When we look back on our formative years how many of us can count ourselves fortunate to have been guided and nurtured by an inspirational teaching personality? Such moments are even more significant in the musical world when future development and ultimate career success so often depend on life-changing encounters. As in the case of the Taiwanese violinist Cho-Liang “Jimmy” Lin, who as a young music student in Australia was so entranced by the playing of Itzhak Perlman that he determined to follow in that individual’s same path and continue his studies with Perlman’s own teacher at the Julliard School, the great Dorothy DeLay, whose centennial year this is.
I asked Lin to explain what made her teaching ability exceptional. She had a very positive streak about her, embodying the proverbial American can-do attitude, always seeing “possibilities and never hindrances or difficulties”. She never imposed a set way of playing on her students but actively encouraged them to seek out other approaches. In this she was poles apart from the more rigid line taken by many Korean teachers today, summed up in the admonition, “Do it my way or get out of my class”, who are often relentless in their quest for picking talents that can win competitions rather than nurturing students as musicians. DeLay was certainly helped by having so many highly motivated individuals but she didn’t just aim at producing winners.
Which took us on to the subject of competitions. Lin readily acknowledges that the Leventritt, Moscow and Queen Elisabeth events no longer have the impact they once had, joking that the Brussels contest could almost be renamed the Queen Asia Competition because of the large number of entrants and winners from that continent. However, he believes very strongly in exposing young players to competitive rigours, just as he is grateful for the pressure he was put under at the Julliard, enabling him to take a sneak peek at the outside world. Many of the teachers he talks to currently “over-pamper their students, keeping them in a warm, fuzzy cocoon”, instead of giving them a hard-edged dose of reality. He pushes his own students to perform as much as possible and to enter competitions big and small, arguing that this will prepare them more effectively for any challenges that lie ahead, whether the individual is hoping to launch a solo career or land a successful audition for an orchestral job or become a music pedagogue. Born in 1960, Lin now gives some eighty concerts a year for which he prepares meticulously, similarly expecting his students to give of their best all the time.
He shares my view that many young artists and competition winners, though highly accomplished technically, lack the individual personality which marked out some of the great names of the past such as Heifetz, Milstein, Stern and Francescatti, and recalls how distinctive in their different ways the sound of the Leningrad Philharmonic under Mravinsky or Cleveland in the Szell era was, not to mention the playing of Parisian orchestras in his youth. Though the generation of budding stars performs with good taste and a perfect sense of style, the individual voice that seems to be saying “Listen to me – I’m really unique” is now quite rare. This “sameness” is sometimes a problem when he sits on competition juries, since there will be little that separates finalists in technical terms. Lin agonises over every decision he makes, since any six that are selected could potentially win on the night. He feels sorry for those that crash and burn due to pressure, but once in a while he hears someone “so compelling that you would pay to hear them in concert.” If there is one thing that he looks for, it is a sense of connection with the audience. In a competition, he admits, it’s much, much harder because young players are under a microscope, but “they have to communicate with those listening and not just play for the jury.”