Memories of Sascha Lasserson

Miriam Morris

Iamvery fortunate to have been born into an eminent musical family. While my mother was a pupil of the great English pianist, Solomon, a distant relation by marriage was the Russian violin pedagogue, Sascha Lasserson. Sascha was the most longstanding student of Leopold Auer at the St Petersburg Conservatoire alongside such luminaries as Jascha Heifetz, Mischa Elman, Efrem Zimbalist and Nathan Milstein. He was also Auer’s assistant. Sascha was fondly known as one of the ‘Odessa babies’.

Among his many concert appearances, the Glazunov Violin Concerto was of great importance to Sascha as he had performed it with the composer conducting. In 1914, he was on a world tour but the First World War grounded him in London, so England became Sascha’s second home. It was here that he met his future wife, Zelda, a relation of my first cousin, Michael Lasserson. Sascha became the doyen of the Russian school of violin playing in Europe and he taught the majority of the foremost post-war professional violinists in England. That is not to say that Sascha only taught the most talented students. He was essentially a modest and generous man and charged little for the wonderful pearls of wisdom that he imparted to his students. I remember that, having left school, was in a quartet with two young students of Sascha. While they were proficient, serious players, they were not of the first water, yet their regard for Sascha was profound. Sascha had great integrity and possessed an uncanny knack for sorting out his student’s problems. A prime example of Sascha’s modesty was when Heifetz was booked to play in London. Naturally, the queue for tickets was very long. Who should I meet in that queue but Sascha. Needless to say, he could have easily got a