Musical Background


M.R.  I was born in 1926, in Wuppertal, Germany. In 1933 with the Nazi threat, my mother decided, from one day to the other, to finish all our business in Germany and leave immediately. we ran away to Brussels. Most of our family went from there to Rio de Janeiro, but my mother insisted of going to Palestine, and, at 8 years old, I arrived to sandy Tel-Aviv. By pure coincidence, next to our house lived Prof. Szulc the solo bassoonist of the Palestine symphony. I was playing on my balcony recorder and harmonica.  He had a spare instrument to sell and he offered me to try this out. On my first attempt I played the whole F major scale. That was my destiny.


My father sold one of his sewing machines from the factory to buy the bassoon. And so, age 12 and a half, I started playing the instrument. I advanced fast for one a half years. He gave me excellent Basics. Then, I entered the Shalva Conservatory. My teacher there didn’t know much about reeds or sound – without one you can’t have the other. But he worked a lot on technique and I managed to advance.


In 1940, there was an immigration wave from Hungary, which gave birth to a second opera orchestra in Tel Aviv. Strong competition started. When one played Tosca, the other did as well. But where in Israel one could find bassoon players for 2 Tosca on the same time? So at age fifteen, I played my first Tosca and stayed in the opera until 1946, the year I was accepted at the Palestine Symphony Orchestra (Later the I.P.O) where I stayed until my retirement in1991!


I had to play 200 concerts each year for 11 years in a row. There were no other bassoon players in Israel to assist me. Even for a young man this was too much. I decided to leave the orchestra. In N.Y I played an audition for Leopold Stokowski at his place on the Fifth Avenue.  It went well and he accepted me. At the same time, Mr. Haftel, the IPO manager was in town. He asked me to come back and promised to hire another bassoonist. I then phoned Stokowski and said that because of unforeseen circumstances, I could not accept the wonderful job he offered me. After a moment of silence, he hanged up the phone. I returned to Israel. They did find me a co-principal, but he left few months later… And that’s how years went by. I had to put all the weight on my shoulders, until I teached new generation of bassoonists.


In 1977, I took a sabbatical to teach in Bloomington Indiana, where I was offered a Tenure Professorship. I quit the orchestra, but after few months, I told my wife: this is not a place to spend the rest of our life in. But in Israel, there are no jobs like the one in Bloomington, so I went back to the orchestra.



Musical influences…


As a teenager, there was a Dutch clarinet player, Gys Karten. He had this lightness in his playing. I still remember his Weber concertino and Ibert sax concerto.

In general, I was an autodidact. I learned hugely from the great ones who came to play with us: Heifetz, Stern, and Rubinstein etc. I studied composition with Eden Partosh and learned a lot from listening to records. I wanted to play on the bassoon what you can usually hear on a string instrument. And that enriched my playing greatly. I developed my own system, my own school and established my musical language. The best school was the orchestra, which taught me a lot. The bassoon needs the biggest range in the orchestra. Below the flute, an extreme pp and above horns and strings the biggest ff.



Teaching…


Already at 23, I started teaching. Teaching was always a great devotion of mine. I think I was born to be a teacher. I taught all instruments and Chamber music. The players of today are very talented and better technically than my generation, but I have this feeling, that we were more serious, more profound, somehow more musically invested. What I find today most worrying is that there are not enough great teachers around the world, even in the big schools. It might be for 2 reasons: or they don’t want to teach or they can’t teach. And as Koussevitzky said: “when there are no professors, there are no students”, and this is the heart of the problem.


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