This video of young Joshua Bell playing for famous teacher Ivan Galamian gives a great lesson to students, teachers and parents. It shows us that we don’t precisely know what our child is going to turn into.
In this footage from the 80’s Bell makes a lot of mistakes and sounds, well, like a student. Ivan Galamian was one of the most influential violin teachers of the Twentieth Century and during his life taught hundreds of students.
Not all are famous soloists and many played better than Bell did at the same age. But it turned out that only a few years later the young violinist was already winning competitions and playing as a soloist with the Philadelphia Orchestra. If we just saw this video, we wouldn’t know this young and shy student would turn out into one of the great violinists of the 21st century.