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ARTS The Gift

At thirteen, Kristi Curb is a world-class cellist who must balance her love of music with a passion for boys and Swatch watches.
By Skip Hollandsworth |

I first heard Kristi Curb play last year at a black tie gala honoring the famous cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich. Southern Methodist University had brought Rostropovich to Dallas to receive the prestigious Meadows Award for ex-cellence in the arts, and the crowd had come to sit through a string of testimonies lauding Rostropovich for his impact on music in the twentieth century.

Then, completely unannounced, a girl with waist-length hair, wearing a black satin dress that her mother had made, came out with a cello, sat down, and with a quick, un-dramatic nod to her piano accompanist, began playing what is considered to be the most difficult piece in all of the cello repertoire-’’Humoresque,” written by Ros-tropovich himself when he was a young man living in Russia.

Rostropovich leaned forward as Kristi Curb’s fingers flew up and down the cello. The others on the stage who had flown in from around the country to commemorate Rostropovich listened open-mouthed as the girl, her head thrown back regally, roared through a complicated series of sixteenth notes and then octave runs. “Humoresque” is rarely heard by audiences because it is simply too complicated for most professional cellists. But here, the music had an elemental power, each note bursting confidently into the air. At the end of the piece, Rostropovich, the old master, dashed across the stage to kiss the girl. He obviously was stunned by her technical mastery, her noble tone, and her bold, emotional style. He also, no doubt, was stunned because Kristi Curb was only twelve years old.



When I went to meet Kristi recently, I was filled with the usual misgivings one associates with a “child prodigy.” Everyone has a favorite child prodigy horror story-of this little boy, once the toast of Carnegie Hall, now driving a truck in Kansas; of this little girl, once hailed as the next Isaac Stem, now gone mad. At the age of seven, Mozart was dragged by his father all over Europe to perform for the royal courts. Haydn was sent away from his home at age five to study music. When the legendary violinist Niccolo Paganini was a child, he was not allowed to eat unless he practiced ten hours a day. Even for strong-minded adults who recognize the punishing price of artistic success, it’s painful to think of a child hunkered over an instrument for several hours a day while other children romp in the fields.

Indeed, given all that prodigies must endure, it is a wonder any of them survive. Some prodigies recognize their genius with a miserable sense of their own uniqueness, and thus try to bury their talent to blend in among their social peers. Others plod on, brilliant and alone. Some become targets of hostility. Others become near puppets of their parents, who seem to be realizing their own ambitions through their blessed offspring. Ultimately, there is a natural tendency to believe that prodigies, sooner or later, are going to self-destruct before ever fulfilling their early promise. Anyone who is pushed so hard at that early age. goes the theory, is surely destined to burn out.

Yet the child prodigy has always been a dependable feature on the musical scene. A little kid zipping cheerily through a Mendelssohn concerto brings forth cries of de-lighl from people who have only the most minimal interest in serious music. The truth of the matter is that practically every major concert performer started out as a child prodigy. With their miniature violins tucked under their chins or their legs dangling from the piano bench, too short to reach the pedals, they played the hell out of anything put before them, bounding off the stage to thunderous standing ovations.

Today, perhaps because teachers remember the tragic experiences of other prodigies, the child star is not as exploited. No longer do kids go on the whirlwind concert tours the way they did in the 18th and 19th centuries. Famous musicians like Leonard Bernstein encourage the musical darlings to stay in their practice rooms. There is a more nurturing approach to their talent-teachers allow their students’ skills to be polished without constantly placing them in the glare of public performance. But the excruciating pressure is still there to sharpen an already uncanny ability, and so is the nagging feeling that if they don’t stay ahead, they will lose their special touch. The prodigy can’t be shielded forever-and for Kristi Curb, the time to emerge is drawing near. After many highly acclaimed local performances, she will make her debut this month with a symphony orchestra in Knoxville, Tennessee, and her teacher is lining up an even larger performance.

When I went to see her, I had read a good deal about the careers of gifted young musicians, their rewards and afflictions, their discipline and pain. But I was not in the slightest prepared for the life of Kristi Curb.



Kristi, now thirteen, lives with her family in the small community of Southlake, about a thirty-minute drive northwest of Dallas. Southlake is a collection of small farms and horse stables and a couple of little neighborhoods where on an average day you will find horses grazing in front yards and a couple of cows standing by the fence watching the traffic pass by. There isn’t much crime or fast living to speak of: the only real danger comes when the dogs start chasing the livestock. Last year, the Curbs’ family poodle was killed when the horse it was barking at came over and stepped on it.

When I pulled up into the driveway of the Curbs’ seven-acre home, Kristi’s father, Bill Curb, an electrical engineer for LTV, was raking leaves out in front. An easygoing, quiet man who has always felt more comfortable in the country than in the city, he was whistling as he worked.

