Interview: Virginia Eskin

by Robert Edward Smith

Pianist Virginia Eskin (website) appears with the Chamber Orchestra of Boston February 6th, performing Kaprolova’s Partita and Lizst’s Malédiction. Robert Edward Smith spoke with her last week about her upcoming appearance.

What music did you listen to as a child?

Hah! What color do you paint your toenails? Well, my father was a jazz banjo virtuoso and guitarist, so there was a lot of 30’s jazz, Victor Herbert, that kind of stuff. A man named Uncle Sam, that was his real name, moved in for a week that turned into twelve years, and he played jazz and Dixieland. I wanted to be in jazz, too, but my mother was a Canadian intellectual, kind of a hippie ahead of her time, and she hated the idea of me playing in clubs, so she made me go into classical. At the time, radio was big, and they had talent competitions, so I would go and play Ritual Fire Dance, and the crowd loved it, and I would win first prize and a pair of Buster Brown shoes.

Did you play any instrument other than piano?

I was a professional cellist for years, so was my husband. I played cello in symphony orchestras, but I really wanted to get back to the piano.

Where did you study, and with whom?

I started studying music with a woman named Mary Walker. She came to the house and taught me musical analysis, figured bass, species counterpoint. That’s all very important. You can’t really know a piece until you’ve done an analysis of it. I mean structural and harmonic. You have to know what’s going on in the piece.

Later on, after I stopped playing cello and got back to the piano, I went to London to study with Myra Hess and Gina Bachauer. Bachauer told me you can’t be a pianist until you can play all the Chopin etudes with ease. She made me play them in all the keys. I still do that. I take them in very hard keys, and it’s really good for your hands, because you have to contort them. You take the etude in C and put it in D-flat and all of a sudden you have all these black keys to get around. She also made me study Brahms technical exercises. She wasn’t interested in anything else I was doing. She’d say, “You’re playing the Transcendental Etudes? That’s inevitable,” but she didn’t want to hear them. She was an extraordinary technician with small hands, but she could play anything with them. You have to work with the hands you’ve got. I only had about twenty lessons with her between 1959 and 1961, but I learned a lot.

How did you come across the music of Vítezslava Kaprálová?

I was in Israel for a conference on Women in Music. I went with a bunch of women, and I took my husband along. I’m Italian, he’s Jewish. We couldn’t believe how well we were treated there by everyone. We played recitals and chamber music, and had workshops. It was very exciting. One day a man came up to me and gave me a score of the Partita. I ended up recording all her piano music. It’s great stuff; it has this Magyar, Czech sensibility, very expressive, emotional. Anyhow, I ran into David Feltner at the farmer’s market, and he asked me what I was doing, and now I’m playing the Partita with his orchestra. Are you coming to the concert?

I wouldn’t miss it.

Virginia Eskin appears with the Chamber Orchestra of Boston on February 6, 2009 at 8 p.m. in New England Conservatory’s Jodan Hall. More information and tickets >>