Pianists: A Later Vintage

Rain thrummed on the huge tent twice during the performance, but the audience at the Aspen Music Festival in Colorado hardly seemed to notice. Onstage, the pianist leaned more intently over the keyboard and subtly adjusted his tone to bring the music out over the sound of the shower. Wet or dry, it was an excellent performance of Beethoven's last and perhaps greatest piano sonata (in C minor, Opus 111), a piece that alternates between demonic fury and lyric contemplation and requires more than mere competence to bring off.

The man who played it so beautifully at Aspen was 38-year-old Jacob Lateiner, whom most professionals would call "a musician's musician," which is another way of saying that he lacks the glamour and glitter so dazzling to most nonprofessionals among concert audiences. The pros, on the other hand, call him one of the finest interpreters of Beethoven since Artur Schnabel. "The remarkable quality about Lateiner's playing," says Composer Elliott Carter, "is his depth of understanding." It is an understanding that Lateiner has distilled from scholarly scrutiny of the original manuscripts of the music he plays. A collector by inclination (rare books, German expressionist drawings), he has amassed an impressive number of sketches and first-edition scores by Beethoven, Mozart and other composers, is often asked by other musicians to decipher the Sanskrit-like scratchings of Beethoven's notes and handwriting.

Reviving the Spark. "I am not interested in theory or history in collecting, but only in how the item can help me in my performance," Lateiner explains. No pedant, he uses research to "get under the composer's skin" and revive the spark and freshness of the creative impulse behind the music, "to re-create a piece at each time, on each plane, as if it had never been played before."

The controlled fire of Lateiner's playing is notable in someone who flared brilliantly at first, then threatened to become a burnt-out case. He was born in Havana of musical Polish-immigrant parents, won a piano scholarship at Philadelphia's Curtis Institute, then at 18 went to New York in search of "a room some place where I could develop pianistically the way I felt I wanted to." Instead, almost in spite of himself, he appeared as a soloist with the Boston and NBC symphonies, astonished the New York critics with a masterly debut recital at Carnegie Hall, made a few recordings for Columbia, and embarked on a concert career.

Who Are You? After a three-year stint in the Army, however, Lateiner's headlong progress hit a not-so-grand pause. Columbia Records ignored him, and indeed, Lateiner, who was shy and knew nothing of the ways of self-promotion, never even tried to get his recording contract renewed. For several years he seemed merely to hover on the fringes of the select circle of U.S. pianists; he never quite won the measure of popular acclaim that went to others of his generation, such as Gary Graffman and Leon Fleisher. Last month, when he called his manager's Los Angeles office, a new switchboard operator asked curtly: "Who are you and what do you play?" It was typical of Lateiner that he was wryly amused rather than offended.