A Guitar for Christmas
After a week’s sea voyage, we were once again back in Toronto, where my father rented a house in the west-end suburbs. The Boyd tribe moved into 14 Paragon Road, presuming it would be for only a year or two, as experience had accustomed us to frequent changes; however, it was to serve as home for fifteen years. Vivien and I were enrolled in the seventh and eighth grades at Dixon Grove School. Although we had been away for only a year, Canadian school required readjustments on our part. Ahead lay the challenges of those critical years of adolescence, when identity has to be forged among peers.
Canadian girls seemed so much more sophisticated in attitude and dress than their English counterparts. Rather than navy blue school uniforms and knee socks, our classmates decked themselves out with fashionable outfits, nylon stockings, and handbags. Instead of simple ponytails and braids, these girls backcombed and sprayed their hair. Vivien and I were teased about our “weird way of talking” and interrogated on our church affiliation. On discovering that I did not attend Sunday school, one sanctimonious girl determined to expose my true religion. Leading her on, I invented a couple of Native Indian deities, inspired by my grammar school poem “Hiawatha.” “Our family worships the wind god, Mudjekeewis, and the fire goddess, Wawataysee,” I stated mischievously, with an exaggerated English accent, defiantly flinging back my two pigtails. “Ah, so you really are pagans!” she retorted. The news of my strange religion spread throughout the eighth grade, giving the students a reason to look on their English classmate with added suspicion. Knowing I was already different from the other kids, I took perverse delight in this ridiculous deception.
To satisfy a budding interest in biology, I posted notices at the local mall: “SOS. Nature lovers desperately in need of an aquarium.” Miraculously, my sister and I received four calls from generous Torontonians, and we convinced my father to pick up our booty in his old black Pontiac. One became a soil-filled ant colony, another a salamander vivarium furnished with damp moss, the third a weedy fish tank, and the last a home for Phred, the pet toad. As Damien was also fascinated by anything that crept, crawled, or flew, my poor mother had to tolerate the boxes of cecropia moths, daddy-long-legs, and garter snakes that he housed in his bedroom. Having read Gerald Durrell’s childhood auto-biography, My Family and Other Animals, I enjoyed the humorous parallels between our outlandish families.
A sudden interest in breeding tropical fish stimulated the entrepreneurial spirit that had surfaced during my odd-job escapades in London. As angelfish, filters, and thermostats required more than my weekend allowance, I decided to salvage empty pop bottles from local building sites, returning them for two-cent refunds. Setting off by bicycle to explore houses pungent with drying paint provided the thrill of a private expedition. Each time, I returned triumphant, with sandy Coke and beer bottles to rinse with the garden hose; long before the days of recycling, I was inadvertently doing my part for ecology! Now, in addition to fish-purchasing power, I had my first savings account at the Royal Bank of Canada. How proud I felt when it reached one hundred dollars.
Construction-site scavenges gave rise to another scheme during the dog days of August. The thirsty Italian workmen paid twenty-five cents for soft drinks from the catering vans. I persuaded Vivien to join me in selling Kool-Aid at fifteen cents a glass and put Mother in charge of production. Dragging a box of ice cubes, we trudged off to the construction sites, where shirtless bricklayers and carpenters gulped down the chemical brew, happily dispensing sweaty dimes and Sicilian smiles. Had I been given handouts by wealthy parents, I never would have experienced such pride and delight in watching my black mollies, swordtails, and angelfish swim around their second-hand aquarium.
When fall came, I was placed in Kipling Collegiate’s grade nine enrichment class. Students were given a choice of art or music and home economics, but taking both art and music was not allowed. My obdurate parents marched up to the school arguing that the arts would play a larger role in their daughter’s life than home economics ever would. How right they were; I still loathe housework and I am a hopeless cook!
After a frustrating week of broken oboe reeds, I settled on the clarinet. Kipling was fortunate to have an exceptional music teacher in Barry Gosse, who inspired his students and produced an acclaimed annual show. It was his classes that introduced me to the works of Beethoven, Gershwin, and Aaron Copland. What a fascinating world of rich orchestration and harmony! I had never enjoyed the theoretical aspects of music, but loved studying the lives and works of great composers. At my mother’s suggestion, I memorized Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Song of India” on the clarinet. However, that instrument was not intended to feature in my future; I gave it up after one year. Nevertheless, the wind family must have held some appeal, as I taught myself to play the melodica, a small keyboard instrument that is held in the hand and blown into.
