his career, he doesn't care, he tells Dennis Rooney.
(Reprinted with Permission from Strad Magazine, November 1997).
'I've always been something of a rebel,' Aaron Rosand says to me as he recalls the near half-century since his debut in New York's Town Hall. 'I never thought of music as a business, living in a fantasy world where music is concerned. I was always very proud and if I couldn't do it on my own I didn't want to do it. I do have a certain intolerance for incompetence, preferring to live in my own ivory tower rather than be nice to people who are not worth the effort,' he continues, 'I haven't played the social game or attempted to ingratiate myself with people in power. Some might say this has cost me, but I don't think so. I live very well, and those who appreciate what I have to say and do make my career gratifying.'
Cicadas provide a shrill counterpoint to our conversation on a mild August afternoon as we sit on a shady patio at the rear of Rosand's Connecticut home, where he lives with his wife, Monica Woo, in a rambling yet cosy house that is filled with mementos, each one possessing a unique resonance of the people, places and events that fill a lifetime.
Rosand, with a small goatee and a slim, athletic figure, wears his 70 years lightly; the refinement of his person is matched by his renowned elegance as a performer. However, despite a reputation among both his colleagues and his connoisseurs as one of the peerless violinists of his generation, Rosand has never achieved wide public acclaim. For many years, his appearances before U.S. audiences were often infrequent, his reputation in his homeland to a large extent secured by a distinguished series of recordings.
Rosand was born on 13 March 1927 in Hammond, Indiana. His parents were both professional musicians whose separate occupations (cabaret singer and cinema pianist) were combined on weekends. 'Once, during a performance, I jumped out of the lap of whomever was caring for me and announced that I wanted to sing, too, and proceeded to sing my father's songs from memory.'
At almost three-and-a-half, Rosand began to study the violin, making his first public appearance at five. His parents had, by then, moved to Chicago so that he would have a good teacher and at nine, assisting at a recital by the tenor Jan Peerce, at Chicago's Civic Opera House, he became a local celebrity. 'The next year, I made my Chicago Symphony debut with Frederick Stock, playing the Mendelssohn Concerto.'
At twelve, with the support of the Chicago philanthropist, Max Adler, who also sponsored Isaac Stern, Rosand became a scholarship student of Leon Sametini at the Chicago Musical College. With Sametini, Rosand learnt most of his repertory and the violinistic tradition of Sametini's teacher, Eugene Ysaye. 'At first, he was very hard on me. "With your left hand," he told me, "if you never did any more with it, you would have enough technique to play anything, but your right hand has to be improved." He made me play only open strings for several months. He had a yardstick, and he used to rap my wrist every time it came up.'
In July 1944, Rosand met the last of his teachers, Efrem Zimbalist, then director of Philadelphia's Curtis Institute. 'Sametini had died suddenly the day before I was to play the Tchaikovsky Concerto in Grant Park with Desire Defauw and the Chicago Symphony. I dedicated that performance to his memory. Adler decided to send me to study with Zimbalist, who heard me at his summer home in Rockport, Maine, and accepted me immediately. I began that September.' Zimbalist didn't teach repertoire so much as he listened intently and commented briefly. 'What he had to say didn't always have an immediate effect; sometimes years passed before his meaning was understood. Very rarely, he would suggest some fingering or bowing. In those works in which he specialised, he might occasionally make some notation. When it came to working out violinistic problems, his attitude was that of the Russian School: "Well, you must practice." Was his reply.'
In 1945, Rosand left Curtis for 18 months of Special Service with the U.S. Eighth Army in Japan, whose culture sparked a lifelong fascination. When he returned to Curtis, he was noticed by the National Concert and Artist Corporation, then a competitor of Columbia Artists Management Inc. (CAMI) who encouraged him to make a NewYork debut (27 December 1948). 'It was very successful and I began my career while still enrolled at Curtis.' His first season included '30 or 40 recitals', most of them for National's Civic Concerts. 'It was a wonderful training ground for young artists.' Touring the country with Civic Concerts, however, made continued study with Zimbalist difficult. 'Eventually I simply drifted away and went to New York.'
Early on, Rosand became known as a 'pinch-hitter' for ailing artists because of his ability to perform any of 20 concertos at a moment's notice. 'I was called at the last minute to replace an ill Yehudi Menuhin, who was to play the Bruch Concerto in Indianapolis. Fabien Sevitzky, the conductor, wasn't too happy to have me instead of Menuhin. As we began, I noticed him looking at his watch - I don't think he heard a note I was playing!'
