LDV77

DAVID GRIMAL 27 Ysaÿe the teacher had many students with very different personalities. Do you think it’s possible to speak of an Ysaÿe ‘school’? We have a handful of documents of his violin playing but too few recordings have survived to give us a complete picture of his art today. Ysaÿe was a charismatic musician and personality who left a deep impression on all the violinists who worked with him. Rather than a school, I would prefer to speak of a source of inspiration. Intuitively, I feel that Ysaÿe is more of a crossroads than a source, that he radiated in many directions rather than ploughing a single furrow. The great violinists do not necessarily create a ‘school’; they are beacons that enlighten us down the generations and can inspire us far beyond conventional frameworks. It’s only natural here to mention some of his disciples, such as Louis Persinger (who taught the young Yehudi Menuhin, Ruggiero Ricci and Isaac Stern) and Josef Gingold, the legendary teacher of Miriam Fried, Gil Shaham, Leonidas Kavakos, Joshua Bell and many others in Bloomington, Indiana. In conclusion, I would like to recall some words of Gingold. Speaking in the 1990s, he observed that times had changed, that we were now in the age of computers and that the standard of violin playing had never been higher. Any violinist in an orchestra could stand up and play the Brahms concerto in four seconds. Nevertheless, he felt that the standard of the great artists had been much higher in the past. They had an elegance, an expression, colours one no longer finds. But as he said, it was another world. In a very touching documentary that can be viewed on the Internet, Gingold has tears in his eyes as he remembers a few notes from Chausson’s Poème played by Ysaÿe. It was indeed another world: the violin was an extension of the player’s soul, and that was what the audience came to hear.