Bravo, Encore!

Readers’ Comments

As an international arts curator, music presenter, and creator of programs that bring music to audiences in many different settings, I have spent much of my professional life thinking about how we invite more people into a meaningful relationship with great music. Bravo, Encore! offers an ingenious answer: tell irresistible stories, choose wonderful music, and make listening part of the reading itself. Thomas Wolf draws on generations of extraordinary musical history with knowledge, discernment, affection, and a wonderfully irreverent sense of humor. Through recordings, playlists, links, and QR codes, curiosity becomes listening almost instantly. The result is something rare – a book that brings deep musical knowledge together with an infectious spirit of curiosity and discovery. I have seen Tom bring this combination of music, storytelling, and history to life in performance; audiences love it. Bravo, Encore! captures that same spirit on the page: generous, entertaining, deeply informed, and above all an invitation to listen.

—Manuel Bagorro, Creative Advisor, Carnegie Hall

In Bravo, Encore! author Thomas Wolf takes us back to a bygone era of extraordinary music and musicians. His stories and history abound with wit—with his unique personality and an insider’s perspective on the personalities of multiple generations of musicians, their remarkable gifts, and their follies. A book not to be missed.

—Steven Ansell, Principal Violist, Boston Symphony Orchestra

Tom Wolf’s Bravo! Encore! is a highly original and delightful romp through both the history of his remarkable family and the marvelous pieces often played by the great musicians on hearing those two welcome words as their concerts came to a close. The anecdotes recounted here, most hilarious, some somber, each one delightfully bound to a particular encore, take us from the Russia of Czar Nicolas II into which Wolf’s soon-to-be world-famous violinist grandmother, Lea Luboshutz, was born, to the foundation and growth of Philadelphia’s celebrated Curtis Institute of Music, to whose history Wolf’s grandmother, his uncle Boris Goldovsky, and his brother Andrew Wolf, made major contributions. Along the way we meet Jasha Heifetz, Gregor Piategorsky, Josef Hofmann, Pablo Casals, Serge Koussivitsky, Efrem Zimbalist and Mary Louise Curtis Bok Zimbalist, among others. Even the young Leonard Bernstein makes a cameo appearance. A must read—and listen—for anyone interested in the backstage lives of some of the artists who made the classical music headlines during the twentieth century.

—Peter Bloom, Grace Jarcho Ross Professor of Humanities, Emeritus, Smith College

“I am a physician by profession, but music has always been the second language of our household—my wife on viola and at the piano, the children on strings, brass, and woodwinds, and myself listening and enjoying it all. Bravo, Encore! feels like it was written for families like ours. Forty warm-hearted stories, each paired with an encore you can hear at the scan of a code: it turns reading into listening, and listening into playing. For the amateur who loves music without making a living from it, for young players discovering why we return to these pieces again and again, this book is a gift.”

—Dr. Jens Deerberg-Wittram-Professor of Hospital Management and Value-Based Health Care, Technische Universität, Berlin, Germany

One of this book’s greatest pleasures is the company it keeps. Ysaÿe, Toscanini, Isaac Stern, Queen Elisabeth of Belgium, and so many other legendary figures appear as part of everyday life, making me feel closer to these towering monuments than ever before. Catching glimpses of them throughout the book became one of my favorite parts of reading it—each appearance felt like discovering another hidden gem tucked along the journey.

As a lifelong violinist, I had always thought of encores the way the book describes them: “rich musical desserts.” They were always an afterthought in recital preparation and although I admittedly judged performers by their choice of encore (Augustin Hadelich always seems to pick great ones), I had never really considered them beyond face value. This book showed me that an encore is never just an encore. Every chapter revealed another story hidden behind the music—a family memory, a friendship, a moment in history. After reading this book, I know I’ll never hear an encore the same way again.

There are moments throughout that every musician will recognize: waiting just long enough before taking a bow, looking to friends and family in the audience to help carry the applause. Mixed in are stories that anyone can relate to—summer romances, growing families, or wondering about the baseball score while you’re otherwise occupied, unable to check it. But what stayed with me most were the moments where those worlds came together: what happens when you make music with your family? The result is something wonderfully layered, where family life shapes music and music shapes family life.

The book captures something rare: how music becomes a living archive, carrying family history and tradition in a way that feels deeply personal—continuously lived and carried forward into the present to share with all.

—Haeun Moon, Former Concertmaster, National Youth Symphony