Chamber Music: The Star as Team Player

It’s an honored tradition, the venerated virtuoso momentarily forsaking his solitary perch to join colleagues in the noble collaborative art: chamber music.

Isaac Stern has exemplified the ideal of star as team player since the early 1950s, when he participated in the Casals festivals in southern France. Subsequent activities included the violinist’s anchoring of the Istomin-Stern-Rose Trio and, most recently, membership in various all-star configurations assembled for the occasional live concert and a spot of recording.

The latest recordings of the intimate Stern are the two sublime Brahms String Sextets, preserved in a two-disc Sony set (45 820), which despite fleeting instances of insecure ensemble are things of stunning beauty.

The most obvious problems, dispensed with within a few measures of each work’s opening, regard uncertainty as to tempo: Both begin sluggishly, with Stern, furthermore, playing under the note.

But in each instance cellist Yo-Yo Ma kicks the show into gear, and cohesiveness, with his entrance. After which Stern’s playing assumes its wonted security, richness of tone and driving rhythmicality.

His colleagues are as impressive in their individual strengths as in their ability to communicate as an ensemble.

Jaime Laredo, trading violin for viola here, violist Michael Tree and cellist Sharon Robinson are chamber music players by profession, and among the best, whereas Cho-Liang Lin becomes the second violinist of our dreams: a headliner able to take just that little bit off his individuality to make him alternatingly listener, leader and blender.

And Ma is Ma. The suave, throbbing tone and gliding ease are unmistakable. But there is no grandstanding. And, anyway, this is Brahms--hardly music for the faint-toned or emotionally withdrawn.

The Opus 18 Sextet, in B-flat (the other, Opus 36, is in G), alone is available in a recording from the 1952 Prades Festival, reissued in Sony’s valuable, low end of mid-priced “Masterworks Portrait” series (44851), until now widely available only in Europe.

Stern was also the nominal leader then, and his playing is gloriously firm and energetic. But the course of the opening movement was dictated, perhaps unwittingly, by then-76-year-old cellist Pablo Casals, whose labored entrances--and expressive groaning, which clearly unsettles his colleagues--signal some awkward adjustments of pace.

The centerpiece andante, however, emerges impressively intact and would suffice to validate the “historic” label attached to this release.

The Prades ensemble otherwise comprises violinist Alexander Schneider, violists Milton Katims and Milton Thomas (the twin stars of the andante) and cellist Madeleine Foley.

Masterworks Portrait also has two unqualified winners in the star chamber music category: from 1946, George Szell and members of the Budapest Quartet in the two Mozart Piano Quartets (47685) and one of the few recorded collaborations between pianist Rudolf Serkin and the Budapest Quartet (45686), the Brahms’ Piano Quintet.

Szell is as commanding at the keyboard as he was on the podium, but without the unyielding control with which he tended to straitjacket his orchestral Mozart.

But don’t expect a soft Szell. Rather, he offers playing of immense dignity and rhythmic clarity that, with the Budapest’s Joseph Roisman, Boris Kroyt and Mischa Schneider in top form, illuminates every corner of these glorious, elusive works.

As bonuses, Sony offers two imposing duo sonatas by Mozart, K. 296 and K. 301, in which Szell deftly partners violinist Rafael Druian, his fluent and stylish Cleveland Orchestra concertmaster. Very highly recommended.

The Serkin-Budapest collaboration dates from the 1963 Marlboro Festival, and while apparently recorded without an audience present, it projects the spur-of-the-moment intensity of live performance.

Serkin was never one to temper his clangorous tone or ferocious rhythmic drive. Yet with the willing partnership of the Budapest he is the focus of a performance that is both interpretively cohesive and edge-of-the-seat exciting, in no small part because of its rough edges.

The coupling has the Budapest four in a glowing, 1963 traversal of Brahms’ C-minor String Quartet, which, while hardly a model of intonational purity, succeeds in enabling Brahmsian lyricism to triumph over Brahmsian ponderousness.