“So, 1 guess me musical genes come from your side of the family?” I asked.

Curb gave me a bewildered look. “Goodness, gracious, no,” he said. “I can’t even carry a tune.”

If any “musical genes” at all helped Kristi Curb, they must have come from the mother of the family, Maurine, a former part-time piano teacher who can vaguely remember that a couple of long-dead relatives from Oklahoma once played the fiddle. In fact, the Curbs seem to be the last kind of family that would develop a concert artist. They are an average, small-town family that goes to the Baptist church and grows a back yard garden and watches situation comedies at night on television, But something clicked. Among the endless flow of mortal generations, a child suddenly popped up blessed with phenomenal gifts.

The child was in the back of the house practicing. As the sound of the Haydn C Major Concerto wafted into the living room, Maurine, a pretty woman who grew up in small Texas towns, folded her hands neatly in her lap and said, “There’s one thing I want you to understand. Please now, this is very important to me. I am not a pushy mother. Never. My great fear is someone will think I’m the kind of mother who hits her child with a ruler if she makes a wrong note.”



Though the two Curb children (Kim, the oldest, is eighteen) spent their early childhoods telling their mother they wanted to be roller-skating champions, both quickly showed musical talent. Kim, an accomplished piano, French horn, and violin player, received two music scholarships to North Texas State University. But it was Kristi who, at the age of five, gave her first sign that she had an extraordinary talent. The children’s Sunday school teacher at church realized that Kristi had perfect pitch. She could play a note on the piano, and little Kristi could tell whether it was an A or an A flat. No one told Kristi how significant this was. The teacher asked Kristi if she might one day want to be a musician, and Kristi, a bubbly girl who had gotten in trouble on her very first day of school for grabbing a boy and kissing him, said no thank you. She wanted to be a mommy with twelve babies.

Maurine enrolled her in Suzuki lessons on the cello. (Suzuki training introduces a child to a stringed instrument by simple exercises that are not unlike games.) Within a year, by age six, Kristi was playing at a high school level.

“Right then,” said Maurine, “I began to get this sort of feeling in my stomach. I wondered, ’What is inside this child?’”

“Did you begin to think you might have a prodigy on your hands?” I asked.

“Oh, no. No way. I just tried to persuade myself that the other students just weren’t getting as much practice in as Kristi.”

“But, surely you knew. . .”

“Of course I knew,” interrupted Maurine. “But I didn’t want to admit it. It would have meant that much more responsibility. I wasn’t sure I would know what to do for her.”

About then, the music in the back room stopped, and the squeaky sound of tennis shoes against the floor began to make its way down the hall toward the living room. There was a giggle, another squeak, and the musical sensation known as Kristi Curb leaped over her mother and landed on the other side of the couch. Then she punched her mother in the arm and giggled again, the sunlight pouring through the window and gleaming off the braces on her teeth.

Perhaps it was that I, like most people, had (his mental picture that a child prodigy would always wear long dresses, petticoats, and black patent-leather shoes. Perhaps I expected a, well, slightly more serious demeanor. But as Kristi shifted around impatiently on the couch, rolling her eyes as her mother told her not to put her feet on the coffee table, I realized that this girl was like the typical thirteen-year-old in everyone’s neighborhood. Her hair was thickly moussed, and she was wearing Guess clothes, Nike tennis shoes, and two Swatch watches on her left arm.

“Why two watches’?” I asked.

“Well, you know, it’s cool.”

“Oh,” I said. “Who are some of your favorite performers?”

“Michael I Fox and that guy on ’Moonlighting.’ “

“No, not those kind. Musical performers.”

“Um, well, there’s, uh. . .” She seemed distracted, and she looked at me in an odd sort of way. “Hey. I have a pair of jeans just like yours except they snap.”

Kristi and I then discussed, in approximate order: 1) Why she chose the cello. “I don’t know. I thought it was pretty neat.” 2) Boys. “Okay, like, I had this one boyfriend who’s also thirteen. He plays the violin, but he, like, won’t ever let me listen to him.” 3) Her rivalry with her sister Kim. “The only time we ever get mad at one another is when she takes too long in the bathroom before school.” 4) Her other abilities. “Kristi can touch her nose with her tongue,” said Kim. who had come into the room to listen to the interview. 5) Whether she has ever screwed up during a performance. “I don’t think so. Mom? That hasn’t happened to me, has it?” 6) Books that she reads. “I just finished Don Quixote. That was pretty neat. Here’s another one I finished. I forgot the name of it. The dog chewed the cover off.” 7) What other kids think of her. “They don’t know about what I do. Like, sometimes I tell them I practice all day, and they act real shocked, but that’s because they only have to practice fifteen minutes a day to be in the band.”

1 wasn’t sure I was getting any of the answers I wanted. “Is it true,” I asked, “that you can play a piece of music one time, and then play it the second time by memory?”

