These years of my becoming acquainted with the violin were of course punctuated – as earlier years had been – with frequent attendance at concerts to hear the great musicians of the day. No visiting virtuoso, certainly no violinist, could pass through San Francisco unmarked by my adoring observation, and as far as possible, what I heard in the concert hall was rerun on our wind-up Gramophone at home to serve as ideal models for my own attempts. The swarthy Carichiarto apart, the first visiting soloist to impress me, almost as much by his swaying stance as by his wonderfully voluptuous sound, was Mischa Elman. A pupil of Leopold Auer in Moscow, Elman was the Russian-Jewish violinist par excellence, whose music came from the heart and the guy and rose to every opportunity for rich vibrato and affecting portamenti and slides, even to those opportunities which the “best” taste might not allow. I admired him greatly. << less