Newsgroup: it.arti.musica.classica.mod
Titolo: E' morto ISAAC STERN

Come da oggetto, un momento tristissimo  per tutto il mondo della musica
classica.
Daniele

Riporto un articolo tratto dall'Associated Press che io ho ricevuto
attraverso la mailing list FluteNet...
Ciao,
   Luca
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Master violinist Isaac Stern, credited with saving
Carnegie Hall, dies at 81
By MARTIN STEINBERG
Associated Press Writer
NEW YORK (AP) _ Isaac Stern, the master violinist who
saved Carnegie Hall from the wrecking ball, died
Saturday. He was 81.
Stern was one of the last great violinists of his
generation and helped advance the careers of
generations of musicians who followed, including
Itzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zukerman and Yo-Yo Ma.
Stern died of heart failure at New York Weill Cornell
Medical Center, said Ann Diebold, spokeswoman for
Carnegie Hall. He had suffered from heart disease for
several years and had been in and out of the hospital
for the past six weeks, said Carnegie Hall Chairman
Sandy Weill.
"Isaac was far more than a musician. He was a person
who was outstanding in everything, whether thinking
about politics, or business, or as a humanitarian,"
Weill said.
Five-foot-6 (1.67 centimeters), rotund and with pudgy,
dimpled hands, Stern commanded a rich tone and steady
rhythm from his 18th century Guarneri. With his dynamo
energy and fluid bow strokes, he was equally at home
with the mathematical contortions of Bach, the fury of
Beethoven, the syncopations of Brahms and the
convulsions of 20th century composers.
Stern was one of the most recorded classical musicians
in history, making well over 100 recordings.
A supporter of Israel, tireless concertizer, teacher
and raconteur, Stern played well over 175 performances
by the late 1990s at Carnegie Hall, America's musical
temple renowned for its acoustics.
The hall was built by industrialist Andrew Carnegie
and opened in 1891 with a concert conducted in part by
Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky.
"Carnegie was, is and will not be only a building.
It's an idea. It's a mythology, a necessary mythology
about music," Stern said in a 1997 interview with
CNN's Larry King.
In the late 1950s, as the city was planning Lincoln
Center, a developer proposed razing Carnegie Hall and
building a 44-story office tower with panels of bright
red porcelain and diagonally placed windows. Life
magazine in 1957 described the architect's plan as "a
strange-looking checkerboard."
Using his prestige and his contacts among fellow
artists and benefactors, Stern rallied the opposition,
eventually securing legislation that enabled the city
to acquire the building in 1960 for dlrs 5 million.
"I talked a lot," Stern told King. "It's something I
do very well. When you believe in something, you can
move mountains. I knew that this could not disappear
from the face of the Earth."
Weill described Stern, who had been president of
Carnegie Hall since 1960, as "the inspiration for all
of us to scale higher heights to create an institution
that would really make the world feel better."
Stern was born in 1920 in Ukraine in the fledgling
Soviet Union. His parents brought him to America when
he was 10 months old, settling in San Francisco.
Believing that music was an essential ingredient to
education, they started him on the piano at age 6. Two
years later, after hearing a friend's violin playing,
he picked up the fiddle and wound up playing it for
the rest of his life. Ironically, he never went to
college.
He studied at the San Francisco Conservatory and with
Naoum Blinder, concertmaster of the San Francisco
Symphony and a violinist of the Russian school of
playing.
"He taught me to teach myself, which is the greatest
thing a teacher can do," Stern recalled in a 1987
interview with the Guardian.
At 16, Stern attracted his first national attention,
performing the Brahms Violin Concerto with Pierre
Monteux conducting the San Francisco Symphony in a
concert broadcast on national radio.
Seven years later, on Jan. 8, 1943, he made his
Carnegie Hall debut in a recital produced by the
impresario Sol Hurok. Performing with pianist
Alexander Zakin, who became his longtime accompanist,
Stern played Mozart, Bach, Szymanowski, Brahms and
Wieniawski.
"I played almost defiantly, to demonstrate my skills,
to show them all what I was capable of doing with the
fiddle," Stern recalled in his 1999 memoir, "My First
79 Years."
The performance attracted the attention of
composer-critic Virgil Thomson. Writing in the New
York Herald Tribune, Thomson proclaimed him "one of
the world's master fiddle players."
He later played in countless places around the world:
Iceland, Greenland and the South Pacific for Allied
troops during World War II; Moscow after Stalin's
death; Jerusalem's Mount Scopus immediately after
Israeli soldiers recaptured it in 1967; China months
after Washington restored full diplomatic relations in
1979. One country he refused to perform in was
Germany, which he boycotted for years because of the
Holocaust.
During the 1991 Gulf War, a concert in Jerusalem was
interrupted by a siren warning of an Iraqi Scud
missile attack. After the audience put on gas masks,
Stern returned to the stage and played the Sarabande
from Bach's D minor Partita for solo violin. Stern
didn't wear one, saying he doubted Saddam Hussein
would fire missiles at Jerusalem with its many Muslim
holy sites and large Palestinian population.
"It was a very eerie sensation to look out in the hall
with the audience covered with gas masks," he said.
Through the American-Israel Cultural Foundation, he
helped finance the studies of many Israeli performers,
including Perlman and Zukerman. He also helped arrange
for Ma to study with the great cellist Leonard Rose _
Stern's partner in the much recorded
Istomin-Stern-Rose trio, along with the pianist Eugene
Istomin, and he approached Hurok about the sensational
young cellist.
At his peak, Stern would perform more than 200
concerts a year.
He also played in the movies "Humoresque," "Fiddler on
the Roof" and on TV's "Sesame Street." The Academy
Award winning documentary "From Mozart to Mao"
chronicled Stern's performance and tutoring in China
in 1979 after the Cultural Revolution.
Stern ended his boycott of Germany in 1999 for a
nine-day teaching seminar, saying it was time to see
how young German musicians were absorbing their
musical heritage of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms and
Mendelssohn.
"It isn't very human not to give people a chance to
change. The time came when I wanted to hear, search
and think. With my visit, I forgive nothing," he said
at the time.
"I have a responsibility to pass on to the next
generation what I learned from my teachers," Stern
said. "It keeps me young and reminds me where I came
from. Teaching young artists is like giving water to a
flower."
Survivors include his wife, Linda Reynolds Stern, whom
he married in 1996; three children from a previous
marriage, daughter Shira, a rabbi, and sons Michael
and David, both conductors; and five grandchildren.
On the Net:
Carnegie Hall: 
http://www.carnegiehall.org/