Jeffrey Biegel: Seeking concert stardom

Jeffrey Biegel was first profiled in Newsday at the age of 26 when he was an aspiring concert pianist. Here is the profile that ran on Aug. 13, 1987.

The Biegel family's 8-mm., black-and-white home movies from 1964 show a skinny, intense little boy with curly hair, sucking on his third and fourth fingers, standing as close as he can to the box against the wall.

And staring, staring, staring.

His three older sisters grab his hands, trying to get him to dance, and he relents -- for a moment. But then-3-year-old Jeffrey Biegel breaks away and goes back to the box, cozying close. Staring.

The box is a stereo: the fascination, music. Today, nobody remembers what music -- although his parents liked to play '40s Big Band numbers and his sisters, rock. But it doesn't matter.

If Jeffrey Biegel had turned out to be a New York City cop, like his dad, no one would remark on that little boy's captivation with music. But those home movies have achieved the status of evidence, of family legend.

By age 4, Biegel was playing his older sister's piano lessons -- by ear. At 5, he announced to his kindergarten class that he wanted to be a concert pianist. His teacher said he'd taught Jeffrey by age 9 everything he knew and it was time for him to go on to someone else. At 15, he was accepted as a student by the famed Adele Marcus.

Now 26, Biegel is a prodigiously talented concert pianist whose career is starting to pick up speed -- not zooming fast enough for his liking, but moving nonetheless. Within the past month, he has performed in Seattle, Maryland and Indianapolis, and he will perform the "preconcert" at the Mostly Mozart Festival at 7 p.m. Monday at Avery Fisher Hall. He will be performing on Long Island at the Friends of the Arts Beethoven Festival in September and with the Nassau Symphony in November.

Respectable engagements all. But not one of them paid more than $2,000. And for some, Biegel had to pay his own expenses.

Welcome to the world of the struggling young concert pianist.

Biegel lives with his parents in Plainview, as he has all his life, in a ranch house guarded by the statue of a jockey. He's engaged to Wendy Yamashita, a Honolulu-born pianist he met at Juilliard, but he's not making enough money from his concerts to live independently. They plan to teach at the local Y to supplement their incomes. Marriage is still a few years away.

Yet Biegel is an artist who, The New York Times has said, " . . .will soon be mentioned with the best of the current crop of pianists"; whom The Washington Post called "dazzling," and whom the Seattle Times compared to Vladimir Ashkenazy.

Two years ago, he won the top, $15,000 award in the University of Maryland's International Piano Competition; he has won major scholarships and competitions at Juilliard; his debut recital last year was a triumph. "It was like a wedding," he says, "like getting married to the profession."

But Biegel has no scheduled performances for two months this fall. His name is unknown outside of an intimate circle of music-lovers-inthe-know. And his future -- despite his talent and drive -- is hardly assured.

"If everything comes easily to you in your career, sometimes your sensitivity to the music just doesn't grow," Biegel says. "Sometimes, when you suffer more, and you go through disappointments, you grow more of an inner awareness of what life is all about -- and what the composers were going through when they wrote the music. They didn't have it easy."

Lee Lamont, president of ICM Artists Ltd. in New York, says, "The start of the most secure careers are careers which are built over a period of time. Nobody jumps immediately onto every new artist. There is no Cinderella story. It doesn't happen in a year. All young artists should be aware of that." ICM Artists, which recently added Biegel to the roster of 28 pianists it manages, pays higher fees than those he has been receiving.

* * *

Carnegie Hall -- oh, how Biegel yearns to perform there. Biegel recalls visiting that fabled showcase of great musical talent as a teenager. "I stood onstage," he says, his expressive blue eyes dancing with the memory, "and I felt that it was my domain."

"Music is a language of emotions, of expression," he says. "It's not enough for the performer to feel it. You have to make the audience feel it."

But he's not there yet. For on this Saturday night in July, Biegel is preparing to give a recital at the University of Maryland's Tawes Theater in College Park. He is playing lengthy solos, as well as duets with Kyoko Takezawa, a 20-year-old Japanese violinist who won the Indianapolis competition last year.

Takezawa takes her 200-year-old violin wherever she goes, but Biegel is at the mercy of whatever instrument is provided. It's a Steinway, and, luckily, it's still in good shape after the competition the week before.

Yet he's a perfectionist. Some notes are raspy, even offensive. So he leaves a lengthy set of instructions for the technician who will be tuning the piano, with a note that reflects some of his personal style: "I am sure all these notes may seem tedious" (mollification), "though I am positive the piano requires these few adjustments for tonight's concert" (assertiveness). "My technician, Steve Barrell, couldn't come" (name-dropping). "So, I truly appreciate your best efforts" (diplomacy).

Even so, he plans to bring his own needles to soften the hammers before the concert, if necessary.

Over dinner, he gives advice to the younger violinist and bemoans the exploitation of 10-year-old prodigies, all the while talking about how frustrating it is not to be getting farther faster.

With half an hour to kill at the hall, he first tries the piano. It passes inspection. Now he has to see if he passes.

"Do you think the pants are too short?" he asks. He frets over a stain on his shirt that had gone unnoticed. "Do you think the tie is too long?"

