Pianist Arrives in Town With Luggage by Steinway

SAN DIEGO —  VIP travelers are usually easy to spot. They check into the best hotels with their designer luggage in tow.

Pianist Eugene Istomin is a VIP, and travels like one, but when he arrives in town, he sports more than Vuitton luggage and an American Express platinum card. His specially equipped truck disgorges two 9-foot concert grands, the Steinways on which he consents to perform.

It’s not that Steinways in concert halls are rare or that Istomin considers himself above playing on the variety of instruments he finds in the hinterlands. After more than four decades of playing in public, he simply wants to reduce the number of variables he has to face when he walks out onto the concert stage.

“We pianists are the only people deprived of knowing the instruments we perform on,” he said.

By using his own pianos, Steinway Nos. 86 and 257, Istomin claims he has removed “one of the imponderables of performance,” the unfamiliar instruments on which pianists are required to perform as they travel from city to city.

On the side panel of Istomin’s piano-laden truck, which is as sleek and black as a concert grand, the gold lettering demurely proclaims the pianist’s 1988-89 North American tour. This weekend Istomin will play Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto in three concerts with the San Diego Symphony under guest conductor Bernhard Klee.

“This is a project that I thought of four years ago, prior to my 60th birthday. I had come to one of those many crises in life where one says, ‘Sixty, good grief! You better think about what you want to do.’ I was even thinking about quitting.”

Istomin noted that bringing his own instruments on tour hearkens back to the heyday of the great piano virtuosos.

“The only pianists in my lifetime that Steinway would ship pianos for were Rachmaninoff and Horowitz. Later, there was Rubinstein, and, later than that, Rudolph Serkin bought his own truck to ship his instrument.”

Of course, shipping one’s instruments around the country cuts into the profitability of touring.

“I’ve earned enough money,” he said, “that’s not important. In fact, the relationship of playing and money is very distant to me.”

According to Istomin, the shortcomings performers encounter in pianos in concert halls is more than an artistic handicap. It is also a factor that has proven dangerous to the health of a number of pianists.

“I think that the most treacherous and insidious problem is the absence of carrying power, especially in the treble section of the piano keyboard. It happens that the area of the piano which has the most melodic activity is that area of the treble resister which also corresponds to the weakest fingers on of the right hand. This may account for some of the reasons why certain very great, famous pianists have been incapacitated due to the giving way of that area of the hand.”

Istomin listed Gary Graffman, Leon Fleisher, and Byron Janis as keyboard artists who have lost the use of their right hand through extensive performance. The 63-year-old Istomin noted that though he has had operations on each hand, his physical assets are still in top shape. Using the pianos that he knows will do in concert what he wants them to is part of his performance insurance.

Istomin was not crowing about anniversaries as he sat in the conductor’s suite behind the Symphony Hall stage, but this week does mark his 45th year on the concert stage. At the age of 17, he made his debut playing Chopin’s F Minor Concerto with the Philadelphia Orchestra on Nov. 17, 1943. Four days later he played the Brahms Second Piano Concerto with the New York Philharmonic under Artur Rodzinski.

While his appearance with the New York Philharmonic was a result of winning the Leventritt Competition, he is no fan of competitions.

“Yes, I’m very much against competitions. I won two--that’s how I started my career--but I hated every second of it. People think they have to know who is better. It would please some people if you could have an international competition, have Horowitz and Serkin play against each other like Wimbledon, or a championship golf tournament. It goes against the whole meaning of art,” he said.

Then there is the more practical liability of musical competitions--the lack of performance opportunities for the winners.

“We have contest winners who are very gifted, only there are 57 major contests in the world. How can you launch 57 people in one season? And then what about the 57 from last year--what happens to them? They need a public.”

Istomin observed that, as he sees it, the audiences for classical music performance have reached a plateau.

“The public, that is the hard-core music audience, isn’t growing, even though the population is. With television and recordings, the concert-goer faces more competition. The real music lover, however, may stay away because concerts are not exciting, riskless or boring.”

Although Istomin does not have the reputation of an incendiary keyboard player, risk-taking is high on his list of performing virtues.

“I play wrong notes, and I take chances. Every performance has to have some element of risk.”

Istomin reflected on the performers he heard in his formative years--Kreisler, Heifitz, Rubinstein, Hoffmann, Casals, and Toscanini.

“Something happened that you never forgot in their concerts. Not that it was perfect; the bad things you did not remember. There was something in their performance that took fire, something incandescent. For that you have to take risks. The next second, of course, you land on your face in a puddle. But that’s humanity. There really is no such thing as a perfect performance.”