Gary Hoffman

"My mother was a violinist so it was natural for me to start on the violin. One day when I was nine I was in my grandmother's house on the South Side of Chicago. My aunt's cello was out of its case and I picked it up and plucked a few strings, and something resonated inside of me. I came home that day and said to my parents, 'I want to play the cello.' Physically it was more natural for me in terms of the way it's held; the body's less contorted, the limbs are freer and there's less adjustment to properly hold the instrument. I immediately progressed in a way that I never did on the violin.

"For 12¹/2 years I've had a Nicolo Amati, made in 1662. It was a much-heard instrument for many years long before I was born; it was played for 32 years by one of the great cellists, Leonard Rose, who died in 1984. In the 19th Century it belonged to a Russian, Count Mateusz Wielhorski, who apparently was an accomplished cellist and who knew Mendelssohn and Schumann. I've read that Clara and Robert Schumann met him on their travels in Russia, and it was around that time that Robert was writing the piano quartet -- which has a big and very memorable cello solo in the third movement -- so possibly this man and this cello inspired him.

"I've always loved the music of Gabriel Fauré. It may be going out on a limb but to me he's one of the truly great composers. There's a simplicity, a purity, a directness and a profundity in the music that I associate with Schubert; telling a story without fuss and bother, without trying to make major points. Though I don't think of this as essentially French music, it evokes that fin-de-siécle attitude that time has stopped; standing on the Bois de Boulogne on a Sunday afternoon you feel you could go back a hundred years. In one of the parks there's a merry-go-round with old wooden horses that an old woman cranks by hand. Sometimes there's a little hitch as it goes around -- and there's a moment in Fauré's First Quintet that sure sounds like that merry-go-round!

"To listen to something transporting, I might put on Charlie Parker or John Coltrane; in classical music it would be a late Beethoven Quartet, Brahms's Fourth Symphony or Schubert's G Major Quartet. It wouldn't be a piece that I play; at the risk of sounding arrogant, there are some pieces I know so well I can almost imagine them better than I can ever hear them played, and it's enough for me to hear them in my mind. I still feel an incredible charge about the Schubert Cello Quintet, but in a certain sense there's more in my mind about the piece than I could ever hear realized. There are also pieces you feel so personally about, it's difficult to hear others play them. There's a recording of the Bruch Second Violin Concerto with Heifetz, and he does a glissando at one moment that gives me a chill every time I hear it, over and over and over again.

"There's a moment in Charlie Chaplin's The Idle Class that's genius. It's clear from the beginning of the movie that he's an alcoholic. He reads a note in his boudoir that his wife can't stand it any more and she's leaving him. He turns his back to the camera and his shoulders start to shake. Naturally you assume that he's crying; he turns around and he's shaking a martini! It's so bitter and cynical and terribly biting and ironic -- and yet so human and understandable. Chaplin has a timeless quality; there's something so true and so real that's part of what we are as people.

"I have an aversion to playing a phrase or a piece the same way twice. That seems so uncreative to me, and creativity is what it's all about. I suffer listening to my playing on record. There are recordings I've done that I don't own copies of and have never heard after listening to the tape for final approval. I don't ever really feel like I've gotten to the point where, Now I have it. Composers themselves admit that writing music down is not an exact science; there'd be no way to write all the things they feel even if they wrote a million indications.

"Music at its best can accentuate, magnify and bring about the best things we are as human beings, and these are directly connected to our Creator. In playing and listening to music I've actually felt a kind of connection to something greater than me and greater than the music -- a part of something divine.

"My greatest achievement is getting past an incredibly difficult and disillusioning time in my life, learning the lessons that were to be learned and realizing that I can still be a happy, productive person and have a full life. I've pretty much come through that and become a better and stronger person.

"At the Chamber Music Society there's a commitment to doing things in the best possible way and to giving the best possible chance for personal musical wishes, whether they be repertoire or personnel, to be realized. It doesn't belong to any one of us; David is very much concerned with how each Artist Member feels and what each person wants to do. It's a very complex puzzle to put together. The thing I value most is that all the elements are here to do the best that can be done; what more could one want?"

Ideal person to have dinner with tonight:

"Beethoven would be endlessly fascinating. A composer I love more in terms of a connection to the soul is Brahms, but there's something about Beethoven as a character..."