I was always trying to expand my musical horizons. There were two good orchestras in Odessa: the opera and the philharmonic. The leader of the latter was Naum Blinder, Isaac Stern's teacher. Blinder was a very good violinist with a real European education. He had studied in Manchester with Adolf Brodsky, to whom Tchaikovsky's violin concerto is dedicated! I remember Blinder playing Prokofiev's First Concerto. It all sounded fine and solid, but a bit heavy, perhaps; for my taste, it missed the music's bouquet and poetry. I liked going to the philharmonic's rehearsals and listening to their presentations of new music. The conductor was Lev Steinberg: I always remember him holding up his slipping pince-nez with his left hand as he conducted. Once I was at a rehearsal with Blinder, the leader, absent. We learned that he was sick and not coming to the performance that night. They were rehearsing Richard Strauss's Ein Heldenleben, a work that I adored. It has an important violin solo. The manager of the Odessa Philharmonic (husband of the pianist Ania Dorfinann, later taught at Juilliard) asked me to fill in for Blinder; I readily agreed. And so with just one rehearsal I played Ein Heldenleben in concert. The audience shouted "Bravo!" and I was very pleased. << less