Rosand's first wife, the late pianist Eileen Flissler, set in motion perhaps his most bizarre platform experience. 'Joseph Szigeti was scheduled to perform the Busoni Concerto and the Berlioz Reverie et Caprice with the Little Orchestra Society, for which Eileen was the pianist. At one of the rehearsals, the conductor, Thomas Scherman, announced that Szigeti had cancelled because of illness and he wasn't sure if anyone could be found to play two such unusual works. Flissler boldly announced that her husband could. 'When they called me and asked if I would be able to perform both works in a week I said: "Of course," because it was a golden opportunity to play in NewYork, but in truth, I had never laid eyes on either one before. It took two days combing the used music shops in Manhattan before I found the score to the Busoni. Then I practised about 24 hours a day. At the performance I walked out on stage without music, but when the orchestra began the Busoni I couldn't remember how it started. It was like a bad dream - "I'm not really here. Will someone up there help me?" I began to feel outside myself, watching myself as I began to play with fingertips and bowings that I had never practised. The performance was impeccable, but I didn't seem to be conscious of what I was doing. I don't know how I pulled it off, and yet it was all there. I have a tape to prove it!'
In 1957, Rosand recorded an LP of the Brahms sonatas op. 78 & 100 with Flissler. 'Only 800 copies were pressed and I'm told that today it is a collector's item.' The duo's 1961 recording of all the Beethoven works for violin and piano was originally part of the legendary 'Vox Box' series and is now available as a three-CD set, while Rosand's first orchestral recording for the label, a French programme of his own divising, was listed by The New York Times as one of the all-time best-selling violin records.
In 1960, Rosand made his New York Philharmonic debut, playing the Barber Concerto with Leonard Bernstein. But despite the success of his recording career, such recognition in his own country was also all too infrequent. 'Nathan Milstein told me: "You're a great violinist but you'll never make a great career in America because you were born here. You should go to Vienna: you'd be king in Vienna.'" By the early '60s, Rosand began giving concerts extensively in Europe. He was spending so much time there that by the late -'60s he jumped at the chance to buy a house in Italy, spending summers abroad until 1993.
Rosand has stubbornly resisted the tendency during the past few decades to equate sonata programmes with recitals. 'A recital is a one-man show,' he says, 'No recital programme in my youth was complete without showpieces.' By the late -'50s, however, virtuoso violin music was being ignored on recital programmes. Rosand feels that the virtuoso literature is in many ways the most challenging of all. 'To play great violin music with virtuosity, style and ease requires a special kind of technique.'
In 1967, Rosand gave a Carnegie Hall recital of music by the great violinist-composers: Tartini, Vieuxtemps, Paganini, Sarasate and Ysaye. 'The reviews were favourable, every violinist in town was there and the house was almost full. I wanted to make a point.' In the ensuing years he solidified his reputation as a virtuoso throwback at the annual Romantic Festivals in Indianapolis, playing concertos by Arensky, Ernst, Joachim, Hubay, Ries and Godard.
After Ivan Galamian's death in 1981, Zimbalist asked Rosand to join the faculty of the Curtis Institute. At his own Alma Mater he now seeks to impart the twin strains embodied in his own playing - 'the Russian school of Auer and the Ysaye tradition' - to a new generation. 'There is a sense of fulfillment in handing down a tradition of which I'm so proud. In a way, I'm the "last of the Mohicans",' Like Zimbalist, Rosand is inclined to allow his students considerable freedom, but unlike his former teacher, he attempts to analyse a violinistic problem and tries to clarify it. 'With the youngsters, I give them my part, but if I see that it's not working, I immediately change it since every hand is different.' Rosand is distressed by the increased frequency of physical problems that young violinists develop. 'Most of them are caused by bad position or tension, trying to over vibrate and the increased pressure needed to produce a volume of sound on synthetic strings.' I'm a stickler for good position, and my students always are noticeable by the way they hold their violins and bows.'
For Rosand, the increasing use of shoulder rests is a particular bete noir. 'No great artist, past or present, has used one. It throws everything out of position. The shoulder and clavicle form a table on which the violin rests. It's not the most comfortable position and if you don't start doing it early, say at four or five, you'll never be able to turn your arm correctly. If you look at old Heifetz photos or videos, you'll see that his left hand is well under the instrument. In that position, everything is in control. Because of shoulder rests, the hand is in a different position and the fingertip vibrato is more like a twitch. Occasionally, if someone has an ostrich-like neck, I will allow it, but only if that student promises to keep their left elbow well below the violin so that the fingertips are in the right position to vibrate.'
