MEET THE FACULTY Ebony and Ivory—and Longevity A MASTER’S INFLUENCE REVERBERATES OVER SEVENTY-THREE YEARS AT CURTIS BY PETER DOBRIN Perched on the edge of a rocking chair with “Much better,” says Mrs. Sokoloff. a score opened before her, Eleanor Sokoloff This drill, the transfer of accumulated looks up into the air and shakes her head in knowledge from master to student, is time to the music. basically the one you hear in every studio “That’s a girl,” she says, her forceful alto at the Curtis Institute of Music. Except overpowering the Beethoven. “I could use that this master has been doing it longer a little more top. Ah. That makes all the than anyone else. difference in a phrase.” Much longer. Eleanor Sokoloff The French cuffs of Mrs. Sokoloff’s has held essentially the same job at the fifteen-year-old student glide over the world-renowned music conservatory Bösendorfer keyboard. And then Sokoloff for seventy-three years. stops her. If you count back to the first time she “Well …,” she says with distaste and walked through the doors as a frightened suspicion in her voice. “Why is that note seventeen-year-old student, Sokoloff, 95, so soft?” has been a presence at the school for nearly Yen Yu “Jenny” Chen tries it a eight decades. different way. “She was always here,” said former “No, that’s ugly. You know why? Curtis president Gary Graffman. It breaks the line.” “She’s kind of a colossal figure at Chen takes yet another stab at it. Curtis,” said Heather Connor, a student from 1992 to 1997. 18 OVERTONES SPRING 2010 Eleanor Sokoloff, the piano, and Curtis have been inseparable for more than seventy years, whether she was performing with Vladimir “Billy” Sokoloff— her husband and fellow faculty member and classmate (pictured on facing page)—or teaching generations of students, such as Yen Yu “Jenny” Chen (this page, shown at a recent lesson in Mrs. Sokoloff’s apartment). PHOTOS: CURTIS ARCHIVES AND (THIS PAGE) APRIL SAUL/INQUIRER STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER And so, to get the full measure of the concertmaster Norman Carol, violinists pedagogue, as peppery in her opinions as Aaron Rosand and Jaime Laredo, and she is perpetually sunny and curious about violist Michael Tree. life, you’d really need nothing less than How many students has she had? a centenarian eyewitness. No one at the Rittenhouse Square school Curtis being Curtis, the school has one. knows, and she’s lost count. “She stresses the fundamentals of piano “I can tell you this: More than seventy- playing and builds on top of that, as good five have played with the Philadelphia teachers should,” says Orlando Cole, 101, Orchestra,” she said. the cellist who matriculated at the school Sokoloff alumni have carried her at its founding in 1924 and became an reputation far. emeritus faculty member in [2005]. “Over the past few years, I’ve played in “She’s had innumerable fine players—I Japan, China, New Zealand, and Europe, mean really world-class pianists—and they in addition to this country. Every place I go, start with her and go on to other teachers Mrs. Sokoloff’s name is venerated,” said who get credit for it. You know. That’s Sheppard, who studied with her from the way.” [Editor’s note: Mr. Cole passed 1965 to ’68. “I don’t know if people in away in January, two months after this Philadelphia, including perhaps even her article was originally published.] present students, realize this.” Not always. Among those eager to give Despite being a great oak among credit where credit is due are Leon McCawley, the saplings, Mrs. Sokoloff doesn’t Charles Abramovic, Randall Hodgkinson, romanticize the past. “What has amazed Craig Sheppard, Lambert Orkis, and Susan me about her is that someone with that Starr—pianists of varying vintage, but all much history might be talking about holders of big careers. the good old days, but Eleanor is one As piano teacher to non-piano majors, of the most forward-looking faculty she also taught musicians famous for doing members we have,” said Curtis president other things: former Philadelphia Orchestra Roberto Díaz. OVERTONES SPRING 2010 19 MEET THE FACULTY (When her former house at 1415 Curtis in those days was a formal place. Delancey Street—the Sokoloff home for The school still holds a tea for students 35 years—was being demolished to make every Wednesday—a tradition started way for the Kimmel Center, she stopped in Curtis’s first year—and Mrs. Sokoloff by for one last look and said: “This is going frequently pours with an assist from the to be a big improvement.”) lustrous samovar that onetime Curtis Mr. Díaz talks to her about Curtis’s