Isaac Stern 1920-2001 The German baritone, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, recalls a particularly 'riotous' performance of the 'Hallelujah chorus' from Handel's Messiah on May 18, 1976. The venue was New York's venerable Carnegie Hall. The conductor was Leonard Bernstein, and the soloists in the chorus, standing sheepishly along the stage apron, were none other than Yehudi Menuhin, Mstislav Rostropovich, Vladimir Horowitz and the violinist, Isaac Stern. Fischer-Dieskau remembers being dragged out by stagehands to stand between Menuhin and Rostropovich, who, together with 'Isaac and Lenny', were singing their hearts out. 'In all my life I have never heard so many wrong notes,' he remembers. This was Stern's show. He was president of Carnegie Hall, a post he held for several decades until his death on September 23. The hall was going to be sold off and demolished, and Stern had got together his most eminent musical colleagues for an appeal concert which finished with this mad and magnificent caprice. The Carnegie Hall remained, 'not only a building', as Stern put it later, but also 'an idea', 'a necessary mythology about music'. As a legendary violinist, a dedicated teacher and a powerful shaper of the American national musical character, Isaac Stern is himself inseparable from this mythology. Born in 1920 in what is now the Ukraine, Stern was a Russian Jew whose parents fled the revolution in 1921. They brought the infant Stern to San Francisco, where he got his first music lessons from his mother, trained to sing at the St Petersburg Conservatory. Among his early teachers at the San Francisco Conservatory was the concertmaster of the San Francisco Symphony, Naoum Blinder. Later in New York, he was also taught by Menuhin's revered teacher, Louis Persinger. In 1936, Stern made his orchestral debut under Pierre Monteux with the Bach Double Violin Concerto; Blinder was the other soloist. A few months later, he played the Tchaikovsky Concerto with Otto Klemperer and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The Brahms Violin Concerto also became very much his own work. He kept returning to it, and to the rest of Brahms, throughout his career. Stern's rise, in America and in Europe, was spectacular. He broke political taboo in being the first American violinist to tour the Soviet Union in 1951, persuading Nikita Krushchev to reopen artistic exchanges between the Soviet Union and the West. An important focus of Stern's musical life lay in Israel, where he set up the Jerusalem Music Centre in the Seventies. Stern, Bernstein and the Israel Philharmonic did a historic performance of the Mendelssohn Concerto on Mount Scopus soon after the Six Day War in 1967. He remained uncomfortable about performing in Germany, but did a series of master-classes in Cologne in 1999, declaring afterwards, 'With my visit, I forgive nothing.' The quality of Stern's violin-playing and the nature of his musical collaborations were informed by this sense of a community, a shared destiny of displacement and election, in history and in music. His genius did not project itself like Herbert von Karajan's, nor did it ever take on the kitsch Disneyism of his contemporary, Leopold Stokowski. Within the diaspora of excellence, Stern forged musical bonds which produced peerless recordings: the Schubert, Haydn and Mozart chamber works with the pianist, Eugene Istomin (another Russian-American), and the cellist, Leonard Rose, in the Sixties, and the immortal Brahms recordings with the Philadelphia Orchestra under the Hungarian-born conductor, Eugene Ormandy. The sweetness and warmth of Isaac Stern's tone, produced on a beautiful Guarnerius, carried the musical line of an older school of 'fiddling' (Stern's favourite word) into contemporary virtuosity. Indomitably modern, yet rooted in his historical and musical origins, his repertoire stretching from Bach to the soundtrack of the Fiddler on the Roof, Stern inspired an entire generation of younger Jewish violinists like Itzhak Perlman and Pinchas Zukerman. The 'Life in Music' series from Sony collects his entire range, from the passionate nobility of the Brahms concertos to the lucid melancholy of Schubert's piano trios. Karajan remembered Stern's performances of the Beethoven Violin Concerto while rehearsing it with the brilliant young violinist, Anne-Sophie Mutter, in 1981: 'You simply can't play it like that any more. That's over. The generation has passed where one kept going faster towards the end.'