At Curtis, Rosand is considered a 'tough teacher'. 'I'm demanding. I insist on preparation and disciplined practice. The violin is not a trumpet. In order to play loud, one must learn to play soft. I insist that my students practise quietly and do not try to play intensely. Otherwise they will lack endurance. I also insist that they practise scales every day. I don't want them to think they can pick up the violin and get the same sound that they had when they finished practising the day before. Like a good athlete, one must warm up the muscles,' he explains, before turning to the right hand: 'The bow must be drawn gently across the string, all pressure coming from the fingers, not the arm muscles. When you use the fingers, you have great sensitivity and control. First and foremost, I want my students to think of the music they are playing, so that technique becomes an unconscious servant of the music.'
Rosand encourages students to enter competitions when he thinks they are ready, believing that winning a competition is the only way that a person beginning a career today can attract management. Although a frequent competition judge, he is highly critical of the way many are run. 'Only if a jury is completely impartial will top players reach the finals, but they way they're run works against producing a top-notch winner.' The crucial reform in Rosand's opinion, would be to bar any teacher who has a student in competition from serving on that competition's jury. 'Although a teacher cannot vote for his student, he can vote against other contestants in ways that make his own students look better. I've known a judge to extol a performance and then not vote for the performer. At other competitions, I've seen instances of the rankest favouritism go unchallenged. I have become so upset by that sort of thing that I don't really want to serve on juries anymore.'
As the cicadas give way to crickets and frogs, Rosand lights up a choice Havana ('to ward off any mosquitoes') and mentions his annual tour of Asia and, in June 1998, three recitals at London's Wigmore Hall, while new recordings of the Bach Solo Sonatas and the Beethoven and Brahms concertos for Vox Records will soon be added to his currently available discography of more than 20 CDs. 'I'll be busier this season than I've been in ten years,' he says as we walk to his car for the drive to the station. As the afternoon shadows lengthens into dusk, I seem to hear a faint echo of Mohican war whoops in the stillness of this Connecticut valley.
At 70, Aaron Rosand is busier than ever. But if his reluctance to conform has affected his career, he doesn't care, he tells Dennis Rooney.
(Reprinted with Permission from Strad Magazine, November 1997).
'I've always been something of a rebel,' Aaron Rosand says to me as he recalls the near half-century since his debut in New York's Town Hall. 'I never thought of music as a business, living in a fantasy world where music is concerned. I was always very proud and if I couldn't do it on my own I didn't want to do it. I do have a certain intolerance for incompetence, preferring to live in my own ivory tower rather than be nice to people who are not worth the effort,' he continues, 'I haven't played the social game or attempted to ingratiate myself with people in power. Some might say this has cost me, but I don't think so. I live very well, and those who appreciate what I have to say and do make my career gratifying.'
Cicadas provide a shrill counterpoint to our conversation on a mild August afternoon as we sit on a shady patio at the rear of Rosand's Connecticut home, where he lives with his wife, Monica Woo, in a rambling yet cosy house that is filled with mementos, each one possessing a unique resonance of the people, places and events that fill a lifetime.
Rosand, with a small goatee and a slim, athletic figure, wears his 70 years lightly; the refinement of his person is matched by his renowned elegance as a performer. However, despite a reputation among both his colleagues and his connoisseurs as one of the peerless violinists of his generation, Rosand has never achieved wide public acclaim. For many years, his appearances before U.S. audiences were often infrequent, his reputation in his homeland to a large extent secured by a distinguished series of recordings.
Rosand was born on 13 March 1927 in Hammond, Indiana. His parents were both professional musicians whose separate occupations (cabaret singer and cinema pianist) were combined on weekends. 'Once, during a performance, I jumped out of the lap of whomever was caring for me and announced that I wanted to sing, too, and proceeded to sing my father's songs from memory.'
At almost three-and-a-half, Rosand began to study the violin, making his first public appearance at five. His parents had, by then, moved to Chicago so that he would have a good teacher and at nine, assisting at a recital by the tenor Jan Peerce, at Chicago's Civic Opera House, he became a local celebrity. 'The next year, I made my Chicago Symphony debut with Frederick Stock, playing the Mendelssohn Concerto.'
