Music: Roving Fiddler

For 70 minutes one evening last week, an audience in Manhattan’s Carnegie Hall watched a short (5 ft. 6 in.), pudgy man in white tie and tails play a 1737 Guarneri del GesÙ violin. In that time Virtuoso Isaac Stern, backed by the New York Philharmonic, worked his way through three separate concertos (Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 5, Brahms’s Concerto for Violin and Cello, Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto), giving each of them the luminous tone and the warmly lyric sentiment that are his specialties.

Clear hit of the evening was Berg’s difficult twelve-tone piece, last played in Manhattan ten years ago. Moved by the death of the 18-year-old daughter of a close friend, Composer Berg interrupted work on his opera Lulu to write the concerto in the summer of 1935, died before he could hear it performed. A tenderly elegiac work, it spreads a filigreed web of wispy lyric phrases, works up to a climax drawn from a phrase of a Lutheran hymn (Es ist genug), ends with the violin soaring softly above the fading orchestra. Last week’s audience warmly applauded Stern’s sensitive reading of the concerto’s twilit moods—which he describes as “neurotic.”

The concerto recalled, among other things, that at 39, Isaac Stern is not only one of the world’s great violinists but one of the U.S.’s fastest-moving, farthest roving musicians. He often talks of slowing down to give some time to teaching, but he is now in the midst of a countrywide tour, will play some 80 concerts by the end of April, then pack his Guarneri and head for his second tour of Russia (six weeks) before hitting the European summer festival circuit. Last week Stern was not in the least bothered at having to play three concertos on one program. In Israel, he recalls, he once played two concertos at a 5 p.m. concert, another three at 9 p.m. Says he, “I’m like the girls who can’t say no.”