Cellists: Verbal Virtuoso

Gregor Piatigorsky has been known to audiences for nearly half a century as one of the world’s great cellists. But in the music world, he is almost as noted for his borscht-accented conversation—sharp and sagacious—as for his musicianship. Last week, as he observed his 65th birthday on his rambling estate in Los Angeles, the far-from-retiring Piatigorsky gave one of his inimitable offstage performances in a four-hour talk with TIME’S Los Angeles bureau chief, Marshall Berges. As these excerpts show, he is as much of a verbal virtuoso as ever.

On aging:

I consider myself an extremely young man but a fairly old musician. How long I have played the cello is far more important to me than if I had reached the age of 150 because the years as such do not mean anything, but with the cello, not a day passes that I do not look for something new. I have played it for 58 years, and it is still full of surprises, full of adventures. Mine was made by Stradivari more than 250 years ago, but it stays forever young. How marvelously preserved it is! How beautiful it sounds!

On modern music:

So much that is composed today seems to be done with electronics, or kitchen utensils. The score looks like an engineering design, and you feel that, instead of a musician, you are an atomic engineer. Yet I hesitate to reject it. Beethoven and Mozart never heard the sounds of today—the ringing of a telephone, the roar of a jet engine starting. If they had, perhaps they would have utilized them in their music. The same goes for plastic art. Leonardo da Vinci never saw New York City at night. Rembrandt didn’t see the vistas that our astronauts have seen. Frankly, I would like to work with these composers who write crazy music, but they are terribly isolated. They should collaborate with performers; then, instead of looking to new instruments to produce new sounds, they would develop insight into existing instruments. I think it would be nice to particinate in the new movement, to make it more sane.

On U.S. audiences:

Americans are growing more sophisticated in their musical tastes. However, there is still very little opera in this country, and I think we need new audiences at concerts. There is still too much division. I watch basketball, hockey, baseball, soccer, wrestling. Tell me, why shouldn’t a wrestler or a hockey player go to a cello recital?

On living in Hollywood:

When I lived in Paris or London, everybody sneered at the Hollywood style or Hollywood superficiality. But when I moved here in the ’40s, who were my neighbors? Schoenberg, Rachmaninoff, Aldous Huxley, Heifetz, Thomas Mann, Stravinsky and Rubinstein. What Hollywood style? What Hollywood superficiality? These creative people lived here, first, because the city is so widespread that you can have your privacy when you want it. Second, the climate. Also, people here are not afraid to break traditions. When we want to play without a conductor, we do so.

On chamber music:

People always say that those who play chamber music couldn’t make it as soloists, that it’s for very old people who would play a little bit on the slow side and everybody would fall asleep. Actually, it got its name because it is performed in chambers—in a room—and not in the marketplace. If a pianist plays a sonata by Chopin, he plays alone, but nobody calls it chamber music. If you add one other instrument

it becomes chamber music. Isn’t that strange?

On reviews and performing:

When I first came to the U.S. nearly 40 years ago, I played in many cities where the cello was unknown. My manager thought something was wrong with my head because I rejoiced at a negative review and was unhappy at a favorable one. For instance, a review would say, “Piatigorsky played magnificently, but the piece is weak and the cello really is not a solo instrument.” Well, if the reviewer found that the Stradivari and the composition were bad, obviously I had been very poor. But if the review said how magnificent the composition was and how glorious the cello was, but how poorly Piatigorsky played, then I knew that I had been able to present the piece so that it was beautiful. So I lived my life backward. There is a constant striving by the performer to make the music as good as it really is—and that is one way in which a person can live for something that is bigger than himself.