Violinist and educator Efrem Zimbalist (1890-1985) led a legendary life in music in an age of violin legends. Of the dazzling stars to emerge from the Russian School at the beginning of the 20th century, Zimbalist earned a special place. David Oistrakh compared him to Heifetz: While Heifetz conquered by sheer brilliance, Zimbalist captivated people by appealing to profound mysteries of heart and soul. Zimbalist was also one of the century's great teachers, for 40 years devoting himself to the renowned Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, serving as its director from 1941 to 1968.His was a remarkable journey, fortunately recounted in hundreds of hours of taped interviews with author and Curtis Institute student Roy Malan, longtime concertmaster of the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra. Malan then waited nearly a decade after Zimbalist's death before seeking publication, so that the story could be told in its entirety.This definitive biography of the world's first globe-trotting vir
I loved this book and could not put it down. This is the bestviolin bio since the one on Kreisler which came out 56 years ago. There are great anecdotes here about almost every famous musician of Zimbalist's time. It's too bad it wasn't written years ago when people still remembered who Zimbalist was. I fear that you will miss out on a great book if you don't get it right away. A special-interest book like this usually never comes back into print unless the artist is in recent memory. Even Zimbalist Jr. is ..
Roy Malan has written a charming and continuously interesting book that not only tells the life story of the great Russian-born violinist Efram Zimbalist, who eventually headed one of America's most important music schools, but also introduces the reader to a tradition of violin pedagogy and virtuoso performance reaching back to the time of Brahms and involving such fascinating characters as Joseph Joachim, Leopold Auer, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Mischa Elman, Eugene Ysaye, Jascha Heifetz, and Fritz Kreisler..
Roy Malan is himself a famed concertmaster and solo violinist who studied under Efrem Zimbalist at the Curtis Institute, so is the perfect critic to provide biographical embellishment to the life of violinist Efrem Zimbalist, one of the directors of the Curtis Institute of Music. Zimbalist began his professional career at the age of nine, became a celebrity at 17 in a debut in Berlin, and became one of the century's greatest teachers of the instrument: Efrem Zimbalist: A Life covers all the nuances of his l..
