DR. LUIS DIAS
I got an unexpected ‘blast from the past’ a few days ago when I went through my
email inbox.
I am subscribed to several websites related to music and music education. So my routine is to scan the subject line, and usually I save opening them for later when I have the time.
But two websites (violinist.com and The Strad) stopped me in my tracks. They announced the death of violin pedagogue Henryk Kowalski aged 78 in a Stockholm hospital, triggering a lot of memories for me.
It took me back to a time when high-calibre concerts were more frequent, but are virtually absent today. This generation of youth has no idea what they are missing, and it is a
tragic loss.
In November 1985, the brothers Kowalski (Henryk, violin and Jakob, cello) and Tehmie Gazdar, piano, performed at Institute Menezes Braganza, Panaji. Gazdar frequently came to Goa as pianist for several visiting performers from those years. I was her page-turner on quite a few of those occasions, and probably did the honours for the Kowalski concert
as well.
What I do remember from that concert is the famous Haydn Piano Trio number 39 in G major (Hob. XV/25) nicknamed the “Gypsy” or “Gypsy Rondo” trio because of its Rondo finale ‘all’Ongarese’ (in the Hungarian style). It was the first time I heard it in live performance.
I was in my second year of MBBS; but in terms of my study of the violin, I was without a steady teacher at the time. My beloved ‘sir’ Carlos D’Costa had died in 1983 after a long battle with laryngeal cancer. I tried unsuccessfully to take lessons with Melbourne Halloween and Myra Menzies in Mumbai (still called Bombay then) but they would not take on long-distance students, even though I was willing to make the bus journey as often as necessary.
So I began ambushing visiting violinists in green rooms and hotels, anything to get just a few scraps of instruction and guidance. Not everyone was obliging, but it didn’t dampen my resolve.
The details are not clear now, but I must have recounted my story to Henryk Kowalski, and seeing that I was keen, he agreed to give me a lesson in his hotel room the next day. If memory serves me right, it was the
Hotel Mandovi.
I think I played snippets from the Beethoven Romances in F and G major for him. In the F major, I remember feeling my trills were laboured, and in the G major, I wanted the double-stops to be ‘cleaner.’
He did address both issues eventually, but he was the first pedagogue to get me to focus on an even bow arm by playing open strings very slowly. I was reminded of this when I read the many tributes that are flooding in, that also mention this. It is advice I impart to students, thanks to him.
Although he used humour to put me at ease, he wanted his instructions followed. I remember the lesson carrying on for longer than scheduled, because when his brother reminded him of their meeting with someone in the hotel restaurant, he said he would come down later. You could tell he enjoyed teaching.
I have gathered his life trajectory from many obituaries and tributes. I realise now what a great man he was and appreciate even more the kindness he showed me.
Henryk Pawel Kowalski was born in Warsaw on December 13, 1947. His father, Leon Kowalski, was a concert violinist who played in the National Philharmonic Orchestra and the Warsaw Operetta orchestra. The younger Kowalski studied at the Warsaw Conservatory with Tadeusz Wronski, one of the leading figures of the Polish violin school.
As a student, he participated in Warsaw’s jazz scene, and formed an ensemble combining traditional jazz, swing, and Eastern European musical influences.
In 1968, due to anti-Semitism, he was forced to leave Poland before completing his final conservatory recital. He continued his studies at Indiana University with Tadeusz Wronski and Josef Gingold, receiving an artist diploma in violin in 1974. His chamber music teachers included the violist William Primrose, pianists Menahem Pressler and György Sebok, and cellist János Starker.
His solo appearances included performances with the Seattle Symphony, St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, Copenhagen Symphony, Warsaw Symphony Orchestra, Belgian Radio Orchestra, Seoul Symphony Orchestra and Bochum Symphony Orchestra. He also appeared with the Indiana University Philharmonic, Warsaw Academy Orchestra and the festival orchestra of the Tokyo College of Music.
In 1977, he co-founded Trio European with his cellist brother Jakob, and the pianist Jean-Claude Vanden Eynden. He remained a member of the ensemble until 1989. The trio performed in Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Iceland, India (where Tehmie Gazdar obviously replaced Eynden), South Korea, Honduras, Guatemala, Spain, the Netherlands Antilles, and the United States.
Henryk Kowalski joined the Indiana University School of Music faculty in 1975. After serving as assistant professor at Indiana University–Purdue University Fort Wayne during the 1977-78 academic year, he returned to Bloomington. He was a visiting assistant professor from 1979 to 1986, associate professor from 1986 to 1990 and professor of violin from 1991 until his retirement in 2011, becoming
professor emeritus.
He also served as visiting professor of violin at the Tokyo College of Music during the 1990-91 academic year. In 1994, he began teaching at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, initially as a visiting professor, and was appointed professor in 2006.
The international careers of his students reflected the geographical extent of his teaching: Andrej Power, a leader of the London Symphony Orchestra and principal concertmaster of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra; Andrew Ling, principal violist of the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra; Yun Zhang, associate concertmaster of the Virginia Symphony Orchestra; Jenny Eklund, a member of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra; Linnea Andersson Meilink, a violinist in the Royal Swedish Opera Orchestra; John Maple of the Nashville Symphony; and Leslie Frey Anderegg of the Phoenix Symphony. Other former students established careers as soloists, chamber musicians, and teachers.
He gave masterclasses at the Toho Gakuen School of Music (Tokyo), Seoul National University, National Taiwan Normal University, Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music (Singapore), the Warsaw Conservatory, Iceland Conservatory of Music, and several Swedish institutions.
He was a frequent adjudicator at violin competitions, serving several times on the jury of the Tadeusz Wronski International Violin Competition in Warsaw and judged competitions in Spain and the United States. In 2014, he chaired the violin division of the Stockholm International Music Competition.
Henryk Kowalski’s legacy through the many musicians he trained continues a pedagogical tradition extending from Wronski and Gingold (and via Gingold to Eugene Ysaÿe and Henryk Wieniawski!) to orchestras and conservatories around the world.
Those concerts from the 1970s and 1980s hosted by organisations like ‘Cultura’ in Goa were so important to me
I cannot remember the last time we had a piano trio of such fine calibre perform here, which is why it angers me when rubbish is written about a classical music ‘renaissance’ in Goa. On the contrary, Goa’s concert life has regressed dismally, compared even to the rest of India, an immeasurable loss that very few acknowledge, even fewer wish to address.
