one of the times that he took off from giving concerts. He was not playing at all. He had several such episodes in his life, but this was one of them. When I played for him, he never went to the piano to show me anything, nothing! He could play in such a convincing way but still… I was growing up with Horowitz, Rubinstein, Schnabel, and Serkin, and of course I had preferences. But each of them was playing in totally convincing way, in their own way. Probably Horowitz felt that maybe I would try to copy certain things. Occasionally, he would say: You’re on the wrong track!, but that wasn’t often. He wouldn’t say that he disagreed with my interpretation or that I should do it differently. But he would say that he saw what I was aiming for, and that I might succeed better by playing in a different way...”.
Katrin Zagrosek ©Matthias Baus
Katrin Zagrosek is a cultural manager with a broad horizon. After studying music and cultural studies, she worked as a freelancer for internationally renowned cultural institutions and festivals such as the Musik-Biennale Berlin (today: Märzmusik), the Berliner Festwochen, the Innsbrucker Festwochen für Alte Musik, the Salzburg Easter Festival, the Théâtre et Musique in Paris and the Lincoln Center Festival in New York. In 2008, she took over the production management of “Wien Modern”, Austria’s largest festival for contemporary music. In 2012, Katrin Zagrosek became artistic director of the “Niedersächsische Musiktage” , and from 2024 she has been artistic director and managing director of the Ruhr Piano Festival- the largest piano festival in the world.
Years later, among Graffman´s students at Curtis was also Yuja Wang. “She was one of these extremely fast learners, amazing!”, Graffman recounts. “Obviously, she got accepted because we all heard her at her audition. We thought she was a super major talent. When she brought new pieces to her lesson, it might not have been perfectly okay, but it was her style to learn things first without going into detail. Then she would come back a week later, and it was as if she had played the piece already for two years. She had no technical problems, but in that sense I also have to say that Curtis is not your typical conservatory. In one year we may have well over 100 applications but only 3 places available. There are only 19 piano students at Curtis, so everyone is on a very high level, and everyone is special in their own way”. There may be few pianists enrolled at Curtis School of Music, but that is rather the exception, and all over the world, the number of high-level pianists is rising. But do their audiences, and does the demand for them grow as well? Karin Zagrosek thinks otherwise: “We don’t
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