Piano teacher, Eleanor Sokoloff, dies at 106 after teaching for 83 years

Posted 8/5/20

When asked about the secret to her longevity, Sokoloff once told a reporter, "It is my love of music, my love of my students and my love of my piano! I love what I do every day." Here she was seen on …

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Piano teacher, Eleanor Sokoloff, dies at 106 after teaching for 83 years

Posted
When asked about the secret to her longevity, Sokoloff once told a reporter, "It is my love of music, my love of my students and my love of my piano! I love what I do every day." Here she was seen on her 100th birthday with her Bosendorfer grand piano that she taught on for decades.

by Michael Caruso

When Eleanor Sokoloff died Sunday, July 12, at the age of 106, she closed out a remarkable career as both a piano student and teacher at the Curtis Institute of Music that reached back to 1931.

When she entered the elite school on Rittenhouse Square, Curtis had been founded a scant seven years earlier through the combined efforts of philanthropist Mary Louise Curtis Bok, pianist Josef Hofmann and conductor Leopold Stokowski. When she first began teaching piano in 1937, Sergei Rachmaninoff still had another six years to live.

Her teaching career spanned the directorships of Hofmann, Randall Thompson, Efrem Zimbalist, Rudolf Serkin, John de Lancie, Gary Graffmann and the current Roberto Diaz. That career included 75 piano students who went on to perform with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Chestnut Hill music lovers experienced the artistry of two of her best loved students in performances at the Woodmere Art Museum: Susan Starr, who tied for the silver medal at the 1962 Moscow Piano Competition, and Marcantonio Barone, who continues Mrs. Sokoloff’s legacy of teaching along with his own busy concertizing career.

Curtis’ present head, former Philadelphia Orchestra principal violist Roberto Diaz, told me that he first met Mrs. Sokoloff in 1982 when he arrived at the school as a student. He pointed out that she personified the school’s history, having been there almost since its first academic year. Not only had she seen it all – she remembered it all.

“She was a limitless source of information about Curtis,” Diaz said, “a wealth of knowledge. She carried with her Curtis’ DNA. She was incredibly friendly to everyone at the school, yet there was a sense of gravity to her conversation about Curtis because she basically knew everyone – and remembered them.”

Diaz pointed out that Mrs. Sokoloff was still teaching up to the time Curtis closed in March, 2020, due to the COVID-19 coronavirus, serving Wednesday afternoon tea to students, faculty, staff and guests.

My own memories of Eleanor Sokoloff reach back to the late 1960s, when as a young piano student I auditioned for Curtis. She was one of three piano faculty to hear me, the others being department head Rudolf Serkin and the nearly as long-lived Mieczyslaw Horszowski. A student of Theodor Leschetitzky (who studied with Carl Czerny, a student of Ludwig van Beethoven), the Polish-born Horszowski was a month shy of his 101st birthday when he died in 1993. His fellow Leschetitzky students included Jan Ignace Paderewski, Artur Schnabel and Leon Fleisher.

It was a difficult time to audition at Curtis. The piano department accepted only two new students for the coming academic year — and I wasn’t one of them. A decade or so later, when I met Mrs. Sokoloff as a music critic covering a chamber music recital at Curtis, she came up to me and said, “I don’t remember when or why, but I do remember you. Did you audition at Curtis?”

I replied that I had but that I hadn’t been accepted. She seemed genuinely saddened by that news but brightened when I told her that I ended up attending the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore, where I studied with Julio Esteban and attended Leon Fleisher’s master classes. Fleisher teaches at both Peabody and Curtis.

Then she said, “I hope you won’t hold that against us now, will you?” I answered, “Absolutely not. I played very well at my audition. It just wasn’t good enough. I realized just how selective in the best sense of that word Curtis really was.” That made her beam even more brightly — and we were friends ever since.

On several occasions, I had the pleasure of sitting in on her individual piano lessons with her Curtis students, which were taught at her home on a pair of stunning 7’4” Bosendorfer grand pianos. The character of her teaching was revelatory and has remained with me as an inspiration ever since.

Mrs. Sokoloff never separated digital technique from musical interpretation. The former was never anything other than a means to the end of the latter. Technique was an indispensable tool, of course, but never an end in and of itself. She always demanded of her students that they make the piano sing – not so much denying its inherent percussive character but deploying that character to sustain an unending flow of lyricism enhanced by emotional drama.

She once joked to me that she was living proof that the good die young. If that were so, then her longevity was the result of her not being merely good; she was truly, profoundly and unforgettably great. It now falls to those of us who treasure our memories of her to continue her peerless legacy as best we can.

You can contact NOTEWORTHY at Michael-caruso@comcast.net. To read more of NOTEWORTHY visit www.chestnuthilllocal.com/Arts/Noteworthy.

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