Isaac Stern: Words of Wisdom

My musical choices for the programs Zakin and I played were based entirely on what I liked. If you play a piece not because you like it yourself but because it's the right length, or other people like it, or you need something light or splashy at a certain point in the program, you'll find that you aren't going to make your audience like it. What you are playing at that moment must be your own favourite piece of music. You're playing it because it has meaning for you, and you want to communicate that meaning to your audience. When you're on the concert stage, you can't pretend to like a piece; the audience can hear your conviction, or your lack of it.

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A performing artist selects and rehearses repertoire with thought for musical variety, with a wish to display abilities and move an audience, and with the realization that the world of music is enormously complicated in that it is without absolutes - except when what you are doing is wrong, absolutely wrong, wrong in tempo, wrong in ideas, wrong in your understanding of the period in musical history when the work was written, what performance practice was then like; all those things. Rehearsing and practicing, you have to learn what the variables are. Most people do not stop to think that the words "piano", "forte", "mezzo-forte", "mezzo-piano" - that is, soft, loud, half-loud, half-soft - mean nothing in themselves. Each of these indications is simply in relation to the sound that preceded it; the kind of piano or the kind of forte that one plays or uses depends almost entirely on where it comes in the body of the work that you're learning or performing. And the relationship between the quality of sound and the amount of sound has to do with the control and understanding by the performer of the composer's total concept. You learn that when you play the first note of a composition, you must already understand where you expect yourself to be when you reach the final note of that movement, if it is a three- or four-movement work; you must know the tonal, harmonic, and tempo relationships among the movements to make a work hold together throughout its entirety, from the first note to the last.

And you remember the performances of the same work by many great artists, how differently they sounded - and yet all correct. How can music be so differently performed and yet remain correct? Because as the performer grasps the totality of the composition, he gauges the amount of sound and speed required by the work against his own skills with tonal and volume pressures and technical fleetness, so as to enable him to create feelings and ideas that will make difficult passages seem easy. In every fine performance there is a sense of inexorable logic that forces you to say, "Well, of course, that makes absolute sense. It's clear that's the way it should be." Then you'll hear someone else do it differently, and you'll say the same thing. Beyond the necessary acquired knowledge of the instrument and musical history, every artist also has a very personal and indefinable symbiosis with his instrument, be it violin, piano, cello or his own vocal cords. As he plays, he hears the composition in his or her own very special personal voice. Every great artist has a distinctive interpretive strength. That is what one searches for through all of one's life: uniqueness and simplicity. The single most difficult responsibility of a performing artist is to know how complicated, how interwoven, how difficult a work is - and how to get it to sound simple and inevitable.

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Mr. Stern himself described his style of play as like the "natural rise and fall of the human voice. . . . You sing in your head, and you play what you hear."