Her Brilliant but Bumpy Career

Late in life, legendary violinist Mischa Elman observed that some things never change. “You know,” he said, “I’m still getting the same reviews I used to get as a child. They tell me I play very well for my age.”

Ida Haendel can relate. Once a celebrated prodigy, she is playing better than ever, or so the critics tell her. Opportunities to prove it, however, are much harder to come by for a seventysomething fiddler.

“It is no longer quality that matters,” she asserts vigorously. “Only how you look on television. You know, it’s a cult, for youth and the young generation. If you are over a certain age, how good you are does not come into it.

“That shouldn’t apply to music. Fifteen, 20 years ago, nobody asked how old Heifetz or Rubinstein were. If you are good, you should continue.”

Ironically, she returns to Los Angeles on Friday as a guest with the young award winners of the third International Laureates Festival, playing Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante with 19-year-old German violist David Garrett and the I Palpiti Chamber Orchestra under Eduard Schmieder.

“Talent deserves to be heard, whatever age. We need to encourage and help young artists,” she says. “I’m not against the talented; I’m against eliminating older artists from the stage.”

Born in Poland, Haendel was 3 when she started on the violin. Her father, a portrait painter, had dreamed of becoming a violinist and vowed that one of his children would take up that vision. Haendel’s older sister first tried the instrument without revealing any extraordinary talent, but when young Ida picked it up, a tremendous gift was immediately apparent.

“You know, I strongly believe in reincarnation,” Haendel says. “I knew I was a violinist. There was nothing else for me, I didn’t like dolls at all. I remember not thinking about it at all--just knowing it. Maybe it all happened before.”

Conservatory studies soon followed in Warsaw, where an early competition victory led to further study and performances abroad. Haendel became a child star in England before World War II, making her London debut in 1937 playing the Beethoven concerto under conductor Henry Wood, founder of the Promenade Concerts.

A subsequent British performance in 1939 has led to a discrepancy about her age. Scheduled to play at Queen’s Hall on a Sunday, she was warned that the county council forbade Sunday performances by children under age 14, so she added three years to her age. Standard references give her date of birth as 1924, but she says it is really 1928.

Her studies were largely informal and infrequent. “What I learned about music really came from within and from exposure to great musicians. I worked with Carl Flesch and George Enescu, who was a tremendous inspiration, but mostly it was just hearing and playing millions of concerts. [Conductors] Rafael Kubelik and my friend Sergiu Celibidache were very important.”

During the war, Haendel played often for Allied troops, and afterward she did her first U.S. tour. Her 1940 recordings have been reissued on the Pearl label, and concerto performances with Kubelik and London’s Philharmonia Orchestra from the late 1940s and early ‘50s are now available on Testament.

Haendel also championed contemporary British music, and recorded two of her signature pieces, the Britten and Walton concertos, with Paavo Berglund and the Bournemouth Symphony. Just released is an intriguing Decca disc of Central European arcana--Enescu’s Sonata No. 3, Szymanowski’s “Mythes” and Bartok transcriptions--with pianist-conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy. The Enescu sonata, according to Norman Lebrecht in London’s Daily Telegraph, “displays the huge warm tone for which she was always famed, along with a controlled wildness and calculating wisdom that comes from a life well lived.”

“Ashkenazy is a wonderful musician,” she says, “and we have done lots of concerts together. I recorded the Sibelius Violin Concerto about 20 years ago, and I think I am about due for another--I would love to do that with Ashkenazy conducting.”

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Though productive, Haendel’s prodigy years were not completely satisfying for her. Indeed, that was the main topic of her autobiographical book “Woman With Violin,” published in 1970.

“I had a lot to write about,” she says, “a lot to reveal about what it meant to be a child prodigy, particularly a female child prodigy, and the difficulties that arise. In those days, there was a lot of prejudice. Women were not treated as equals. I never had a problem with public recognition, but the professional attitude was that a female prodigy should not be compensated as was a man. That continued a long time.”

Now, she feels that the age bias also weighs most heavily against women, and she is probably right. There are numerous senior male violinists still proudly on the circuit, but hardly another woman over 50. Many of the younger violinists have undoubted qualities beyond the merely photogenic, but that certainly does not hurt. In what must be a first, Finnish violinist Linda Brava graced the cover of Playboy before the cover of her first album, just issued by EMI, Haendel’s old label.

“It is all about publicity now, whether they deserve it or not,” Haendel says. “The promotion, the hype, the lobbying, that has changed everything.”

Everything, that is, about the business. The art remains the same, Haendel believes. Violinists today are no better or worse than they were, there are just more of them.

“There were only a few great violinists when I was young, and the same applies today,” she says. “There are many more--millions of fiddlers--but you can count on one hand the real musicians. They think technique has developed; no! They all still look up to Heifetz, and who can match him? That is still the role model for violin playing, in mechanical aspects as well as drama and passion.”

Though quite firm in her opinions about playing, Haendel does not teach beyond the occasional master class. For one thing, she does not have the time. She is speaking by telephone from Miami, a midpoint stop between concerts in Mexico and New England, where she will make her belated Tanglewood debut and play at Newport. After Los Angeles, she goes on to Israel, where she has been a regular guest with the Israel Philharmonic since its founding.

Venerated as a violinist’s violinist in many circles, she does have disciples if not actual students. A case in point is her Mozart partner, violinist-violist David Garrett.

“The Sinfonia Concertante is something I do with great joy. David is a very gifted boy who plays divinely,” Haendel says. “He has been following me for years. Wherever I go, his parents would pick up and follow me. We’ve become very close friends, but I never tell anyone what to do. I say, ‘David, this is what I do. If you like it, use it.’ ”

The Sinfonia Concertante is the centerpiece of her Los Angeles concert, at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre, on a program that also includes Saint-Saens’ “Carnival of the Animals” narrated by Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky. Free concerts today and next Sunday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Bing Theater frame the International Laureates Festival. The festival brings young competition laureates from around the world together in a chamber orchestra and smaller combinations, and Haendel is an honorary president of Young Artists International, the festival’s parent organization.

“This is something I believe in, a wonderful cause,” Haendel says. “Classical music is really in a state of collapse, and I am quite fascinated by what Young Artists is trying to do.”

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For whatever reason--sexist bias or what some critics characterize as an emotional reserve that has kept her from connecting with mass audiences --Haendel’s own career has seemed sporadic, at least from a Los Angeles perspective. She insists that she has never stopped playing, and she was at Hollywood Bowl last year with the Brahms concerto. She has performed with Los Angeles Philharmonic music director Esa-Pekka Salonen in England and would love to do so here.

So if not exactly in a comeback, Haendel is at least more visibly active now. She may have rather dour thoughts about the future of classical music and its opportunities for older women, but it is hard to imagine that she could be doing more concertizing.

In addition to touring, she has finished the second installment of her autobiography, and has a commercial video of performances of the Brahms and Sibelius concertos with the Montreal Symphony due out soon. She has lived in Canada since moving there with her parents and older sister in the 1950s, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. made a two-hour documentary about her that has aired many times.

“It never stops,” she says with a laugh. “As long as I can play the fiddle, I’m going to go on.”

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INTERNATIONAL LAUREATES MUSIC FESTIVAL, featuring Ida Haendel, guest artist, and I Palpiti Chamber Orchestra, John Anson Ford Amphitheatre, 2580 Cahuenga Blvd. East, Hollywood. Date: Friday, 8 p.m. Prices: $25. Phone: (323) 461-3673. Other festival events: (310) 281-3303.