The Tempo at 60: Prestissimo

By Christopher Porterfield

Isaac Stern plays strings and pulls them with equal gusto

In his own variation of Parkinson's Law, Violinist Isaac Stern expands to fill any space available, even one as large as the city of Paris. There, for the past two months, an entire army of Sterns has been at large in the streets, salons and concert halls. Which was the real one? The celebrity glimpsed in a blue Mercedes limousine, racing to such appointments as a private tour of Versailles and a recital before President Valery Giscard d'Estaing? Or was it the doppelgaenger who never seemed to leave the rehearsal hall, reflectively pushing his horn-rims up over white hair and grilling the young violinists who passed before him: "Who did you study with? Why did you choose that piece? Can you explain why you are holding the instrument that way? Up, up! Higher!"? Or the virtuoso who appeared onstage with the Orchestre National de France and the Nouvel Orchestre Philharmonique, the rosette of the Legion d'Honneur pinned in his lapel, and tossed off the feat of playing 15 major works, from Mozart to Samuel Barber, during a sequence of eight concerts?

All were, of course, irrepressibly, ubiquitously, impossibly Isaac Stern--a natural force not to be explained. As he approaches his 60th birthday on July 21, he still has not slowed down enough to be closely observed. "We do not know how many hours Isaac lives in a day," says Conductor Zubin Mehta. "We only know that it must be more than 24."

What would be fulfillment enough for almost any violinist--to be one of the world's leading virtuosos--is for Stern merely a starting point. He is also a tireless advocate of causes, a godfather to young talent, a lobbyist, a fund raiser and a supreme power broker in the music world, albeit a rather puckish, cherubic one. "I've never been able to live in a cocoon," he says. "I have a long buttinsky nose." In Yiddish--one of the six languages he either speaks or understands --the expression is a kochleffl (a stirrer-up of the pot). Even his relaxations are strenuous. Says Leonard Bernstein: "You should play tennis with him some time. My God, the force, the velocity of those balls! He's a bull out there."

When not cradling a violin or wielding a tennis racquet, Stern can usually be found holding a telephone or two or three. (He has eleven of them in his Manhattan duplex.) If forced to spend a couple of hours at an airport, he finds a lounge or booth and places one long-distance call after another to his many friends, who range from a Who's Who of the concert world to Henry Kissinger, Dinah Shore, Arthur Miller and Jimmy Connors. Members of the Israel Philharmonic like to tease him about the three-minute orchestral introduction in the Beethoven Violin Concerto, which leaves Stern, as soloist, with nothing to do. The musicians say they cannot understand why he does not use the time to phone Moshe Dayan.

Stern first stirred the pot in a big way in 1960, when Carnegie Hall was threatened with demolition. He rounded up moral and financial support for a deal whereby the city of New York bought the property and rented it to a nonprofit corporation, of which Stern was named president. He remains president to this day, and hence has a powerful say in Carnegie programming, which includes frequent appearances by him as "house fiddler." Stern's wife Vera also takes an active hand in the hall's affairs, as she does in many of his projects. Says she: "Isaac dreams, he animates people. He counts on me to follow up."

During the cold war Stern was the first U.S. soloist to tour the Soviet Union. Last year he was among the first to visit China, lecturing, giving master classes and talent scouting as he went. But his permanent, personal cultural exchange mission is with Israel. He serves as a sort of patriarch of Israeli musical life, and he feels such a deep affinity for the country that he does not hesitate to give interviews taking issue with the way Prime Minister Menachem Begin runs it. In 1973 he founded the Jerusalem Music Center, where Israeli musicians play and study with top international performers.

Many--although not all--of the young musicians whom Stern has discovered or helped have come from Israel, among them Violinists Itzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zukerman, Sergiu Luca and Shlomo Mintz. Taking the example of Mintz, 22, Zubin Mehta explains how the Stern patronage can work: "I heard Mintz play a Paganini concerto when he was eleven. Immediately I phoned Isaac, because what can I do with such a talent? I cannot exploit him by giving him concerts. Isaac hears him, Isaac takes him to New York, Isaac gives him the best teacher possible, Isaac arranges through a foundation that all expenses are paid, and today we have Shlomo Mintz."

Stern, Perhnan, Zukerman, Mehta (who, although not Jewish, is music director of the Israel Philharmonic). Pianist-Conductor Daniel Barenboim and some of Stern's younger prot&3233;g&3233;s form a particularly close fellowship that is sometimes described as the "Kosher Nostra." Stern rejects the term's implication of clannishness and favoritism. "Outsiders always look for a reason to explain why they are not inside," he says. "They never look in the mirror. Let's face it, the profession I'm in is a very simple and a very cruel one. There is no way that you can create a career for someone without talent and no way to stop a career of someone with talent." A born public relations man, Stern is adept at disarming the inevitable criticism that he throws his weight around, if only by making fun of his weight. Once, as he settled his rotund, 5-ft. 6-in. frame at the start of a chamber concert in Seattle, he swiveled to the people seated behind him and said, "Pardon my back." Then he turned to the people facing him and said, "Pardon my front."

