I want to express my gratitude to those who helped and continue to help me on my musical journey - my teachers past and present. The photo on the previous page - it's me drinking to their health!
Lena Kaimachnikova
Oh my first teacher - when back in 2001 I decided to start studying piano, I went to Lena. She helped translate my vague aspirations into an actionable program, showed me the basics and, most importantly, gave me the first nudge in the direction of classical music. Without her tact, advice, and support I would have certainly dropped all this long ago, and I remember Lena with gratitude, and this period generally - my elementary school...
Tatiana Lapidus
I met Tatiana Mikhailovna when my lazy bum son started taking lessons with her, and I had to drive him there and back and sit on the sofa during his lessons. Very quickly it has become clear that I am much more interested than Andrew in what she was trying to teach him - I was like a moth drawn by light, and when Andrew quit (thus repeating my childhood path) I gladly took his place. This was probably back in 2004.
Now, looking back ten years, I begin to appreciate how hard it must have been for her to teach me. I resisted so much of her advice, came to lessons unprepared, skipped class... what can I say? How do you teach music to an adult? If you insist on sticking to the regimen he will quit studying, if you don't he won't learn anything. I sometimes feel that she is holding my hand like small child's on a stroll, and I keep wanting to break away and start in some dangerous direction. But somehow she managed to guide me onto a path of virtue, where I feel that I do what I want (and am thus willing to play the same passage for hours), but she tactfully makes it so that what I want is what is appropriate and useful for me at this stage. Somehow she sees (not just in me, but in all her students) their strong and weak points and leverages the strong to develop the weak. As a result, my path is by no means straight, some things take years to develop, but by now I can look back and see how far she has led me from my starting point.
I value her pedagogical skill enormously, but this isn't the most important thing for me. It is very hard to study music at my age, it's a very lonely pursuit, everything takes years, and Tatiana Mikhailovna for me is the person who gives me steady moral and emotional support without which this quest would have ended long ago. And it is for that that I am most grateful to her.
And by the way, my Andrew is now asking if she would take him back - go figure...
Alexander Izbitser
I always admired and envied people who command the instrument in the same intuitive way as a singer uses his voice, and can play what they hear in their head or their soul, and Sasha is one such person. I always thought that the standard music education teaches anything but that ability, but Sasha's example shows me that it is not true - all depends on the quality of that education and, of course, on the quality of the student. When Sasha agreed to give me lessons (that was in spring 2011, as far as I remember) I was hoping that he'd disclose some magical secrets of how people reach that level. And he did - the secret is in systematic hard work and deep understanding of what you are doing... I'm very grateful to Sasha for this insight, for the conversations in his kitchen, and for the nuggets of musical wisdom that he planted in my soul and that now, many years later, sometimes unexpectedly rise to the surface.
Les Horan
Les is another person on my musical journey who possesses what to me looks like magical ability to express on the piano whatever he wants. He is a revelation to me - this is the first time that I see someone for whom music theory is not some abstraction but rather the structure guiding every note he plays, who asks not how a music text is constructed but why, and I listen in total awe to his explanations of what goes on under his fingers. He comes from a completely different musical tradition (jazz, blues) which I never understood, and I am intrigued by how classical music looks from that perspective. And, of course, I continue to be greatly impressed with his energy and his enthusiasm. I learned a lot from him in the past year, and I am hoping this is just a beginning of a long road.