Post-Prodigies

For some years, the most widely traveled U.S. concert pianist has been an elusive fellow named Leogene Graffteiner. In several different incarnations last week he played Brahms in Boston, Schumann in Cincinnati and Mozart in Hamburg. Everywhere he was applauded by the critics.

Leogene Graffteiner is really four pianists: Gary Graffman, Leon Fleisher, Eugene Istomin and Jacob Lateiner. The first three are close friends, and all share an extravagant admiration for an ancient Steinway concert grand known as "Old 199." Because they pass it from one to another while touring in the U.S., they refer to its current player by a composite name. Graffman & Co. today are in the forefront of a group of young U.S. pianists who have recently made the perilous leap from prodigy to professional artist.

Pianist Graffman had Old 199 with him last week when he turned up in Boston's Symphony Hall to play Brahms's Piano Concerto No. i in D Minor. It was the kind of performance--thick-textured, solidly shaped, glowing with suffused light --that Graffman's audiences have come to expect of him. The great, blustery music of the first movement burst from the piano in finger-blurring but perfectly articulated gusts of sound; the contrasting adagio glided as serenely as a gull.

Three Piano Musketeers. Manhattan-born Pianist Graffman, 29, played for the first time with a full symphony orchestra (the Indianapolis) when he was still a knickerbockered scholarship student at Philadelphia's Curtis Institute of Music. A local critic decided that his "assurance, ease and poise" were "a bit terrifying." The son of Russian-born parents, he followed a path after Indianapolis that is familiar to many another promising young U.S. soloist: special award in the Rachmaninoff Fund's nationwide piano contest, guest appearances with half a dozen U.S. symphonies, an RCA Victor recording contract. In the in-between years, when the glamour of being a teen-age virtuoso wore off, he dropped almost from sight on the community concert circuit. By preference he steered away from the showy, romantic pieces ("I was an egghead about what I played"). A year ago he went to Europe, scored a noisy success with the London critics.

Graffman, Istomin and Fleisher share remarkably similar backgrounds, musical tastes and careers (Lateiner has not yet performed as widely as the other three). Like Graffman, both Istomin, 31, and Fleisher, 29, are the sons of Russian-born parents. Brooklyn-born Eugene Istomin abandoned a boyhood ambition to play for the Dodgers (he served as their water boy during one spring training) in favor of a scholarship at Curtis, where he studied under Pianist Rudolf Serkin. San Francisco-born Leon Fleisher studied under Artur Schnabel in Manhattan, got his biggest professional boost five years ago when he won Belgium's International Concours. Nowadays when the three are in Manhattan together, they reserve Steinway's basement on 57th Street every free evening and test new pianos ("We are always on the lookout for pianos that are good for Mozart and also Prokofiev") and play for one another until midnight. When one of the trio is playing well, there is nothing but the sound of the piano in the basement; when one is playing badly, there are shouts and threats: "You dirty pig, why don't you practice?"

Artistic Holdup. Pianists Graffman, Istomin and Fleisher currently stand together on a musical plateau, well above most of their contemporaries and within climbing distance in another 15 or 20 years of the eminence occupied by the Rubinsteins and Horowitzes. In artistic maturity, they are probably farther advanced than these looming figures were at their age. "We were a very lucky generation," says Istomin. "During the war so many of the great musicians came to the States. When I heard men like Rubinstein, Artur Schnabel, Horowitz or Bruno Walter, I felt as though artistically I had robbed the National City Bank of New York."

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