Boccherini Archives

Conversation with Stephen Kates (September, 2002)

Interview by Tim Janof Stephen Kates studied with Gregor Piatigorsky, Leonard Rose, Claus Adam, Laszlo Varga, and Marie Roemaet-Rosanoff. He was awarded the Silver Medal at the Third International Tchaikovsky Competition in 1966 in Moscow, where he returned as the American juror in 1986. He has made solo appearances with the world's greatest orchestras in New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Detroit, Cincinnati, San Francisco, Atlanta, Baltimore, Leningrad, and Los Angeles. He is a former President of the Violoncello Society in New York. For seven summers he was a member of the faculty of the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, California, and has taught at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore for almost 30 years. He has recorded for the RCA, Denon, Melodiya, Orion, CRI, and Bainbridge labels. [...]

By Tim Janof|2020-03-01T18:06:28-05:00October 27th, 2019|Categories: Internet Cello Society Archive, Interviews, In the Practice Room, Performance, Teaching|Tags: Laszlo Varga, Schumann Concerto, Leonard Rose, Piatagorsky, Stephen Kates, scales, Tchaikovsky Competition, Boccherini|

What Makes a Baroque Cellist — by Guy Fishman

I was once accused of playing like a baroque cellist. It was most certainly an accusation, and I don’t know what the coach was hoping to achieve by framing her opinion of my playing in such terms. Suffice it to say I was insulted, and the funny thing is, I don’t even know why. Okay, I was playing Brahms’s F major sonata, on a cello that had an endpin and two steel strings (the other two were wound gut). My partner was playing a Steinway M. Furthermore, and perhaps most revealing, is the fact that by the time I was being coached on this piece, during my second year of doctoral studies at New England Conservatory, I had already won a position with Boston’s Handel & Haydn Society, the nation’s [...]

By Guy Fishman|2021-07-26T15:08:11-04:00October 25th, 2013|Categories: Artistic Vision, Baroque|Tags: Bach Suites, Carter Brey, prominence, performance, critic, Vivaldi, experiments, David Soyer, Yo-Yo Ma, possibility, dual careers, Pablo Casals, Anner Bylsma, endpins, Brahms, curiosity, gut strings, Paul Katz, teachers, historically-informed performance, Beethoven, New York, interest, cello, academic, Jascha Heifetz, cellobello, Baroque, Matt Haimovitz, cellists, Boccherini, modern playing|

Travails of Travel with a Cello

Airlines can be sticky about these instruments, no matter how rare and valuable (Excerpted with permission from OttawaCitizen.com) Don’t tell Pinchas Zukerman, but Amanda Forsyth has another man in her life. His name is Carlo. He’s Italian, 300 years old, about four feet tall and made of wood. On second thought, Zukerman has probably met this guy. He lives in a special carbon fibre case in the home he shares with Forsyth. Carlo is, after all, a cello and a very expensive one at that, having been made by Carlo Giuseppe Testore in 1699 and being worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. That all makes Forsyth pretty protective of old Carlo, her nickname for her instrument. “He’s my other husband,” she says. “Whenever I go to Italy, I always open [...]

By Blogmaster|2018-11-19T02:36:24-05:00October 14th, 2012|Categories: Cello Travel|Tags: Travel, Boccherini, travel with an instrument, stress, flights, musical instruments, baggage, WestJet, air travel, checked baggage, airlines, security, Pinchas, safety, Zukerman|