Time was when violin playing delighted the eye as well as the ear. According to an awed contemporary, the great Italian Virtuoso Arcangelo Corelli (1653-1713) startled his audiences with eyes "as red as fire" and eyeballs that rolled in agony. The legendary Paganini (1782-1840) was accused of deliberately playing on frayed strings so that when one snapped he could display his virtuosity on three. But times have changed. Last week, in Manhattan's Carnegie Hall, one of the world's great violinists walked to the center of the stage, took measure of the audience for a long, silent minute, nodded to his accompanist and swept into Beethoven's Sonata in C Minor with all the flamboyance of a stockbroker stepping off the 8:13.
Isaac Stern belongs to a breed of violin virtuosos who blend the elegant techniques of past masters with a warm understanding that elevates virtuosity into art. But Stern's violin (a Guarnerius) still belongs to the breed that Paganini played—and remains a remarkably recalcitrant instrument.* Musicians avoid it so studiously that even major orchestras find it difficult to hire string-section replacements. But Stern and four other greatly gifted players have lifted the solo violin to an eminence any age could envy. Standing with Stern as the world's finest: Zino Francescatti, David Oistrakh, Nathan Milstein, Jascha Heifetz.
Stern, Francescatti & Co. have their marked individual differences, but their music reflects what Francescatti calls "the international style''—a welding of the romantic Russian school with the intellectual German and the elegant French. Stern prefers to call this melting-pot style American rather than "international." and he himself is a prime example. Born in Kreminiecz, Russia, but taken to San Francisco by his parents before he was a year old, he studied with the San Francisco Symphony's Russian-born and trained Naum Blinder, later listened to recordings of the Austrian Fritz Kreisler and the Belgian Eugène Ysaÿe. What emerged from this combination of influences was a manner of playing that is best described as modified romantic—Slavic ardor and butter-smooth tone, under the taut discipline of a scholarly musical mind.
Violinist Stern soon developed a scholar's yen for analyzing music and a distaste for studying technique (although an interest in the problems of bowing once led him to study the anatomy of hand and arm and their motor controls). The son of a house painter, Stern made his Manhattan debut at 17 ("I wasn't the greatest thing since Mozart"), but had to wait seven more years before he was able to start a successful concert career. Now an almost compulsive concertizer, he is rarely in his Manhattan duplex, averages a brain-fogging 125 concerts and recitals a year.
Although he is a masterly performer of Beethoven and Brahms. Stern, 41. is the only topflight violinist who regularly plays the modern masters—Prokofiev, Hindemith, Bartok, Berg. Each performance is a marriage of technique with the temper of the music. "I don't want to be known only as a violinist," Stern once said. "I want to be a player of music—one whose instrument just happens to be the violin." His ambition is snared by his peers: