https://www.eugeneistomin.com/
Eugene Istomin has the most involved website you can possibly imagine. You can literally spend hours on this. The moment I clicked through it, I wanted to hate him. But the truth is, this guy is.... exactly the kind of person I always wanted to be and to have as friends in my life. Not just a pianist or chamber musician, but an intellectual who read everything, politically active in the Democratic party, talked to the greatest historians and philosophers of his time as an equal. A child of poor immigrants whose talent was caught early, and was mentored in music and culture from the earliest age. As a kid, he attained fluency in French and Russian (and, let's face it, he was probably born into Yiddish...). A repertoire that involved every major composer, minor composer, and no little new music. Mentoring lots of young musicians. And hell, he was even a lifelong Tigers fan. He is, on point of principle, now my favorite American pianist.
And yeah, his plays pretty good too... If you've never heard his Schumann Piano Concerto with Bruno Walter, it's honestly worth setting alongside Lipatti, and his Beethoven PC 4 is, honestly, just about on the same level as Kempff and Moravec, all the more surprising that it was just one more concerto recording from the Ormandy factory.
But then there's the Stern/Rose/Istomin Trio. All you can say is that this is some of the greatest chamber playing in the world. I want to hate Isaac Stern and anything connected with him. Talk about Freudian... - as a nice Jewish boy who played the violin I was raised to think Isaac Stern was a great man. Now we know the real Stern, and all I can think is that he was just another false bill of goods sold to Jewish kids about what was possible... Then you hear what he did to make it happen, not just the stories of blackballing other violinists but the stories you haven't heard yet... they would uncurl Bach's wig.
Anyway, back to Istomin. A real intellectual without Charles Rosen's bullshit... It's worth seeing him in the context of his lifelong friendship with Leonard Bernstein, who for all his many truly admirable and lovable qualities, was also a monstrous jackass of ego from the beginning. In both music and life, Bernstein was all id who threw himself into the moment of everything, the welfare of others be damned. From the beginning of their uneasy lifelong friendship, there seems to be a dichotomy between them.
The two of them found each other in Curtis, two lone intellectuals among musical craftsmen. But insofar as their rather restrictive American generation had polar opposite approaches, they approached everything from music to philosophy in diametric opposite Bernstein was the hothead who tried to maximize his imprint on everything. On the one hand, he threw himself into every fashionable critical theory and manor of political radicalism, on the other hand, he always used his political commitments as a self-aggrandizing means to put himself at the center of the photo-op.
Istomin was quieter, more realistic, a Hubert Humphrey ADA liberal who never turned neoconservative, who urged his friend HHH to renounce the Vietnam War in vain, which cost Humphrey the election, and has cost the world ever since. Like a good anticommunist liberal, Istomin supported Vietnam initially, but was entirely willing to correct himself when wrong. While on Vietnam, Bernstein was Hanoi Jane, Istomin made a point of giving concerts in Vietnam himself and seeing the situation, at which point he changed his point of view entirely. In 1948, while Bernstein was giving himself over to Henry Wallace and the idea that Stalin could be accommodated, Istomin was playing for Harry Truman - himself a pianist of moderate ability, and associatting with the 'Wise Men' of Truman's cabinet. On every major domestic issue, there apparently was Istomin. Involved against McCarthy, involved in Civil Rights, involved in cultural mission that steered the CIA for a time to soft power and against rigging more elections.
It was both not surprising and disappointing to read that Bernstein refused to vote Humphrey because he thought the country needed four years of Nixon to realize how bad the course had run. Some realization that turned out to be... What liberals of that generation realized is what radicals never do... the colossal and often unpopular commitments to community and self improvement it takes to maintain a democracy without it turning into autocracy. It's values that have been almost completely lost, and the results are inevitably here for all to see now. How much worse will it get yet?
Is there a 'liberal' musical approach? I doubt one can find anything even remotely resembling a 1-1 correlation. But insofar as one can it is to find the interconnectedness between all things. Istomin has, on the one hand, that Brendel and Schiff even-keeled balance in all things, it almost sounds moral. Musicians like Bernstein invested everything with 1000 volts, even when the music resisted. Istomin was no such musician, and yet he also has a bit of that Solomon and Cherkassky spontaneity. He was clearly not of a rebellious temperament - the Richter/Gulda axis of electric ultradynamism was not for him. But one hears all things in this playing - classic proportion balanced with romantic expression, modern irony balanced with pre-modern spirituality. It's serious musicmaking and as far from slam bang bravura as you can get. You hear in the clarity of his playing a lightness that anticipates the period movement, and also a skepticism about easy sentimentality but very, very deep feeling. There could be a little more freedom and prominence in the left hand, there could be a little more pointing up of detail. If it reminds one of any pianist, it's probably Casadesus. Nevertheless, this is entirely American playing, full of rhythmic energy and motion, and it's the playing of a man for all seasons.
https://youtu.be/PwQcO6f7SLM
https://youtu.be/Cb_akryBSdY
https://youtu.be/FqIaWsD-zCs
https://youtu.be/0yk_N0PD120
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