The Winograds

When I was a student at Juilliard, I had the good fortune to attend the premiere performances by the Juilliard Quartet at Town Hall of the six Bartok quartets. As you can imagine, that was a landmark musical event in this country – in fact, in the world. At that time, Bobby Mann, Robert Koff, and Raphael Hillyer were members of the Quartet. Their cellist was Arthur Winograd. Interestingly, as their lives developed, Arthur began a conducting career, and I had the pleasure of playing oboe for him, both in recordings and in concerts in New York. I don’t know how many of you reading this will remember Arthur Winograd, but of course he was a great cellist, and it is particularly pleasurable to me to have represented the American String Quartet for the past fifteen years, whose first violinist is Arthur’s son, Peter. In a way, it’s not unusual in the music world, which is a very small world, to have that kind of interconnection between families and friends, and I hope that any of you reading this have the opportunity to hear the wonderful violin playing of Peter with his American String Quartet.