At twelve, with the support of the Chicago philanthropist, Max Adler, who also sponsored Isaac Stern, Rosand became a scholarship student of Leon Sametini at the Chicago Musical College. With Sametini, Rosand learnt most of his repertory and the violinistic tradition of Sametini's teacher, Eugene Ysaye. 'At first, he was very hard on me. "With your left hand," he told me, "if you never did any more with it, you would have enough technique to play anything, but your right hand has to be improved." He made me play only open strings for several months. He had a yardstick, and he used to rap my wrist every time it came up.'
In July 1944, Rosand met the last of his teachers, Efrem Zimbalist, then director of Philadelphia's Curtis Institute. 'Sametini had died suddenly the day before I was to play the Tchaikovsky Concerto in Grant Park with Desire Defauw and the Chicago Symphony. I dedicated that performance to his memory. Adler decided to send me to study with Zimbalist, who heard me at his summer home in Rockport, Maine, and accepted me immediately. I began that September.' Zimbalist didn't teach repertoire so much as he listened intently and commented briefly. 'What he had to say didn't always have an immediate effect; sometimes years passed before his meaning was understood. Very rarely, he would suggest some fingering or bowing. In those works in which he specialised, he might occasionally make some notation. When it came to working out violinistic problems, his attitude was that of the Russian School: "Well, you must practice." Was his reply.'
In 1945, Rosand left Curtis for 18 months of Special Service with the U.S. Eighth Army in Japan, whose culture sparked a lifelong fascination. When he returned to Curtis, he was noticed by the National Concert and Artist Corporation, then a competitor of Columbia Artists Management Inc. (CAMI) who encouraged him to make a NewYork debut (27 December 1948). 'It was very successful and I began my career while still enrolled at Curtis.' His first season included '30 or 40 recitals', most of them for National's Civic Concerts. 'It was a wonderful training ground for young artists.' Touring the country with Civic Concerts, however, made continued study with Zimbalist difficult. 'Eventually I simply drifted away and went to New York.'
Early on, Rosand became known as a 'pinch-hitter' for ailing artists because of his ability to perform any of 20 concertos at a moment's notice. 'I was called at the last minute to replace an ill Yehudi Menuhin, who was to play the Bruch Concerto in Indianapolis. Fabien Sevitzky, the conductor, wasn't too happy to have me instead of Menuhin. As we began, I noticed him looking at his watch - I don't think he heard a note I was playing!'
Rosand's first wife, the late pianist Eileen Flissler, set in motion perhaps his most bizarre platform experience. 'Joseph Szigeti was scheduled to perform the Busoni Concerto and the Berlioz Reverie et Caprice with the Little Orchestra Society, for which Eileen was the pianist. At one of the rehearsals, the conductor, Thomas Scherman, announced that Szigeti had cancelled because of illness and he wasn't sure if anyone could be found to play two such unusual works. Flissler boldly announced that her husband could. 'When they called me and asked if I would be able to perform both works in a week I said: "Of course," because it was a golden opportunity to play in NewYork, but in truth, I had never laid eyes on either one before. It took two days combing the used music shops in Manhattan before I found the score to the Busoni. Then I practised about 24 hours a day. At the performance I walked out on stage without music, but when the orchestra began the Busoni I couldn't remember how it started. It was like a bad dream - "I'm not really here. Will someone up there help me?" I began to feel outside myself, watching myself as I began to play with fingertips and bowings that I had never practised. The performance was impeccable, but I didn't seem to be conscious of what I was doing. I don't know how I pulled it off, and yet it was all there. I have a tape to prove it!'
In 1957, Rosand recorded an LP of the Brahms sonatas op. 78 & 100 with Flissler. 'Only 800 copies were pressed and I'm told that today it is a collector's item.' The duo's 1961 recording of all the Beethoven works for violin and piano was originally part of the legendary 'Vox Box' series and is now available as a three-CD set, while Rosand's first orchestral recording for the label, a French programme of his own divising, was listed by The New York Times as one of the all-time best-selling violin records.
In 1960, Rosand made his New York Philharmonic debut, playing the Barber Concerto with Leonard Bernstein. But despite the success of his recording career, such recognition in his own country was also all too infrequent. 'Nathan Milstein told me: "You're a great violinist but you'll never make a great career in America because you were born here. You should go to Vienna: you'd be king in Vienna.'" By the early '60s, Rosand began giving concerts extensively in Europe. He was spending so much time there that by the late -'60s he jumped at the chance to buy a house in Italy, spending summers abroad until 1993.