Throughout the course of this question, Kristi had attempted to grab a piece of chocolate candy from a platter on the coffee table. Her mother had slapped her hand away, then Kristi had shifted on the couch and playfully punched her mother again in the arm.

“Could you repeat the question?” asked Kristi.

As I repeated the question, Kristi jiggled one foot on the floor, then put her other fool down and jiggled that one. “No, that’s probably an exaggeration,” she said. “It. um, like, takes me a couple of times before I can play it by memory.”

Kristi practices three to four hours a day on an expensive French cello loaned to her through SMU. She genuinely enjoys practicing (she also works on the piano one or two hours a day), and though it sometimes bothers her that she can’t spend the night at her friends’ homes on Fridays because she has to get up early and go into Dallas for her lesson, she says she rarely complains.

Though she cannot explain it yet, music exists spinally in her life. Some people might feel sorry for her because she has to give up many normal adolescent events for her practicing-but for her, the most normal way to respond to the world is through her cello.

I warned to talk about some more musical things with Kristi, but she wanted to show me a new trampoline trick she had made up called the “Buckin’ Bronco.” We raced outside past her father, who was covered in grease trying to restore an old automobile, and she bounced up and down while I stood nearby and acted interested.

“Don’t you think about the cello when you do this?” I asked.

Kristi Curb gave me a withering look. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said.



The next day, I went with Kristi to her weekly private lesson with the distinguished cellist Lev Aronson. Aronson, seventy-four, who studied with most of the great cello masters in Europe in the early 1900s, is one of the most sought-after cello teachers in the world. Cellists fly in from around the country to study with him at his North Dallas studio. He presently leaches just two young people-a sixteen-year-old Dallas student named Brian Thornton, and Kristi-because, as he put it, “I don’t have time to waste with those who are not supremely talented.”

Aronson’s highly temperamental and demanding style-he knows almost the entire cello repertoire by heart and relentlessly interrupts his students whenever they make the tiniest mistake-has proven intimidating to scores of hopeful cellists, but Kristi thrives on it. She kisses him on the cheek when she prances in, calls him “Mr. A.” a takeoff (completely lost on Aronson) on television’s Mr. T, tries not to giggle during his cantankerous moods, and stares him straight in the eye when she plays.

Aronson first heard Kristi perform when she was eight years old at a special master’s class for area students in Fort Worth. He was with Leonard Rose, one of the most famous American cellists, “and when we saw this tiny girl walk up with her cello, we looked at one another with the same awful expression. We had experienced many times the sight of a poor little girl being pushed on stage by her horrible mother to play the most atrocious music.”



This time, however, he and Rose watched in near disbelief as the tot zipped through a concerto. “Her technique was terrible,” said Aronson, “but her talent was superb.” Less than a year later, he began to teach her.

He has since taught her five difficult concertos, and she is working on a couple more. On the day of this lesson, she began to play for him the “Variations on a Rococo Theme” by Tchaikovsky. Maurine was there, as she has been for every one of Kristi’s lessons, tape-recording the lesson and then taking notes on nearly everything Lev Aronson said as well.

Kristi rushed through a passage, and Aronson waved his hand impatiently. He looked like a hawk as he stared stonily at his young pupil. “What do you think Tchaikovsky was doing here? Just writing some notes? No. Kristi, your playing here”-and then he paused for effect-“doesn’t echo in your heart. Now sing to me. Tell me a story.”

Aronson knew that despite Kristi’s technical skill, she lacked the emotional currentthat she needed to turn her cello playing into an artistic performance. Kristi was coming to that critical turning point all prodigiesmust eventually make to move from precocious talent to a maturity of expression. Inthree years, at sixteen, she would be geriatricfor a prodigy. No longer could it be said thather playing was “marvelous for a child.” Bythen, it simply must be marvelous.

Aronson asked her to repeat the passage. Kristi, sensing his mood, drew herself up over the cello and put the bow to the strings, It was really quite beautiful to watch the | transformation of a giggly little thirteen-year-old into a confident musician. The kid who can never keep her mind on one subject for longer than thirty seconds suddenly looked down on her instrument as if it was the only evidence she had of her own existence. There was a sense of mastery and peace in her playing that she showed almost nowhere else.

The notes rose up, and, pounding like great ocean waves against our ears, washed across the room. When she finished, the sound faded through the studio like a sigh. For a moment, there was silence, Then the old teacher leaned back in his seat and gave one of his thin half-smiles.

Kristi looked at Aronson with a smirk, as if to say, “top that,” then she looked down at her hands. I wondered if she was reflecting on the majesty of the music, or perhaps the sonorousness of her tone. Kristi shook her wrist. I realized she was thinking of none of that. She was only making sure the two Swatch watches on her arm looked just right.

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