Although he recorded extensively as a soloist for Columbia Records (now Sony Classical), his career as a concert pianist never really seemed to catch fire. Or perhaps I should say, he never captured the public’s imagination quite to the extent of some of his more publicity-friendly contemporaries. This was certainly not for lack of skill or interpretive depth. He just wasn’t interested in playing the fame game. It could be argued that Eugene Istomin found his most comfortable fit away from the spotlight, as a conversational performer and equal voice in one the premier chamber ensembles of his time.

With violinist Isaac Stern and cellist Leonard Rose – as the Istomin-Stern-Rose Trio – he really seemed to find his niche. The trio was an unlikely creation, an all-star ensemble greater than the sum of its parts. And its parts were pretty great. All three musicians were known quantities, “name” soloists who worked very hard to shed their larger-than-life predilections and explore a shared intimacy in chamber music of the masters. Their recordings of the complete Beethoven piano trios, in particular, a Grammy Award winner in 1970, is still highly regarded. Too bad they couldn’t come up with a catchier name for the group.

On his own, Istomin, a contemporary of Leon Fleisher and Gary Graffman, never seemed to excite the way the other two pianists did. This, despite professional associations with Eugene Ormandy, Bruno Walter, Leonard Bernstein, Fritz Reiner, George Szell, Leopold Stokowski, and Pablo Casals. (Istomin later married Casals’ widow.) For one thing, he was more interested in the Viennese classics than he was the Russian showpieces that set audiences aflame. Not that he didn’t love those too. His recording of the Rachmaninoff 2nd with Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra demonstrates that, when he wanted to be, he could be very much the virtuoso. Of course, Fleisher and Graffman’s careers were curtailed by focal dystonia, a repetitive stress malady that effects the fingers and is all-too-common among hard-driving classical performers, with their unforgiving practice regimens.

Istomin had, by his own admission, “pretentious” tastes. He was interested in the music he was interested in, even if it didn’t fit the paradigm of what critics thought he should be tackling at a given stage of his career. (Surely, he was too young to be playing Beethoven and Brahms. This is the time he should be playing Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff!) He was also an avid reader and a book collector, at one point hired by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich as an advisor on the publication of facsimile editions of works by Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy, and others.

Yet he also had a common touch. An ardent fan of the Detroit Tigers, he toured the Midwest with a twelve-ton truck full of his own Steinway pianos. He wanted to be sure to make the music he loved available to the people.

It’s said that his relationship with Rose, who could be touchy and unforgiving even under the best of circumstances, was damaged when Istomin maneuvered behind the scenes with Columbia to get a shot at a concerto recording at a time when he was supposed to be documenting all the Beethoven sonatas for violin and cello with his companions in the trio. The fact that these were left incomplete because of the resulting rift with the label left Rose with a festering resentment. But nothing was simple between Rose and Istomin. They suited one another perfectly, playing together beautifully, as long as they kept their mouths shut. But they also held very strong convictions and weren’t shy about expressing them. Clearly, they remained intimates, but Rose carried hard feelings over the Beethoven debacle for the rest of his life.

Unquestionably, Istomin found depth in the Viennese masters and fire in the Russians, but it was always on his own terms. He also commissioned and performed works by living composers, including Roger Sessions (his piano concerto), Henri Dutilleux, and Ned Rorem. Again, Istomin was more interested in the substance of music-making than in the publicity machine.

Like Josephine Baker and Jerry Lewis, it’s possible he found greater appreciation in France, where he was the recipient of the Légion d’honneur in 2001.

Istomin died in 2003, 16 days before his 78th birthday. He was a terrific pianist, if perhaps not the most enduringly famous. Remembering him today, with gratitude, on the 100th anniversary of his birth.

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