Isaac Stern’s Insightful, Incisive Recital

The clouds parted at Dorothy Chandler Pavilion Sunday night and out came Isaac Stern, grandpappy of the violin.

He’s 75 now, in a musical culture that seems content with teenage violinists, that ranks mechanical perfection as the highest musical good, that prefers its fiddlers with a bit of flash and circus-act pyrotechnics over substance.

Stern’s not interested. He keeps going on, his ever-probing intellect, his concern with only the best music and the best in music fully engaged.

Is his tone thin and sometimes wavering? Sure. Does the accuracy of his intonation occasionally slip? Certainly. For these demerits his detractors (he has them now) would have him hang it up.

But then, as shown in his recital Sunday with the superb pianist Robert McDonald, there are so many merits still intact, including technicalities such as a remarkably flexible and expressive bow arm and nimble fingers. What’s more, he has something the prodigies don’t: a wisdom in his music-making that comes through in everything he plays.

To Beethoven’s First Sonata, he brought a forceful rhythmic vitality and broad range of articulation, his phrases packed with character and energy. He could merely sketch and suggest at the sweeping lines in Brahms’ Third Sonata and capture their arch and space, and the piece was all the better for his restraint.

In the Sonatina and two Romantic Pieces by Dvorak, he produced an abiding simplicity--spare, threading melody, perfectly timed and caressed. His interpretations of Kreisler’s “Siciliano and Rigaudon” and “Praeludium and Allegro” took them seriously (as they should be); here, his playing happened to be dead-on accurate too.

A minor mishap must be reported. During an otherwise vigorous and uncompromising traversal of Bartok’s First Rhapsody, Stern dropped his bow. The crowd ooohed in concern. Stern quickly picked it up and offered a single word of explanation. “Passion,” he said. It might have explained the whole evening.