A Russian immigrant, a 93-year-old, and a toddler walk into SFCM…

Alla Gladysheva with her grandson David in SFCM's Smart Start program.

Thirty years after emigrating from the Soviet Union, Alla Gladysheva now finds herself in the somewhat unusual position of guiding both the San Francisco Conservatory of Music’s oldest student and one of its youngest.

In her current role teaching in the Conservatory’s Continuing Education program, Gladysheva teaches Jack Hoffman, who, at 93 years young, is the oldest student enrolled at SFCM. But she also spends time at the opposite end of the spectrum, joining her grandson David in SFCM’s Smart Start program (under the umbrella of the Early Childhood wing of the Conservatory’s Pre-College division) catering to the youngest aspiring musicians in the Bay Area.

“The Smart Start program, it's an amazing thing,” Gladysheva enthuses. “In my training, I dealt with 4-6 year-olds. But 1-3 year-olds, I didn't know how. So I was very excited then to enroll my grandson. I am very much impressed, seriously, because I can see not only with my grandson, but with the other children in his group, because they’re all so different, but are now approaching the level of what a 3 or 4-year-old would be doing.”

Meanwhile, Hoffman’s musical journey started when he was 88, after learning that senior citizens who participate in choirs extend their lifespan by a decade. After joining a choir through San Francisco’s Community Music Center, he asked his choir director how to begin to learn how to read music, who in turn suggested piano lessons. “I've been taking piano lessons ever since and continued with the choir,” Hoffman said*. "Alla brings me something new to work on every week, and I practice every day for one and a half hours.”

Jack Hoffman and Alla Gladysheva during a lesson.

Hoffman purchased season tickets to the San Francisco Opera, Ballet, and Symphony to get further acquainted with his new passion, attending Sunday matinees by himself. “Music has added a richness to my life,” he said, “a whole dimension of what I do with my time. I devote much more time to music now, between the choir, Alla's lessons, and my daily practice. It's made a dramatic change in my life. It also helped me cope with the unfortunate passing of my wife in 2020.” When photographed for this story, Hoffman was working on Johann Sebastian Bach’s Minuet in G, with Gladysheva occasionally taking over the right or left hand as Hoffman worked through the classic piece of music education repertoire.

A graduate of St. Petersburg Conservatory with degrees in musicology and piano (and a master’s in musicology), Gladysheva and her husband fled the chaos of Boris Yeltsin’s Russia in 1995, landing in San Francisco’s Richmond District—the only place in the U.S. where they had family.

Jack Hoffman prepares for a lesson at SFCM.

“When we decided to leave Russia,” Gladysheva recalls, “it was a very direct decision. It was not a long time thinking where we should go. I just thought, ‘We’re leaving. No way we're gonna stay in the Soviet Union.” Still, she had some reservations about her decision: “I was telling my professor that the only thing I'm hesitant about is that I will change. And he told me, ‘If you don't want to change, if you want to remain who you are, then you will remain who you are.”

Gladysheva cleaned houses for five years—“I didn't enjoy it, but there are a couple of benefits: You come, you leave behind a clean house and you get something of a workout so you don't need to go to the gym and you get your $15.”—before sporadic work with the SF Jewish Folk Chorus and various community centers led to steadier work at the San Francisco Ballet and then SFCM.

“The Conservatory gave me an opportunity to teach a musicianship class, even with my broken English,” Gladysheva (whose English is much less broken at this point) explains. “I think they were much in need of a musicianship teacher, so I was—I think how people say in America—in the right time and the right place, and since then I’ve enjoyed very much working here.”

“Jack taught me a lot about teaching, actually,” she continues. “You take from the person who comes to practice with you. I come from a country which imposes more than it receives from individuals, but I was blessed with my teachers who were actually doing what I'm trying to do: Listening to the students. I still have a lot of curiosity, because even the smallest person or the oldest person or the person in-between, they each have their own ways to learn.”

Learn more about Continuing Education, Smart Start, Early Childhood, and Pre-College at SFCM.

*In an interview with Avery Brandstetter, one of Gladysheva’s Pre-College students, for a school project.