MUSIC REVIEW : A Glorious Stern Recital

At 73, Isaac Stern might be forgiven for packing it in and resting on his laurels.

Some might even encourage him to do so. The faults in his playing are obvious. His tone is small, wiry, and, occasionally, whiny. His intonation is sometimes off, at times considerably. His fingers do not move as easily as they once did. Violinists, unlike pianists, cannot go on forever.

But for every fault on display, there were 100 things he did right. That still puts him considerably ahead of most of his younger colleagues. His recital Sunday night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, with pianist Yefim Bronfman in partnership, was, in a word, glorious. In four words, elegant, probing, communicative and wise.

One would guess that Stern hears what we hear. He knows his technique has faded. He knows his limitations--and he works with them, not against them.

Two Mozart sonatas, K. 377 in F and K. 481 in E-flat, opened the concert. Stern presented them within a tiny framework of sound, avoiding pressing his tone beyond its limits, relying on lightness of touch. The details within that framework, however, were many and pointed.

He seemed to weigh every phrase thoughtfully--gently shading and emphasizing curves, varying articulation--and then place them in the overall context with the skill of a philosopher. The two slow movements emerged in all of their emotional scope, and he made his points by pulling back, by bringing the listener to him.

He lightly sketched in the charms of Schubert’s G-minor Sonatina as well, finding, in the process, what seemed the perfect tempos for the composer’s tuneful thoughts to breathe and glow. Bronfman, with the piano lid fully open, never overpowered the violinist’s slender tone and yet projected an array of color, touch and feeling.

It might have appeared, however, that Cesar Franck’s demanding, richly perfumed and grandly rhetorical Sonata in A would be too much for Stern’s fragile technique. But, again, he did the smart thing by not asking himself to do what he couldn’t, and by capturing the breadth of phrase and heated impulses with urgent, supple restraint. In doing so, with Bronfman offering a rich backdrop for the violinist to work in, he revealed how simple the beauties of this work really are.

The faults? Mere technicalities.