When Christmas time approached, I coerced Vivien and my girlfriend Sandra to join me in a carol-singing experiment. We plodded hesitantly up the snow-covered driveways. While Vivien and I began our recorder duet, Sandra broke forth with the words to “The First Noel,” but nervously wet her pants in the first chorus, causing us to flee down the street. After I dried her off over the heat vent at Paragon Road, we ventured forth again with our Yuletide serenades. People were welcoming, as door-to-door carol singing was a novelty. Occasionally we were invited inside for a slice of Christmas cake or a cup of hot chocolate, but usually, to our delight, we were handed some silver or the odd dollar bill.
Although I was a reticent and self-conscious teenager, some inexplicable force seemed to drive me during those early musical performances. I loved the feeling of making music and sensing people’s appreciation of it. After a couple of nights my accomplices quit, complaining of frozen feet; undaunted, I set off alone, playing recorder or melodica, returning only when my fingers became too stiff from the cold. Half the proceeds were donated to the Toronto Humane Society, as I had always cared about animals. My self-motivated carolling had provided immense pleasure, satisfying the combined needs of performing and supporting a good cause.
Although English literature and science were my favourite subjects, I excelled in art, thanks to my parental role models, and one of my autumn landscapes hung for years in the principal’s office. Vivien and I still had pronounced English accents, but with the British pop invasion we suddenly became acceptable to our classmates; rather than making fun of our hair, they rebelliously started to grow theirs.
My parents discouraged us from watching too much television, for which I remain forever grateful. I am happy to have been granted a childhood in those more innocent days. Reading books, writing poems, ballet practice, painting, and drawing met with approval; we were permitted to watch The Wonderful World of Disney and an occasional Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday evenings while my mother treated us to ice cream and chocolate cake. Disney’s dramas on the lives of Beethoven and Strauss were inspirational, and I sat glued to the set watching the Beatles make their American TV debut. The world of showbiz, however, struck no chords of interest in me at all other than as an observer. The other two programs that my parents allowed were the BBC’s Shakespearean productions and a serialized version of The Scarlet Pimpernel. Those daring exploits of a handsome English nobleman rescuing beautiful ladies from the guillotine so fired my imagination that, swept up in the early stages of adolescent romanticism, I constructed an imaginary white charger out of our basement trunks in order to relive and embellish his adventurous missions.
My youthful intellectual parents attended lectures, art galleries, and concerts, kept company with radical friends in Rochdale College, and immersed themselves in interesting books on philosophy or art. Our family still seemed different from those of my school chums, due in part to our feeling more English than Canadian. Neighbourhood kids teased Damien that his father was a “hippy” for sporting longish hair and a beard — a rarity in those days. I think this awareness of being different drew our family closer together, giving my sister and me a sense of identity and self-confidence.
High school was the time of the swinging sixties, which brought us pantyhose and miniskirts. Our poor legs turned shades of blue and purple as we struggled to walk to school during the cruel winter months. In a moment of bravado, I supported a fellow classmate’s presidential campaign by go-go dancing to the Rolling Stones’ “Paint It Black” before the school assembly. It was obvious, however, that I was not cut out for acting when my girlfriend and I were given the roles of mad professors in a school play, The Mish-Mosh Bird. Two characters with long black beards collapsed in uncontrollable fits of giggles, Sir Laurence Olivier style, during their serious speeches.
At age thirteen, my casual choice for a Christmas present was to change my life. “Why don’t you give me that old guitar hanging on the wall and some lessons?” I suggested offhandedly. It was the instrument my parents had bought in Spain when I was six years old. Given to friends when we left for England, it was handed back on our return. Apart from giving voice to the few simple melodies that my mother had taught herself to pluck, it had served merely as a wall decoration symbolizing our links to Spain. Come Christmas morning, the slightly warped guitar in its rough canvas cover was waiting for me beneath the tree. I bent my fingers around the neck, inhaling its woody aroma, and tried to play the slack, untuned strings. This was obviously going to require a good deal of patience.
Every Wednesday evening I visited John Perrone, a local classical guitar teacher. Crammed into a tiny studio, we laboured through simple exercises in Aaron Shearer’s Book 1. My mother insisted on half an hour’s practice each day, which I performed compliantly but without notable enthusiasm. I was no child prodigy. Besides, ballet had become my overriding passion.