Stern is often cited as the first American violin virtuoso. Although he was born in the Ukraine, his parents emigrated to San Francisco when he was ten months old. Unlike another local prodigy of approximately the same age, Yehudi Menuhin, Stern studied only in the U.S., mainly with Naoum Blinder, the concertmaster of the San Francisco Symphony. When Stern arrived in New York City in the late 1930s to launch a concert career, he found that there was little cachet in being a home-grown artist. Progress was slow. But Impresario Sol Hurok took a fatherly interest in his career, sensing in Stern the drive that could make him a star performer. Says Pianist Eugene Istomin, who met Stern at about this time: "Isaac never concealed that he was ambitious and loved recognition. He was hungry for it--not desperate, but hungry."

Tours and recordings began to bring him fame after World War II. At Pablo Casals' Prades Festival in 1950, the venerable cellist proclaimed Stern a worthy descendant of the great Belgian Eugene Ysaye, one of the two violinists of the past whom Stern most reveres (the other: Paganini). Another vital influence stemming from the Casals festivals was the tutelage of Violinist-Conductor Alexander Schneider, a longtime member of the Budapest Quartet. By the time Stern was 35, he had taken his place among the handful of great violinists in the generation of Heifetz and Milstein, a position he has held with increasing authority ever since.

"The violin is a continuation of the voice," says Stern. "You sing in your head and play what you hear." The intense songfulness of his playing--direct, vibrant, stirring--accounts for the unique and unmistakable personality in all of his performances. Menuhin hears in it "a great need to make everything speak. Whatever happens has to have meaning. That is a Jewish Russian quality, although Isaac has it without the schmaltz of, say, Mischa Elman. A violinist like Fritz Kreisler had incredible elegance. Isaac has more the sturdy, robust yet sensitive kind of feeling."

With unusual versatility, Stern carries this feeling into the compositions of all styles and periods. He has one of the widest repertories of any major violinist, including, among the 30-odd concertos he can play, a number of contemporary works written for him. Since joining with Istomin and Cellist Leonard Rose in the redoubtable Istomin-Stern-Rose Trio in 1961, he has also ranged more widely through the chamber literature than most soloists ever do. Though not an immaculate technician in the Heifetz sense--he sacrifices exactness to conviction too often for that--he nonetheless has a formidable command of his instrument. With his powerful, flexible left hand, he can rearrange the fingering of tricky passages spontaneously even during performances. His bow arm is a legend among musicians. It has a broad, controlled motion that, as Daniel Barenboim says, "makes the bow seem five miles long."

Years ago, Conductor George Szell predicted higher artistic peaks for Stern if only he would not "squander his time and energy on so many worthy causes." But Stern cannot choose between music and his other activities. As his old friend Violist and Conductor Milton Katims puts it, "Those sparks that fly from what else he is doing--talking to Israel or playing tennis--are the ingredients that go into the making of Isaac the violinist." Besides, Stern points out, "I practice more than most people think. With more experience over the years, your palette be comes more varied." His current top priority: retackling the awesome unaccompanied sonatas of Bach.

Does Stern plan to slow down after his birthday? Hasn't he always? After winding up his Paris marathon--the first of several birthday galas planned for this year--he is taking time off to go to Wimbledon with Vera and their children: Shira, 24, Michael, 20, and David, 17. He has announced a sharp cutback in his travel and performance schedule starting at the end of the year, just as he announced similar plans on his 50th birthday and will probably announce them again on his 70th.

"The problem," he sighs, "is that everyone says, 'Isaac, you need a rest,' but as soon as I get it, they will say, 'Isaac, now that you are freer there is just this one thing. . .' " And the worst person about saying that will be Stern. He is bursting to use Carnegie Hall as a base for developing "a graduate institute of the most rigorous and ruthless quality" that would be a musical equivalent of Princeton's Institute for Advanced Studies. Says he: "It could change the whole face of classical music in the U.S."

When Stern talks like that, his family and friends nod knowingly. That's Isaac. Always one more project to push, one more concert to play, one more call to make. The music world may as well accept it. For such stirring, the pot can only be grateful.

--By Christopher Porterfield

Reported by Sandra Burton/Paris

With reporting by Sandra Burton

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