Best and worst master class you ever attended?

December 7, 2015 at 01:34 PM · I am privileged to be a member of an orchestra in Bristol, England, of which Stephen Hough is the President. It will come as no surprise if I were to say that he has played many piano concertos with us, including the Beethoven cycle. Rehearsing with him is almost a master class in itself. I am arranging for the link to the Northwestern master class to be forwarded to members of the orchestra.

A little story ...

He was due to perform the Dvorak piano concerto with us on a Saturday at St George's Hall in Bristol (that's an auditorium with one of the best acoustics in Europe). I arrived early for the afternoon dress rehearsal to find Stephen in the empty auditorium busy at the piano warming up. I thought "just a minute, that's not the Dvorak he's playing". It wasn't - it was the first movement of Brahms piano concerto #1 which he was due to be playing on the Monday in Budapest. As one does.

A very nice guy, someone you can talk easily with.

December 7, 2015 at 04:21 PM · I can think of two good ones. Midori, who talked about having an intention for the direction of your sound out into the audience, among other things. The other was James Buswell, who in a very kind way advised a student to get serious about scales and arpeggios, which may not seem like much, but was really what needed to be said, and also talked about some of the practicalities of performance for some of the more difficult pieces.

December 7, 2015 at 06:17 PM · In my humble opinion Master class has lost its true purpose recently.

To paraphrase the fake quote:

"When the student is ready, the Master will appear"

morphed into

"When Master is visiting the town, the students will appear"

In other words, except in rare cases, most of the students apparently did not benefit from master class I attended for a single reason: they were not ready for it.

I second Christian that Ms. Midori leads her Master classes very well.

December 7, 2015 at 06:39 PM · I've seen some wonderful master classes -- and sometimes I feel almost the opposite problem, not that the students were unprepared, but that they were so polished, I wondered what the teacher could do! Kurt Sassmannshaus gives a very good master class. Very recently I attended a wonderful master class with Lorenz Gamma, for high school students, and Ray Chen, with even younger students. As a teacher, I really enjoy watching a great teacher and seeing what different approaches that teacher has to the various problems, which are really pretty universal among us fiddlers!

Other wonderful master class teachers: Danielle Belen, Ani Kavafian, Ida Kavafian...

December 7, 2015 at 11:59 PM · I attended a cello master class with Steve Doane. Wow.

Laurie is right that the student violinists one often sees in the master classes (e.g., on YouTube) are so amazing that you wonder whether the master will have anything to say. But they do. And that's why you pay the money for the great violinist to do the class. Something like the difference between a chess master and grandmaster. Amateurs can't tell the difference.

December 8, 2015 at 05:59 AM · The best I have been to was a masterclass lead by Sam Sweeney, who specialises in teaching classical violinists how to play effectively in an English traditional fiddle style. I leant so much about that music in those three hours, and came away a much better fiddler than before.

The worst was lead by a very famous player of Irish traditional fiddle, whose name I won't share. He turned up drunk, and then proceeded to play for an hour without any form of interaction with the students at all. This left one teenager in floods of tears, and half of the attending students had walked out by the end.

December 8, 2015 at 08:04 AM · Oh come on Stefan, do share! Why protect the guilty?

December 8, 2015 at 12:27 PM · Geoff, if it's the fiddler who I think it is, then a master class of his is on YT, where the students, who let's face it really need useful feedback on a master class, seem to have received the treatment that Stefan described. I'm not sure whether the YT video is the same one, but it's certainly of the same genre.

On a happier note, many years ago I saw a master class by Julian Bream on BBC TV. Bream was on excellent form and gave good constructive criticism, and praise where due, but there was one student who had him stumped (Bream played cricket in those days - batting without protective gloves(!), to the consternation of his manager - so "stumped" would be the appropriate word). The student finished his piece, Bream thought for a moment and said the performance was so good that he couldn't criticize it. He thought for another moment and came up with his Plan B for the situation (time had to be occupied on TV, of course), which was to talk about the skill of programming pieces of the right kind, in the right order with the optimum pauses between them.

I must also mention the inspirational master classes on TV by the cellist Paul Tortelier, also broadly from the Bream era.

December 10, 2015 at 06:42 PM · Superb comments, all.....thank you so much....