OREM, Utah — Be an actor. Watch a movie. Listen to recordings. Look up a French composer online. Study the way swans move. Know your responsibility. Know how your brain works. See a Mozart opera. Love what you do. Sing!
Each of those bits is constructive advice coming from a trusted mentor or master teacher. What might have been unique for some teenage music students on Thursday, July 29, is that all of those pieces of advice were offered to help with a singular pursuit: mastery of the violin.
The setting was a masterclass in a two-day workshop at the Gruppman Institute, taught by the husband-wife team of Igor Gruppman, principal conductor of the Orchestra at Temple Square, and Vesna Stefanovich-Gruppman, a founding member of the orchestra.
Igor, a native of Ukraine, and Vesna, born in Serbia, then part of Yugoslavia, were students at the Moscow Conservatory and have extensive teaching and performing credentials in the U.S. and abroad. Both are converts to the Mormon church and divide their time between responsibilities with the Temple Square Orchestra, which brings them to Utah three times a year, and their home in Rotterdam, where he is concertmaster of the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra and she is a violin and viola professor at the Rotterdam Conservatory.
Masterclasses are part of the regular course of instruction for university students studying music and other artistic endeavors. The two-day workshop was being hosted by Utah Valley University. But the Gruppmans' workshop is unique in several ways: One is that the instruction given on July 29 was mostly to students in their early teens, and the other is the Gruppmans' notoriety for long-distance teaching. On the latter, the Gruppmans developed computer hardware and software to help students and teachers have lessons when they were physically separated. Using today's technology, Igor Gruppman said their unique technology is no longer needed, and that the workshop was being broadcast over Skype to students.
The event is a first of its kind for the Gruppmans, Igor Gruppman said, originating with the idea of one of their former students, Emily Ricks. Ricks, like many of the Gruppmans' students, is now a teacher herself, training the younger players at the workshop. "Our former students were brought up kind of in our way and our philosophy of teaching. They have their own students now, what we call our 'musical grandchildren,'" Igor Gruppman said. He added that he hopes the workshops can become part of their regular routine when he and Vesna are in Utah. The Gruppmans post workshop information on their website, gruppman.com.
Ricks said she and others organizing the event will always consider themselves the Gruppmans' students. The student-now-teacher performances in the Friday, July 30, masterclass portion of the workshop was where tough-as-nails critiques were expected, Ricks said.
e-mail: sfidel@desnews.com