Home | Archive | Winter 2001 | In memoriam

Isaac Stern 1920–2001

Isaac Stern was one of the foremost violinists of his day, a player who valued communication and intensity of utterance over mere technical perfection. His approach throughout a career lasting more than six decades was essentially a nineteenth-century one, and he had little truck with the straitjacket, as he saw it, of authenticity. He played and recorded Bach and Rameau, but made no concessions to modern musicology’s resurrection of older playing styles, preferring instead to apply his ever sweet and fulsome tone to unlocking a spiritual kernel which transcended time and place.

He was a cautious yet committed exponent of modern music, too, giving the world premieres of Bernstein’s Serenade and William Schuman’s Violin Concerto, and championing concertos successfully introduced by others, such as those by Penderecki, Dutilleux, Rochberg and Maxwell Davies. He also gave the American premieres of Bartók’s First and Hindemith’s only Concerto, worked with Stravinksy and Copland in chamber music, and regularly included in his repertoire such traditionalist twentieth-century classics as the Prokofiev, Berg and Barber concertos.

One of the earliest generation to feel entirely happy in the studio, he began recording in 1945, with Wieniawski’s Second Concerto, for Columbia, and during its subsequent reappellations to CBS and Sony Classical left a large legacy of discs which encompassed the whole of the standard violin repertory and much else besides. Most of them are now transferred to CD, many in the 44-disc collection issued in 1995 as ‘Isaac Stern: a life in music’.

The chutzpah of Stern’s playing spilled generously over into his other activities. Like so many distinguished musicians, he was an inspiring teacher and animateur. He taught formally, gave masterclasses worldwide, and was the paterfamilas of a generation of illustrious American musicians, including Yo Yo Ma, Pinchas Zuckerman, and Itzhak Perlman. His greatest triumph as cultural ambassador was perhaps his journey in 1979 to China, captured on an Academy Award winning video, From Mao to Mozart.

For many, Stern’s legacy was as much in bricks and mortar as in music. The proposed demolition in 1960 of New York’s Carnegie Hall, where he had debuted in 1943, was deferred thanks to his vigorous lobbying, and as a mark of gratitude he was appointed President of the Carnegie Hall Corporation, oversaw the hall’s restoration in 1986 and centenary in 1991, and in 1997 had the main auditorium named after him. The celebrations of his 80th birthday there last year were appropriately lavish.

A regular visitor to the State of Israel, Stern performed to troops and invalids during the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the 1991 Gulf War, even when besieged by missiles, and organised a boycott of UNESCO when it suspended its music programmes there in 1974. A memorable rendition of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto with his old-time colleague Leonard Bernstein and the Israel Philharmonic soon after the 1967 Six Day War was captured on the film Journey to Jerusalem.

Isaac Stern was less than a year old when his parents, fleeing the Russian Revolution in 1921, emigrated to San Francisco. Thanks to the support of a wealthy patroness, he was able to study at the San Francisco Conservatory, then privately with Louis Persinger. He said he owed most to Naoum Blinder, a violinist of the Russian school and leader then of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, with whom Stern studied from 1932 to 1937. His recital debut came in San Francisco in 1935. The following year he played the Bach double concerto with Blinder and the San Francisco Symphony under Monteux, and the Tchaikovsky concerto with the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Klemperer.

His New York debut came on 11 October 1937, but some influential critics found his playing to be less than totally accomplished. A period of further study in San Francisco followed, after which he gave his second New York recital, on 18 February 1939, to greater acclaim. Thereafter Stern was quickly recognised as one of America’s leading violinists. During his heyday he often played upwards of a hundred concerts a year.

During the 1940s he played for Allied troops in Greenland, Iceland and the South Pacific, and toured Australia and Europe, having made his European debut at the Lucerne Festival in 1948. He toured the Soviet Union in 1951, was heard at the Edinburgh Festival in 1953, and was soon playing as far afield as Japan, South America and Israel, and at Casals’s Prades Festival

In 1961 Stern forged a famed trio with the cellist Leonard Rose and the pianist Eugene Istomin, and recorded all the works for piano trio by Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms. When Rose died in 1984 he often teamed up with younger colleagues such as the pianist Emanuel Ax, the cellist Yo Yo Ma, and the flautist Jean-Pierre Rampal to play the chamber-music classics. His regular pianist in solo recitals was Alexander Zakin. In the film Tonight we sing he impersonated the famous Belgian violinist Ysaye.

He was also a regular supporter of organisations to help encourage the young, among them the America-Israel Cultural Foundation and the Jerusalem Music Center. Many of today’s high profile careers, including those of Ma, Ax, Perlman, Zuckerman, Mintz, Swenson, Lin and Bronfman, were kickstarted by Stern, not least through his close association with the powerful ICM Artists management agency.

Stern naturally garnered many awards. These included the first Albert Schweitzer Award for ‘a life’s work dedicated to music and devoted to humanity’ (1974), the Kennedy Center Honors Award (1984), a Grammy for lifetime achievement (1987) and an Emmy (1987). Internationally, he was recognised in Denmark by the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Dannebrog (1985), in Israel by the Wolf Prize (1987), and in France by being made a Commandeur of the Legion d’Honneur.

In his final decade Stern was less visible as a performer, more often than not as a chamber musician. His autobiography, My first seventy-nine years, co-written with the bestselling novelist Chaim Potok, was published in 1999.

Isaac Stern: born 21 July 1920, Kremenets; died 22 September, New York.