After a few months, the renowned English guitarist Julian Bream came to play in Toronto. Remembering his playing from the BBC, my mother suggested we attend so I might experience classical guitar at its best. Apart from one Toronto Symphony Orchestra performance, I had not been exposed to live classical concerts. With great anticipation, we found our seats in the Eaton’s department store auditorium, where pianist Glenn Gould recorded many of his albums. One solitary chair and a tiny footstool were all the bare stage displayed. How could a single guitar player fill the hall with sound? Scanning the program, I was thrilled to recognize a work by Fernando Sor, who had written some of the studies I had been learning. As the audience located their seats, I felt a secret advantage: I also played the classical guitar!
Bream’s London accent in his introductory remarks came as a surprise. Spellbound, I watched while he arranged the tails of his jacket and adjusted his footstool. The fragile lute that he cradled in his arms had a crisp treble tone, thinner than the guitar’s but most pleasing in its delicacy. My eyes fixed on each small movement of his hands while my ears feasted on the crystalline beauty of the notes. The music of John Dowland, Robert de Visée, and J.S. Bach danced and sang under Bream’s nimble fingertips.
After the intermission, he returned to centre stage with guitar in hand to play the Spanish music of Francisco Tárrega and Isaac Albéniz. Now I was completely captivated. Never could I have imagined a more exquisite sound than that which was emerging from this lone musician and his simple wooden instrument. The richness of tone, coloration of phrases, and subtle shadings of sound were an aesthetic revelation. This was the epiphany — the moment when I fell in love with the classical guitar. I determined to learn to play it, so that one day I too would be able to draw such beauty from six strings.
My new enthusiasm convinced my mother that I needed the top classical guitar instructor available. She located a Viennese teacher considered the best in Toronto. Visions of a tall, imposing figure who taught music in the strict European tradition formed in my mind. No doubt he would chastise me for insufficient practice and rap my knuckles with his tuning fork. Eli Kassner had no time for more students, but at my mother’s insistence, he agreed to hear me play.
My father drove me to Kassner’s house in suburban Willowdale. There, upon pulling into the driveway, I saw a scruffily clad gardener tugging weeds out of the rockery. As he approached our car to greet us, I realized, to my surprise, that the blue-jeaned gardener was Eli Kassner himself ! Far from towering above me, Eli looked up at me from his stocky, five-foot frame and smiled warmly. “Velcome, come into ze haus.” After listening to a few short pieces, instead of rapping my knuckles, he accepted me as his student. My new teacher inspired me from the start with his obvious love for the guitar; from then on, my mother never had to remind me to practise, as all my spare time was devoted to this new interest.
Eli scheduled my lessons late in the evening in order to offer extra time, gratis. He first selected “El Noi de la Mare,” a simple Catalan folk melody, which I memorized in a week. After a couple of months, he gave me Andrés Segovia’s transcription of “Asturias” by Isaac Albéniz. This seemed an advanced piece, but I diligently persevered, trying to imitate Bream’s recorded version. In a few weeks I had it mastered; Eli was most impressed. However, a career in music was the furthest thing from my thoughts.
The world of ballet had always resonated with my dreams of romance and make-believe. Since my early dance classes in England, I had loved the bodily sensations of graceful choreographed movement. After five months of lessons at the local school, I made my ignominious debut as a ballerina. My parents sat proudly waiting to see their daughter glide onto the stage with three other nymphs to dance a Mozart minuet. Seconds before my entry, I realized to my chagrin that in the excitement, I had forgotten to remove the heavy warm-up socks used to cover our ballet slippers and it was then too late! Four sylphs pirouetted daintily from the wings in pink-satin tunics, but one had ugly white knee socks and a red face! My parents must have sunk through the floor in embarrassment.
My love of dance persisted nevertheless, and I studied the Cecchetti method with Gladys Forrester and her assistant, Brian Foley. Additional lessons were provided by a Danish teacher, Teenie Gollop, whose name, evoking the image of sugar plum fairies, seemed perfect for a ballerina. Each evening I practised barres and pliés to scratchy recordings of Coppélia and Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. Vivien and I watched our reflections in the darkened living room windows as we leaped around the room in frilly white petticoats. Many years later, neighbours across the street told us that they were often entertained by our evening dancing displays. It had never occurred to us that we had an audience observing our arabesques through the undraped windows!
