Pianists: Lessons of Age

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The old man sat at a table in an RCA Victor recording studio in Manhattan and listened to a playback. The cello came on with a rhapsodic, throbbing solo. "Very beautiful," sighed the old man, and tapped Cellist David Soyer approvingly on the knee. Then, a gnarled passage for piano and strings. "No," said the old man, "that's not so good. Here Brahms makes a trap, and we fell in. What shall we do?"

Violist Michael Tree offered a suggestion. "Maybe," he told the old man, "you could come in a little slower, maybe more quietly." Violinist John Dalley agreed with a nod. "Fine," said the old man, "let's try it." And Artur Rubinstein, a month short of his 81st birthday, led three members of the Guarneri Quartet, whose average age was 36, back to the microphones for another try at Brahms's Piano Quartet in G Minor.

Last week Rubinstein began what has become his annual New York endurance contest, this time in the form of nine Carnegie Hall recitals in seven weeks. Those few pianists half his age with the stamina for such a task would likely spend months in agonizing preparation for the ordeal; Rubinstein walked away from the whole problem, instead took down from a dusty shelf the three Brahms Piano Quartets that he had not played publicly or privately for over a decade, and got them back into his fingers and heart for the recording sessions. Why this, rather than brushing up on the concert programs? "It was like coming back to old friends," he explained during the session. "It filled me with music."

No Generation Gap. It filled him, too, with wisdom about youth and old age. "When I was young, I would play Brahms like this"—and the wrinkled hands moved across the keyboard in a caricature of overexpressive stop-and-go phrasing. "The lesson we learn as we get old is that music can speak for itself"—another time through the passage, impeccable, simple and restrained. "Brahms learned this too. See how luxuriant, how extravagant he writes here"—pointing to a page black with notes from the Quartet, written when Brahms was 28—"and how, later on, the single, simple notes can sing alone"—a pass at the misty, half-muttering Intermezzo in E Flat Minor of 31 years later. "My concert programs are full of familiar pieces, comfortable like old shoes, but there, too, I try each time to make them a little better."