Next-Door Neighbors

A few months after I formed the Grancino String Quartet with Zach DePue, Jessi Thompson and Priscilla Lee, we were fortunate enough to go up to New York for a quartet coaching with Mr. Galimir. At this point he had stopped coming down to Curtis except for rare visits to hear one or two people or groups. I remember that he hadn’t heard any groups yet that year, so we were excited to play a Haydn Quartet, Op. 55 No. 1, that we had been working on.

We played for him in the very room in which I had had my first lesson, and it somehow seemed smaller this time. It was indeed a cozy room, and four people could easily fill it with sound. After one too many of our exuberant dynamic changes (which we thought were exciting and daring), he let out a yell! He breathed hard for a few seconds; evidently he had been getting worked up for a while and we had failed to notice

“You don’t have to--blast me out of the room! Yes, I know that this measure you have piano and the next you have forte. But this is Haydn, and piano and forte are next-door neighbors!”

As it happened, his yell was louder than any forte we made before or since.