The highlight of my short-lived stint as a ballerina was a performance of La Boutique Fantasque, in which I danced the role of Queen of Hearts. I loved the music, the rehearsals, and the excitement of performing with advanced dancers. Through movement and music, we created a world of fantasy in which toys came to life.
After watching a spectacular Royal Ballet performance at the O’Keefe Centre, while prowling backstage for autographs, I came face to face with Rudolf Nureyev. I was instantly smitten. The Russian with the high leaps, high cheek bones, and wild hair was to feature regularly in my teenage daydreams, and his photos adorned my bedroom wall along with those of Julian Bream and Segovia. When Vivien bestowed nightly kisses on her horse pictures, I did likewise with the posters of my idols. Our chosen destinies had begun to take shape.
Eli Kassner prepared me for the Royal Conservatory guitar examinations, which I successfully passed using my new Goya guitar, and my mother helped me study for the required harmony and music theory tests. Aware of the importance of competitions in polishing a student’s performance skills, Eli entered me in the annual Kiwanis music festivals. Some years, in addition to performing solo, I played duets with his other students, enjoying a great sense of accomplishment on receiving several first and second prizes playing works by Manuel de Falla and J.S. Bach. The world of guitar composers was rapidly opening up, thanks to a good teacher’s guidance.
My schoolteacher father had long summer holidays during which we piled into his VW bus to tour around the continent. In the sixties, provincial and state parks were not congested; consequently, our destinations were unplanned. These were wonderful days: camping on empty beaches of the Oregon coast; browsing through rock shops in Utah; exploring the Grand, Bryce, and Zion canyons in Arizona; pitching tents in Alabama campsites that were dripping with Spanish moss; and enjoying hot roadside picnics in Nebraska and Iowa. A generous Texan farmer invited us to stay at his watermelon ranch; a truckload of Alberta Hutterites rescued us in the torrential rains of a furious midnight thunderstorm. Inspired by the natural beauty of our vast continent, which drew us to the Rockies, the Smoky Mountains, and Yellowstone, I kept a log of each holiday, gluing in maps, photos, and poems composed along the way. Eight-year-old Damien sang Beatles songs to entertain his sisters; Vivien ran off in search of horses at every stop; I played guitar, avoiding dishwashing duty, insisting it was bad for my nails. From a piece of wood pilfered from my pop bottle building sites, I constructed a peculiar wooden fingerboard with strings attached and black lines delineating the frets. Using this compact device, I was able to practise left-hand stretches, legatos, and finger patterns while our VW bus rumbled along miles of freeways and dusty back roads. This ingenious contraption was certainly more practical than trying to play on a real guitar. Eli Kassner showed me how to practise right-hand finger combinations using a candy package whose cardboard edges approximated the distance between two guitar strings. Trying to keep cool in the unbearable Texas heat, we wrapped soaking wet towels around our bodies, frolicked in the water sprinklers of parks, or opened the windows of our un-air-conditioned vehicle to catch the breeze. How much richer and more creative those unplanned family holidays seemed than the summer camp routines of our classmates. They bonded our family together, as we shared common discomforts, challenges, and discoveries.
In 1965 we drove west to Calgary to visit my parents’ English friends. Jan Truss, my mother’s school friend, was a writer of children’s books. Her children, Martin and Sally, we knew from our childhood seaside camping holidays in England. Martin now sang folk songs, played the guitar, drove a car, rode his horses bareback, and made my heart beat faster. He wrote out the chords to “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” and taught me to jive at my sixteenth-birthday party. My hazel-eyed childhood pal, whom I remembered chasing along the beach and building castles in the sand, had become a handsome western cowboy who galloped me on horseback across the grassy ranch lands and played hide-and-seek with me in the hay loft. With hesitant kisses, we explored the exquisite new sensations of first love. Passionate letters flowed back and forth during the next year, but by the summer of ’66, my teenage cowboy had faded into memory, as I was in the throes of a brief but intense romance with another guitar-playing folksinger.
