Interview with Eleanor Sokoloff, Part 1
My beloved piano teacher, Eleanor Sokoloff is 100 years young and still teaching actively at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Mrs. Sokoloff has trained some of the top pianists in the classical world during her 79 years of teaching.
In this video interview, Mrs. Sokoloff names some of her top students; gives her thoughts on how pianists can have successful careers; shares some of the secrets of her teaching style and technique training; discusses how to prevent injury; talks about her childhood in Cleveland, Ohio and her beginnings with the piano at the Cleveland Institute of Music; opens up frankly about her stage fright; talks about her first piano teachers (some of them rather awful) as well as her first studies with David Saperton at Curtis.
My good friend Jason Heath recently caught wind of my various online ensemble and pedagogy projects and graciously invited me to be interviewed on his fantastic podcast, Contrabass Conversations. Jason does such a fantastic job at producing content that’s applicable for all musicians across the board, not just contrabass players. And with over 2 million downloads to date and hundreds of episodes under his belt (yikes, mine is #691!!) Jason is definitely one of the leading voices of classical music in the podcast-verse.