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....

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