Sunday, December 31, 2000

In his 70s, making a bold return to the studio

By David Patrick Stearns
INQUIRER MUSIC CRITIC

Rosand can't help being a confounding figure in the recording industry.

A bearded, formidable-looking fixture in Philadelphia's classical music world for decades, the concert violinist is 72, an age when many in his profession no longer perform - much less record the substantial Sibelius Violin Concerto, the latest of several recent recordings. He's hardly a ubiquitous concert presence; with only 40 engagements a year, half the schedule of many violinists, he is teaching at his alma mater, the Curtis Institute of Music.

The final strike against him is his absence. Rosand was away from recordings for years, the result of going against prevailing trends. Now he's back, at a time when recording contracts go to those a half-century younger, and the reason for his return is the same as the reason for his departure: his strong personality.

"The business is tired of everything sounding more or less the same. Everything is an attempt at being brilliant. But when you're talking about romantic repertoire, you have to have lived long and been through a lot to do those pieces well," Rosand said.

Listeners may not realize they're hearing accumulated wisdom - expressed in a style not often heard these days - but they care. Call up Rosand's recently rereleased 1961 recording of the Beethoven violin sonatas on Amazon.com, click the function that tells what its customers also bought, and his cult reveals itself. Buyers didn't go on to more Beethoven, but to more Rosand.

Indian-summer careers for violinists aren't unusual, but they're always a surprise, since the musculature required to play the instrument often doesn't hold up nearly as long as a pianist's. The 76-year-old Polish violinist Ida Haendel authorizes reissues of her old recordings with the condition that she makes new ones, and has done so with astonishing freshness. The late Nathan Milstein recorded some of his best performances in his 80s. American violinist Camilla Wicks successfully emerged from retirement in her late 60s with Alban Berg's fearsome Violin Concerto.

Rosand's longevity has partly to do with playing smart, not hard. The left hand on the fingerboard, he believes, must be light as a feather. Nothing is forced. All is comfortable. "The violin has only a limited amount of sound, and if you go beyond that limit, everything begins to sound more or less the same. The violin," he said with gravity palpable even in a telephone interview, "will never be a trumpet."

Such technique has allowed him to outlive his own eclipse. A child prodigy while growing up in Chicago, Rosand performed with a number of surly but great pre-World War II conductors. As a particularly impressionable student of Curtis' legendary Efrem Zimbalist, Rosand absorbed the Russian romantic ethos of the previous century. The grown-up version of him some 40 years ago perhaps wasn't as individualistic as the current version, but he was a bold presence indeed, aided and abetted by his first wife, pianist Eileen Flissler.

They met while students at Curtis; she was at least as responsible for the success of his chamber music recordings as he was. After her death in the early 1970s, Rosand's style polarized listeners more than ever. He earned the praise of those who love that kind of playing - namely the New York Times' once-powerful, now-retired Harold Schonberg, who dubbed him "the romantic violinist supreme" - but was at odds with those who don't. And at one point, the "don'ts" were the majority.

"It was the inquisition period of music-making," Rosand recalled of the mid-1960s. "Portamento [expressive finger-slides] was frowned upon. Everything was dry. And that went against my way of looking at things. Suddenly, it was out of style." Amid this, his second marriage ended in divorce.

But times change. He's remarried to an Internet and marketing consultant, Monica Woo [and] thanks to the vogue for historic recordings, the performance-practice hegemony that once shut him out no longer reigns supreme. Doors are reopened, and he enters with taste and discretion.

Casual listenings to Rosand's just-released Sibelius Violin Concerto recording on the Vox label reveal nothing outrageous. Heard more closely, he frames and highlights the music's thematic ideas with tempo variations that somehow don't interrupt the flow of the music despite their dramatic effect.

"The great tradition of romantic playing is that the tempo doesn't vary. The rubato should never give a sense of distortion. I don't do anything that will throw the conductor or the orchestra," he said.

American orchestras have all but priced themselves out of the concerto-recording market, especially for budget-priced, independent labels like Vox, which has been Rosand's label in decades past as well as now. The solution has been to go far afield for the Sibelius project, as well as planned recordings of the Glazunov and Korngold concertos. And that means working with the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra. It's a three-year-old ensemble formed by a Kuala Lumpur philanthropist who lured young professionals halfway around the world with promises of good salaries and luxury condos. The orchestra is good and available.

And there's urgency to Rosand's recording activities. He realizes his current state of vigor can't last that much longer. And in some corners of the repertoire, the history in his fingers is particularly precious: For example, he learned Chausson's Poeme from parts used and marked by its dedicatee, the legendary Eugène Ysaÿe, as passed on to him by Zimbalist. If Rosand is going to record that, it should be soon - "while my hands are still good."

David Patrick Stearns' e-mail address is dstearns@phillynews.com

© 2000 Philadelphia Newspapers Inc.

Original URL: inq.philly.com/content/inquirer/2000/12/31/arts_and_entertainment/rosand31.htm

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