Hans and I first met in 1962 at the home of the Schroer family in Beaver Valley, a ski area one and a half hours north of Toronto. We walked the craggy hillsides unaware of what futures were hidden in the cards. Liona Boyd, Hans Grunsky, and Oliver Schroer were all destined to make their mark in the world of music. How could I not be impressed by the handsome, dark-haired nineteen-year-old who wrote his own songs and strummed the guitar? His husky tenor voice charmed me with “Puff the Magic Dragon” until my heart was filled with adoration. But I was only a ponytailed kid to him; a few years had to pass before we would meet again. After forming a folk group, Jack’s Angels, in Europe, he returned to Toronto. He was twenty-one, and I was a blossoming seventeen-year-old with straight blond hair, minidresses, and fast fingers on the guitar. We took long walks, collected bouquets of forget-me-nots from the banks of the Humber River, and played our guitars in the secluded sandy beaches of the Toronto Islands. Now it was Hans whose dark eyes became misty as he held me in his arms and whispered the lyrics to his songs. Together we listened to the folksingers at the Riverboat Coffee House, owned by Bernie Fiedler, in Toronto’s Yorkville district. Then, hand in hand, we strolled along Hazelton Avenue, the mecca of Toronto’s hippy scene, where Indian skirts and bell-bottom trousers trailed along the sidewalks to the strains of wind chimes and guitar strumming. For the first time, my mother allowed me to borrow her makeup and pink lipstick; how grown up I felt!
But all too soon the summer idyll came to an end, as Hans had a plane ticket back to Vienna. On our last evening, after a stroll through James Gardens, he tried to slide his hand under my blouse, but I prudishly squirmed away, explaining that I was too young. Fortunately, he understood my adolescent shyness; we spent our last hours hugging, laughing, crying, and kissing until our faces were so blotched that I had to make a beeline for the privacy of my bedroom. I moped around for weeks while we exchanged long, poetic letters. On the back cover of one of his record albums, Hans used a photo of us sitting side by side in the garden of Paragon Road. After a few months, however, his treasured missives dwindled to a halt; Cupid’s arrow had landed elsewhere. In the eighties, Hans and his new family returned to Toronto, where under the name Jack Grunsky he developed a successful career in children’s music, winning a Juno Award for one of his albums. Oliver Schroer, my brother’s Beaver Valley playmate, came on the music scene later and was nominated for a Juno Award for his 1993 album of ethno-fusion fiddle music.
The boys in Kipling Collegiate held minimal attraction for me. I could never understand how my girlfriends could fall to pieces over some pimple-faced sixteen-year-old on the football team. I developed a mad crush on an older Czechoslovakian student with whom I shared some of my poetic efforts and courageously invited to our Sadie Hawkins dance. Swaying to the music of the Righteous Brothers’ “Ebb Tide” in our darkened school gymnasium was a sensual experience like no other.
The CBC had produced Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, starring Geneviève Bujold and Paul Koslo. To my great surprise, I was introduced to Paul Koslo at a guitar party, and after a few exchanges he asked me out on a dinner date. At twenty-three, with the brooding intensity and charismatic persona of an early Peter O’Toole, Paul seemed to belong to another generation. Imagine my delight on discovering that the young actor also sang and played the guitar! Paul led a rather bohemian life, typical of the times. I became his “Lady Guinevere,” with quixotic promises of elopement, castles, and ten children unfolding in his daydreams. There were never any attempts to get under my blouse; ours was a courtly love! After a few months, however, the different lifestyles of the grade twelve schoolgirl and the struggling young actor dabbling in psychedelic drugs caused inevitable problems; even my liberal parents, who took us to mingle with the flower-bedecked, beaded, and bearded “long-hairs” in Toronto’s Queen’s Park “Love-In,” started to disapprove when they realized he was often stoned. In pursuit of his career, Paul decided to relocate to L.A., where he wrote ardently for two years, but time and distance diluted our romance. Many years later, when I saw him on the screen playing one of the leads in Voyage of the Damned with all his hair shaved off, I hardly recognized my young sweetheart, who had serenaded me with Donovan songs and braided purple morning glories into my hair.
The Guitar Society of Toronto, an organization of students, players, and aficionados, was founded by Eli Kassner. His parties and the society’s after-concert receptions often brought together a potpourri of Toronto’s artistic community: composers, film producers, dancers, actors, and visiting guitarists. For me, these were memorable events, and my parents made sure to introduce their daughter to all the interesting characters who congregated there, even though I was always the youngest. Music, food, and wine ensured that the festivities lasted well into the early hours. The composer Harry Somers waxed poetic, Malka and Joso sang folk songs, and David Phillips and Paula Moreno made the walls quiver with fiery flamenco music and dance. At one of these gatherings, Julian Bream, my musical idol, momentarily fell from grace. Intoxicated on Eli’s spiked punch, he lunged after me until I pushed him off; then, teetering precariously over the wooden bannister, he proclaimed in his strong cockney voice that all these guitar society parties were “nothing but a f— bloody bore.” Even the top classical guitarist in the world had to let off a little steam from time to time. Although he had insulted his hosts and offended the guests, we forgave; his down-to-earth humanity somehow endeared him to us all the more.
