A Tribute to William Pleeth – by Hannah Roberts

I found Pleeth to be continuously imaginative and creative in his thought process when teaching. One defining characteristic was his innate and unaffected gift of creating powerful connections, using imagery from all areas of life to illuminate aspects of cello playing and music making. This was often accompanied by exquisite demonstrations given on his cello with seemingly effortless ease, while standing.

Much of what I learnt from him strongly underpins my own values as a cellist, musician and teacher. He had studied with Julius Klengel, so he often recommended Klengel or Goltermann works as a combination of etude and concert piece. I studied with him at the Yehudi Menuhin school between the ages of nine and eighteen, where I was also fortunate to have weekly lessons with the late Jennifer Ward-Clarke, and she focused more on the setting of studies and exercises.

His unforgettable seminal truth for all bowed string players was, ‘The right arm is the lung, the right hand is the lips, teeth and tongue,’ (meaning the free arm gives a fund of resonant sound, while the hand is capable of channeling that into a wealth of varied articulations, syllables and words.) This is a typically brilliant analogy, full of vivid and memorable imagery.

Pleeth was a free, independent thinker and taught us to question the “traditional” rubato or dynamic traditions that can build as folklore around some of the standard repertoire. Genuine thirst for deeper exploration of the score and piecing together the jigsaw of the whole work from a chamber music perspective- in the case of sonatas particularly- were priorities.

He was always utterly convincing in demonstrating a number of ways the phrases could be played. Less well-thought-out phrasing that a student may have initially come up with were sometimes demonstrated in caricature, although this was never done with cruelty.

He did perform both as a cellist and teacher during lessons and classes, but personally I never saw him doing this to self-aggrandise, and this was a wonderful example of his genuine passion for putting the music and the student first.

He would always refer to us very affectionately in lessons. We were darling, poppet, petal and other endearments and were always met with a warm, beaming smile. I always felt excited about playing to him because I knew that I would come out of the lesson brimming with new thoughts and ideas and having been treated to a number of ravishing demonstrations. He created a gorgeous range of sounds and happily they have remained in my memory as an inspiration.