The Revelers

The plans were enough to prostrate the most gallant music manager. Isaac Stern, Leonard Rose and Eugene Istomin--three top-dollar virtuosos--had teamed up to make chamber music together. Their audience might shrink to the size of the small halls in which trios usually play--and the take, of course, would be split three ways. But the trio had played an intriguing handful of concerts in the past, and bound by 20 years' friendship, they defiantly formed their alliance. Last week, solidly established as the best in 50 years, the Stern-Rose-Istomin Trio played their fifth sell-out concert of the season to a house so full and enthusiastic that it made even Carnegie Hall seem just the right size for chamber music.

A Mirror of Tone. The concert--one trio each by Beethoven, Brahms and Schubert--displayed both the sweep of each man's virtuosity as a soloist and the perfect rapport the three share when playing together. Istomin hulked mightily over the keyboard to delve deep into the music with the sensitive phrasing that distinguishes his playing. Stern and Rose were so perfectly matched that Rose's 1662 Amati cello seemed at times the baritone voice of Stern's Guarnerius violin. In passages in which phrases are repeated alternately be tween them, each provides a mirror of the other in phrasing, tone, even vibrato. Their precision and ease suggests an immense reserve of talent that the evening's program had not required.

Each of the three has discovered in the trio a reward beyond mere music. "There are many miraculous little things that happen during each performance," says Rose. "We play to one another in a sort of musical conversation." Says Stern: "Music is something to revel in -- and when we play together we revel. I'm so proud of this trio I want to shout it from the housetops."

Keep It Gala. It took nearly six years of prodding by Stern before all three mustered the time and determination to get together; each has a highly prosperous career as a soloist, and abandoning private schedules is costly. Now that the three are committed to each other, they plan to spare a month or so each year for work as a trio, making plans far in advance, insisting on ideal halls for chamber music, hand-picking the piano. "We want to keep it gala," says Istomin.

Together with the Juilliard String Quartet (TIME, Aug. 23), the new trio gives the U.S. unsurpassed mastery of chamber music. Critics struggling to define its excellence find no one around to compare it with. They hark back instead to the years before World War I when French Pianist Alfred Cortot, French Violinist Jacques Thibaud and Pablo Casals were the presiding maestri. Even the great trio of the '40s--Heifetz, Feuermann and Rubinstein--is not in the running, for Stern, Rose and Istomin make up a trio unique in attitude as much as accomplishment. They play as if for themselves, and in the playing each achieves a reach of music higher than any he could gain for himself.

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