A year or so later, Bream conducted a ten-day master class in Stratford, Ontario, for which I was selected from an audition tape. About thirty people were allowed to audit the classes, in which fifteen performers sat in a semicircle around the maestro. I judiciously positioned myself near to what appeared to be the end of the line, but to my consternation, he started with the students on my side. The first boy excused himself, complaining of a broken nail, and the next one muttered that he would prefer to play later, having just changed his strings. Then Bream’s eyes alighted on me, leaving me no option but to play first in front of all the intimidating onlookers! Shy in those days, I would find butterflies fluttering in my stomach even while playing for friends. To make matters worse, a film crew was taping the master classes; two cameras zoomed in close as my weak legs propelled me toward the empty seat next to Bream. But as soon as the Chaconne by J.S. Bach started to flow from my fingers, I forgot about everything else. It was then one of the most difficult pieces in the guitar repertoire, having been written originally for violin. Fortunately, Bream seemed favourably impressed. We tackled it section by section, as he expounded on stylistic issues and improved some of my fingerings while relating amusing anecdotes about his own career. Two of the greatest qualities in Bream are his passion for music and his British sense of humour. After the shock of having to play first, I relaxed, enjoying the opportunity to soak up some of the vast musical knowledge emanating from the master sitting before us.
One afternoon, after Bream had trooped us down to the banks of the Avon River to conduct his class alfresco, the famous sitarist Ravi Shankar joined us on the grass. Seeing me struggling with a bar chord, Bream examined the dint on my left index finger. “You’re going to have one hell of a time with bar chords, Liona,” he observed. In contrast to most players, whose first fingers are flat and can depress all six strings, I had to adjust fingering in order to compensate for the uneven physiology of my finger. But if the guitar great Django Reinhardt could make magic with only three fingers, who was I to complain?
A public recital at Stratford’s Festival Theatre was arranged for Bream’s top students. Selected along with four other pupils, I decided to play the prelude from Bach’s Cello Suite no. l and Etude no. 7 by Heitor Villa-Lobos. It was a noon-hour concert, but I rose before dawn to practise warm-up scales in preparation for the ordeal ahead. At the theatre, on whose intimidating stage I had admired the performances of William Hurt and Martha Henry, we chosen ones were pretty nervous, as this was our first real concert and a music critic from the Globe and Mail was coming to review our playing.
Assiduously, I polished and tuned my guitar, then ran through the two pieces a few more times for luck. Liona Boyd was to be the third student to play. The concert had already started when some ragged string lengths at the tuning pegs caught my attention. Thinking the guitar looked a little unkempt for the cameras, I borrowed a pair of nail clippers to tidy it up. My nerves must have already been jumping like yo-yos as, to my absolute horror, a loud snap signalled that I had just clipped off the upper portion of the second string. I now had a five-string guitar and only a few minutes left. Frantically running around backstage like a chicken with its head cut off, I looked for Bream and breathlessly told him of the disaster. There were no spare strings in my guitar case as, being inexperienced at performing in public, I never imagined the need for them. After a few panic-stricken moments, I seized upon a tangled ball of old trebles in a classmate’s guitar case and, with trembling fingers, filched out a second string to wind onto my instrument. Miraculously, it held its pitch. A new one would have kept stretching out of tune, as it takes hours for a string to settle in. With thumping heart, I performed my two selections perfectly.
In the documentary, my calm stage presence completely belies the self-inflicted backstage drama. To quote the old axiom, “Mistakes are made to learn from”; only through each unpleasant experience can one know how to prevent them in the future. To this day, I always make sure to carry a supply of extra worn-in strings and I am meticulous when trimming the ends! A Cuban, Mario Abril, who ripped through Isaac Albéniz’s flashy piece “Asturias,” received raves from the music critic, while I was dismissed as having little promise. Not one of those students succeeded in building a performing career, and mine certainly came close to a calamitous takeoff!