director Efrem Zimbalist brought over dorm building under construction or the from Russia. new program sending student ensembles “Of course, Mrs. Bok [Mary Louise to Berlin and Copenhagen, and “she gets Curtis Bok Zimbalist, the conservatory’s more excited than anyone else.” founder] was there, and everything was It’s a remarkable run that shows no strict. We had to wear skirts or dresses. signs of a diminuendo. And no one seems When she came into the common room, more surprised than Sokoloff herself. we all stood up. Mrs. Bok was from a She never thought she would get different era—I’m one to talk—and when into Curtis in the first place—this stylish she came to school, it was in her beautiful Rittenhouse Square doyenne whose Bentley, with her chauffeur.” distinctive hats and dark arched eyebrows Curtis formed her development as a announce her arrival—much less live to serious pianist, but it also set the course become its most enduring personification. for other departments of her life. She met “I don’t know how I got in. They her future husband, pianist Vladimir “Billy” tested my ear, and I was way off. I only Sokoloff, at the school, and they began a had three years of training. I had no theory. career as a notable two-piano team. She Technically, I had nothing.” taught supplementary piano first (piano It was, she thinks, the fact that pianist for non-piano majors), from 1936 to 1949, and Curtis Director Josef Hofmann took and then became a full member of the a shine to her that won her a place at the piano faculty. Mrs. Sokoloff serves tea before commencement elite school. She studied the two-piano repertoire in 2005. PHOTO: DAVID SWANSON Born in Cleveland as Eleanor Blum, at Curtis with Vera Brodsky and Harold the daughter of a barber and a “singing Triggs, a piano team she remembers being housewife,” Sokoloff started at the Cleveland brought in especially for the Sokoloffs. Institute of Music at age eight. She was Vladimir Sokoloff went on to become the sickly as a child, and her family decamped Philadelphia Orchestra’s pianist, from 1938 to Miami to restore her health. After a few to 1950, and partner to violinist Zimbalist, years, they moved to Washington, where soprano Marcella Sembrich, violist William a radio show proved pivotal. Primrose, and other greats of the twentieth “Curtis used to have weekly national century. He died in 1997. radio broadcasts [on CBS] every Friday, The couple lived within a few blocks and this is how my mother became aware of Curtis for decades, but also set up of Curtis. My father was against my coming house in Rockport, Me., where she still here. There was a scandal: Hofmann had a spends summers. child with a pupil [thirty-one years his junior], Maine is no escape from Curtis. The and it was in the papers. He read that. I harbor town was for decades an unofficial was sixteen, and he was against my coming summer home for the school. She’s often here. But my mother got her way.” seen at concerts there—sometimes giving a She enrolled at Curtis during the lift to others to the Rockport Opera House Depression. Her parents found her room in her 1989 Ford Taurus—and visits with and board for $8 a week at the Rebecca A. Margaret “Stormy” Bok, daughter-in-law Gratz Club on Spruce Street near Sixth, of Curtis’s founder. where she lived with two other girls. “I had Curtis and Sokoloff are steadfast a spinet—there was no room for a grand companions. She lives near the school and piano—and I hated that thing.” is a constant at student recitals while many other teachers are on the road concertizing 20 OVERTONES SPRING 2010 (she herself no longer plays). For the young while they touch on basics like fingering talent she specializes in, she emerges as a kind and voicing, are about leading the student of mother figure. Sometimes in perpetuity. to ask the right questions about the music— “I visited her up in Maine a few summers in effect, teaching how to fish rather than ago,” said Mr. Sheppard, sixty-one. “She providing the fish. put a DVD of mine in her computer, and Recalls Mr. Sheppard: “Great importance started complimenting me, when suddenly was given to chord voicings, good rhythm, something that she didn’t like caught her and agogics”—the idea that a note can ear. ‘Why do you do that?’ she asked. And be accented through duration rather than so on throughout the hour—both the good, how loud it is. “Fingering was especially and the bad! Nothing, absolutely nothing, important, and we were encouraged to find ‘Fingering was especially impor- escaped her attention. I was delighted on Plan B or Plan C, in case Plan A failed us.