While the news from Israel last week was filled with grief, the truth of Israel shined as brightly as the Seattle summer sun. It reflected off the pianist Alon Goldstein, one of several Israeli regulars who come to town to play one of Seattle’s premier summer music events, the Seattle Chamber Music Society Summer Festival. Despite all of its challenges, Israel does nurture beauty.
Goldstein, 38, did his IDF service as a performer of classical music for his fellow troops. Right now, he’s talking about managing a move: he and his wife Vered, parents of a 3-year-old, have just bought a new house in suburban Washington, D.C., where he bases his concert career. His mother, he tells me, is on the way from Tel Aviv to help with the move.
“She’s at her best when she’s needed,” he chuckles, musing on the universal Jewish mother energy (“She’s one of those doers!”). We talk about how the festival itself, founded 27 years ago and still directed by Seattle cellist Toby Saks, is like a family.
“You feel like the audience really knows you,” he enthuses, on a break during rehearsals at Saks’ Madison Park home.
That must account for the regular sellout crowds. “Of course! You don’t want to miss a concert of your son!”
It’s not just audiences who kvell parentally over the 38-year-old performer and his colleagues.
“We all like to be mothered!” Goldstein says, and Saks keeps that in mind to keep her players happy. Home hospitality, the joys of midsummer Seattle weather, and a dependable repertoire of favorites are the hallmark of the festival. In addition to the original July venue, on the campus of Lakeside School, SCMS continues during the first half of August on the Eastside, at the Overlake School.
Goldstein won’t be sharing a Seattle stage this summer with fellow Israeli and his dear friend, the cellist Amit Peled, who arrives at the festival around the time Goldstein leaves, but the two are proudly touting their newly released DVD of two of the Beethoven cello sonatas. The recording, a production of the Hope Channel, documents the ongoing concert work these two are doing, presenting all five of these rarely performed Beethoven pieces.
Here in Seattle, they played these in concert during Saks’ 2007 Winter Festival at Nordstrom Recital Hall. It was a Washington, D.C.-area concert much like the one in Seattle that brought them to the producers’ attention.
“These five sonatas are much more intimate than Beethoven’s [much better-known] five piano concertos,” says Goldstein, emphasizing what may be chamber music’s most outstanding characteristic: intimacy. “With the piano concertos, he’s very aware of the public, always looking over his shoulder to please audiences.
“Just putting together those two instruments was a pioneering thing,” he continues.
Peled lives in Baltimore, involved both as an acclaimed concert performer and as a star teacher at the celebrated Peabody Institute of Music. Goldstein earned his degree at Peabody, as a student of the legendary pianist Leon Fleischer. The two friends, a short ride away from each other down the interstate, get their families together often, and not just because of music.
“We have children now! They are in love with each other! Our son goes out with their daughter!” The Goldsteins’ son is 3; Peled and his wife, Julia, parents of the almost-4-year-old girlfriend, also have a 2-year-old son.
In addition to the satisfactions of an active concert career and family life, Goldstein is a blogger. He calls his site Blog…Stein (www.alongoldstein.com). Fluent and nuanced as a writer in English, he takes a little time to post intriguing thoughts like this: “Next time when you listen to a Mozart concerto, look for these special places where a shiver runs through the body, a smile lights up the face, and you could hear Mozart laughing high above. You have just witnessed yet another layer of this composer’s intimate personality. He whispered a secret in your ear!”
Celebrating intimacy, chamber-style