Nervous? Nooooo. "Just excited," he says.

* * *

"As a child, he was very different," says Janet Biegel, who started working as a customer service rep only after her children were grown.

"He wasn't a jock -- and you know how other kids resent that," says his father, Eugene, a retired New York City police captain who ran the 109th and 111th Precincts in Queens and the 34th Precinct in Manhattan before becoming head of security at Long Island Jewish Medical Center in New Hyde Park.

The Biegels' house is warm and homey and cluttered, filled with tzatchkes and pictures of children and grandchildren. There's no living room, really, for the room that would normally have that designation is overwhelmed by not one, but two grand pianos -- the Baldwin, a bar mitzvah present from Jeffrey's grandfather; the Steinway, a reward for winning a competition. There are the obligatory busts of Mozart, Chopin, Beethoven and Bach.

Although Biegel's parents knew from early on that he had talent, they never rushed him. They're from the old school -- the one that teaches that childhood is for children. He didn't start formal lessons until age 71/2.

"It wasn't always happy all the time," says his mother, recalling competitions. "The phone calls home: `Ma, I made it.' Or, `Ma, I didn't make it.' `How do you feel, Jeff?' `I feel OK.' But I knew."

She says they wish they could travel to all his concerts. "We went to the competition that he won," she says. "The finals were at the Kennedy Center. They announced the third prize winner, and the second, and then he just stood there, and I said, `Oh, my God.' " Her eyes moisten at the memory. "The reporters had come over, and I just couldn't open my mouth."

* * *

Jeffrey Biegel views his teacher, Adele Marcus, as a second mother.

"When she played piano," he says, "it was like opening the Bible." She gave him a book of religious sayings, and he treasures it. He always carries Marcus' little booklet with him during a concert.

As he prepares to go onstage at the Tawes Theater, he pulls out the book and kisses it. Then he walks out behind Takezawa to applause, an enormous grin of pleasure on his face.

They play Mozart together, and after Takezawa's solo, it's Biegel's turn to show his brilliance with a Liszt sonata, Hungarian Rhapsody and étude. He takes chances, seeing "how much the piano can be stretched," using the instrument to tell a story -- this time, of Hungarian gypsies.

Intermission. His brow drips perspiration; his shirt clings to his body. A short, exuberant couple opens the stage door to congratulate and embrace him -- Eva Hornyak, who runs the concert series at the university, and her husband, William. "Did you see the resemblance?" Biegel whispers after they leave. "She's Isaac Stern's sister."

Intermission is over. A Tchaikovsky duet; two Rachmaninoff preludes for him; a Brahms duet. The applause demands two encores.

The nearly 21/2-hour recital is over. Or so it seems. Some members of the audience start to walk out. But Biegel scurries back onstage alone to a round of applause, grinning. He sits down at the piano and, with a smile, holds up one finger as if to say "Just one more."

As if he doesn't want to let this responsive audience go. Not just yet.

He plays Schulz-Evler's arrangement of Johann Strauss' "By the Beautiful Blue Danube," a piece of pyrotechnic wonderment. Applause, punctuated by a "Bravo!" here and there, fills the room. Biegel bows.

The Washington Post later calls the encore "dazzling."

* * *

Backstage, Biegel says he decided to play the encore during intermission, when he learned that Jorge Bolet, the pianist known for his Liszt interpretations, was in the audience. When Bolet comes backstage to shake his hand, Biegel is stunned. "Do you know who that was?" he says over and over. "That's Jorge Bolet. Oh, God." Then Biegel gets his due from the autograph seekers -- well-dressed groupies waving fountain pens and programs.

"When are you coming back in the area?" a man asks Biegel. Ever ready to pounce on an opportunity, Biegel turns to George Moquin, the Maryland festival's executive director. "When am I playing again?" he asks with a smile.

Then comes a required appearance at a private party for 75 people at the home of Delores and Ferdinand Petraitis. It's for the friends of -- read "donors to" -- the summer festival.

Biegel talks to Felicia Borisow, a former concert pianist who arranges concerts in private homes, and Seymour Lipkin, former conductor of the Long Island Symphony, both of whom chide him on the length of his encore. He talks to Mary Aylward, who lobbies unsuccessfully for an impromptu performance of the theme from "Sophie's Choice," and Edward Garrison Neal, president of the Friends, a lawyer who owns a Robert Redford jaw and a purple Porsche.

They all kvell over him; Biegel reminds them subtly that he'd like to be invited back again next year.

* * *

The adulation over, it's time to take the morning shuttle back to LaGuardia. There's a live concert on WQXR to prepare for on Tuesday, then a trip to Indianapolis for a major recital over the weekend.

For now, he is busy. But Biegel wonders what will happen when he's not so busy.

After his debut last year he thought the world would open wide for him. It didn't. He thought auditioning for Leonard Bernstein and Zubin Mehta would do the same. So far, it hasn't.

I'll make it, he says. Eventually. Of that he has no doubt.

"I just want to go out and play so much," he says intensely. "And I have got a repertoire, and I know and I feel in my heart that I have something to say.

"And I want to get a chance to say it."