Klarinet Archive - Posting 000757.txt from 2001/09

From: Sfdr@-----.com
Subj: [kl] Re: Violinist Isaac Stern, 81, Dies
Date: Sun, 23 Sep 2001 12:10:02 -0400

Isaac Stern, the master violinist who saved Carnegie Hall from the wrecking
ball, died Saturday. He was 81.

Stern, one of the last great violinists of his generation, helped advance
the careers of a new generation, including Itzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zukerman
and Yo-Yo Ma.

Five-foot-6, rotund and with pudgy, dimpled hands, Stern commanded a rich
tone and steady rhythm from his 18th century Guarneri. With his dynamo
energy and fluid bow strokes, he was equally at home with the mathematical
contortions of Bach, the fury of Beethoven, the syncopations of Brahms and
the convulsions of 20th century composers.

Stern was one of the most recorded classical musicians in history, making
well over 100 recordings.

A supporter of Israel, tireless concertizer, teacher and raconteur, Stern
played well over 175 performances by the late 1990s at Carnegie Hall,
America's musical temple renown for its acoustics.

The hall was built by industrialist Andrew Carnegie and opened in 1891 with
a concert conducted in part by Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky.

``Carnegie was, is and will not be only a building. It's an idea. It's a
mythology, a necessary mythology about music,'' Stern said in a 1997
interview with CNN's Larry King.

In the late 1950s, as the city was planning Lincoln Center, a developer
proposed razing Carnegie Hall and building a 44-story office tower with
panels of bright red porcelain and diagonally placed windows. Life magazine
in 1957 described the architect's plan as ``a strange-looking
checkerboard.''

Using his prestige and his contacts among fellow artists and benefactors,
Stern rallied the opposition, eventually securing legislation that enabled
the city to acquire the building in 1960 for $5 million.

``I talked a lot,'' Stern told King. ``It's something I do very well. When
you believe in something, you can move mountains. I knew that this could not
disappear from the face of the Earth.''

Stern was born in 1920 in Ukraine in the fledgling Soviet Union. His parents
brought him to America when he was 10 months old, settling in San Francisco.

Believing that music was an essential ingredient to education, they started
him on the piano at age 6. Two years later, after hearing a friend's violin
playing, he picked up the fiddle and wound up playing it for the rest of his
life. Ironically, he never went to college.

He studied at the San Francisco Conservatory and with Naoum Blinder,
concertmaster of the San Francisco Symphony and a violinist of the Russian
school of playing.

``He taught me to teach myself, which is the greatest thing a teacher can
do,'' Stern recalled in a 1987 interview with the Guardian.

At 16, Stern attracted his first national attention, performing the Brahms
Violin Concerto with Pierre Monteux conducting the San Francisco Symphony in
a concert broadcast on national radio.

Seven years later, on Jan. 8, 1943, he made his Carnegie Hall debut in a
recital produced by the impresario Sol Hurok. Performing with pianist
Alexander Zakin, who became his longtime accompanist, Stern played Mozart,
Bach, Szymanowski, Brahms and Wieniawski.

``I played almost defiantly, to demonstrate my skills, to show them all what
I was capable of doing with the fiddle,'' Stern recalled in his 1999 memoir,
``My First 79 Years.''

The performance attracted the attention of composer-critic Virgil Thomson.
Writing in the New York Herald Tribune, Thomson proclaimed him ``one of the
world's master fiddle players.''

He later played in countless places around the world: in Iceland, Greenland
and the South Pacific for Allied troops during World War II; in Moscow after
Stalin's death; on Jerusalem's Mount Scopus immediately after Israeli
soldiers recaptured it in 1967; in China months after Washington restored
full diplomatic relations in 1979. One country he refused to perform in was
Germany, which he boycotted for years because of the Holocaust.

During the 1991 Gulf War, a concert in Jerusalem was interrupted by a siren
warning of an Iraqi Scud missile attack. After the audience put on gas
masks, Stern returned to the stage and played the Sarabande from Bach's D
minor Partita for solo violin. Stern didn't wear one, saying he doubted
Saddam Hussein would fire missiles at Jerusalem with its many Muslim holy
sites and large Palestinian population.

``It was a very eerie sensation to look out in the hall with the audience
covered with gas masks,'' he said.

Through the American-Israel Cultural Foundation, he helped finance the
studies of many Israeli performers, including Perlman and Zukerman. He also
helped arrange for Ma to study with the great cellist Leonard Rose - Stern's
partner in the much recorded Istomin-Stern-Rose trio, along with the pianist
Eugene Istomin; and approached Hurok about the sensational young cellist.

At his peak, Stern would perform more than 200 concerts a year - two every
31/2 days.

He also played in the movies ``Humoresque,'' ``Fiddler on the Roof'' and on
TV's ``Sesame Street.'' The Academy Award winning documentary ``From Mozart
to Mao'' chronicled Stern's performance and tutoring in China in 1979 after
the Cultural Revolution.

Stern ended his boycott of Germany in 1999 for a nine-day teaching seminar,
saying it was time to see how young German musicians were absorbing their
musical heritage of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms and Mendelssohn.

``It isn't very human not to give people a chance to change. The time came
when I wanted to hear, search and think. With my visit, I forgive nothing,''
he said at the time.

``I have a responsibility to pass on to the next generation what I learned
from my teachers,'' Stern said. ``It keeps me young and reminds me where I
came from. Teaching young artists is like giving water to a flower.''

Survivors include his wife, the former Linda Reynolds, whom he married in
1996; daughter Shira, a rabbi; and sons Michael and David, both conductors.

His previous marriages to the dancer Norma Kaye and to Vera Lindenblatt
ended in divorce.

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