Rosand has stubbornly resisted the tendency during the past few decades to equate sonata programmes with recitals. 'A recital is a one-man show,' he says, 'No recital programme in my youth was complete without showpieces.' By the late -'50s, however, virtuoso violin music was being ignored on recital programmes. Rosand feels that the virtuoso literature is in many ways the most challenging of all. 'To play great violin music with virtuosity, style and ease requires a special kind of technique.'
In 1967, Rosand gave a Carnegie Hall recital of music by the great violinist-composers: Tartini, Vieuxtemps, Paganini, Sarasate and Ysaye. 'The reviews were favourable, every violinist in town was there and the house was almost full. I wanted to make a point.' In the ensuing years he solidified his reputation as a virtuoso throwback at the annual Romantic Festivals in Indianapolis, playing concertos by Arensky, Ernst, Joachim, Hubay, Ries and Godard.
After Ivan Galamian's death in 1981, Zimbalist asked Rosand to join the faculty of the Curtis Institute. At his own Alma Mater he now seeks to impart the twin strains embodied in his own playing - 'the Russian school of Auer and the Ysaye tradition' - to a new generation. 'There is a sense of fulfillment in handing down a tradition of which I'm so proud. In a way, I'm the "last of the Mohicans",' Like Zimbalist, Rosand is inclined to allow his students considerable freedom, but unlike his former teacher, he attempts to analyse a violinistic problem and tries to clarify it. 'With the youngsters, I give them my part, but if I see that it's not working, I immediately change it since every hand is different.' Rosand is distressed by the increased frequency of physical problems that young violinists develop. 'Most of them are caused by bad position or tension, trying to over vibrate and the increased pressure needed to produce a volume of sound on synthetic strings.' I'm a stickler for good position, and my students always are noticeable by the way they hold their violins and bows.'
For Rosand, the increasing use of shoulder rests is a particular bete noir. 'No great artist, past or present, has used one. It throws everything out of position. The shoulder and clavicle form a table on which the violin rests. It's not the most comfortable position and if you don't start doing it early, say at four or five, you'll never be able to turn your arm correctly. If you look at old Heifetz photos or videos, you'll see that his left hand is well under the instrument. In that position, everything is in control. Because of shoulder rests, the hand is in a different position and the fingertip vibrato is more like a twitch. Occasionally, if someone has an ostrich-like neck, I will allow it, but only if that student promises to keep their left elbow well below the violin so that the fingertips are in the right position to vibrate.'
At Curtis, Rosand is considered a 'tough teacher'. 'I'm demanding. I insist on preparation and disciplined practice. The violin is not a trumpet. In order to play loud, one must learn to play soft. I insist that my students practise quietly and do not try to play intensely. Otherwise they will lack endurance. I also insist that they practise scales every day. I don't want them to think they can pick up the violin and get the same sound that they had when they finished practising the day before. Like a good athlete, one must warm up the muscles,' he explains, before turning to the right hand: 'The bow must be drawn gently across the string, all pressure coming from the fingers, not the arm muscles. When you use the fingers, you have great sensitivity and control. First and foremost, I want my students to think of the music they are playing, so that technique becomes an unconscious servant of the music.'
Rosand encourages students to enter competitions when he thinks they are ready, believing that winning a competition is the only way that a person beginning a career today can attract management. Although a frequent competition judge, he is highly critical of the way many are run. 'Only if a jury is completely impartial will top players reach the finals, but they way they're run works against producing a top-notch winner.' The crucial reform in Rosand's opinion, would be to bar any teacher who has a student in competition from serving on that competition's jury. 'Although a teacher cannot vote for his student, he can vote against other contestants in ways that make his own students look better. I've known a judge to extol a performance and then not vote for the performer. At other competitions, I've seen instances of the rankest favouritism go unchallenged. I have become so upset by that sort of thing that I don't really want to serve on juries anymore.'
As the cicadas give way to crickets and frogs, Rosand lights up a choice Havana ('to ward off any mosquitoes') and mentions his annual tour of Asia and, in June 1998, three recitals at London's Wigmore Hall, while new recordings of the Bach Solo Sonatas and the Beethoven and Brahms concertos for Vox Records will soon be added to his currently available discography of more than 20 CDs. 'I'll be busier this season than I've been in ten years,' he says as we walk to his car for the drive to the station. As the afternoon shadows lengthens into dusk, I seem to hear a faint echo of Mohican war whoops in the stillness of this Connecticut valley.