Bronfman and Stern

Pianist Yefim Bronfman has something in common with Carnegie Hall: both benefited from the generosity and guidance of Isaac Stern.

At age 14, Bronfman met the virtuoso violinist who led the campaign in 1960 to preserve Carnegie Hall—and was so inspired that he decided then and there that he wanted to play music “forever.” It was Stern, Bronfman says, who inspired him to be “inventive in every way, musically and in life,” urging him to “constantly ask questions: ‘Why do I play music? Why am I doing this?’”

Bronfman’s career took a fairy-tale turn years later when he reunited with his childhood idol to record numerous acclaimed albums and, in 1991, went on tour with Stern to Russia—the pianist’s first public performance in that country since his family emigrated to Israel.

As a 2007–2008 Carnegie Hall Perspectives artist, Bronfman applies his mentor’s invaluable lessons of innovation and imagination in a solo recital on December 17, weaving together various notions of fantasia, as distinctly tackled by a web of intricately connected composers from Beethoven to Ravel.

The fantasia genre lends itself to a performer with both imagination and technical skill, and Bronfman, who possesses these qualities in abundance, has selected an entire program of virtuosic pieces whose composers musically reimagined, with great spirit and verve, other art forms from their time—and in some cases even drew on each other for inspiration.

Balakirev’s invigorating Islamey, born from a fiddle folk tune that a Circassian prince once played for the composer, will follow Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit, based on poetic fantasies by French poet Aloysius Bertrand. In fact, Ravel wrote his piece to one-up his Russian counterpart Balakirev, whose Islamey Ravel claimed was simply not difficult enough (he even went so far as to assign the pieces to his own students). “And Ravel succeeded!” Bronfman insists. “To put these back to back will be fun.”

Further threading the tangle of inspiration in this “fantasic” program are Schumann’s Fantasy in C Major and Beethoven’s Sonata No. 13. As Bronfman explains, “they were erecting a monument in honor of Beethoven in Bonn, and Schumann wrote the Fantasy for the occasion. It’s very eccentric and a great piece that I just love to play.”

Dynamic, muscular, virtuosic, and never missing a note, Yefim Bronfman will perform a collection of Perspectives concerts this season—with the New York String Orchestra, Vienna Philharmonic, MET Chamber Ensemble, and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra—that would surely make his mentor and former chamber partner proud.