If one word could capture Nathan Schwartz’ performances it would be “interior.” Whether the works were new, the ones that the Trio and Duo commissioned and introduced, or the masterworks of the repertory, he got inside the compositions, realizing them with an impeccable integrity, deep understanding and sympathy. No one was more sensitive an ensemble partner.

Either with his wife, or as keyboard partner for such artists as Zara Nelsova, André Novarra, Robert Mann, Felix Galimir, Eleanor Steber, Bethany Beardslee, Joel Krosnik, and Stuart Canin, Nathan Schwartz performed at music festivals in Santa Fe, Seattle, Banff, Ojai, Colorado, and of course here. He played at New York’s Alice Tully Hall, the Kennedy Center, the Library of Congress and on series in Boston, Los Angeles, London, Berlin, Amsterdam.

Nathan Schwartz was born in Montreal but, from the age of a few months, grew up in New York City through his four years at Columbia University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. By 1950, when I first knew him, Nate had come to the University of California Berkeley to earn an M.A. degree in music. He thereupon won the Alfred Hertz Fellowship with which he studied in France with the great Alfred Cortot and Paul Baumgartner. Subsequently, he served on faculties at Cal, with his wife at Grinnell College, Stanford University, the Banff Centre and the SF Conservatory.

His colleague at the Conservatory Mack McCray spoke of Nate’s piano teaching, his chamber music coaching, and his playing as a unified experience. “When we were holding master classes at school (performance seminars), he would hold his counsel for quite a while but then would open up, and I would shut up and listen. He astounded me, humbled me with such a musical approach to things. I would ask him what it was like to study with Cortot, and he would just laugh and say ‘You don’t want to hear about that.’ He treated it the way Mozart treated a secondary melody.”

In 1999, a year or so after he had been taking major medication for leukemia, I encountered Bonnie wheeling Nate, thin and enfeebled, into Kaiser for what she told me then was one of the twice or thrice weekly transfusions he needed to stay alive. He greeted me cheerily from the wheelchair and asked me how I was. Typical. The next I heard, was the miracle. He began a course of holistic treatments and special nutrients, and soon the red cell count began recovering. Very soon, the doctors discontinued the transfusions (not knowing what had reversed his condition). A year or so later, he was back on the Hellman Hall stage, walking and appearing as he had before the leukemia struck, and performing a duo recital with his wife. It was moving.

His faculty colleague Paul Hersh last Sunday recalled the last of the Thursday chamber music classes that Nathan Schwartz attended, a class in which some of 20 different groups will play. “He was having difficulty walking and seeing. The procedure is that (the four to seven faculty members present) are asked which piece they want to coach. Walter Piston’s Piano Trio came up and Nathan, who had never heard or played it, said in his humble way, ‘How can I coach this piece when I don’t know it?’ The students came out, Nathan staying there with his score, and they played the first movement. It was as if a needle of adrenalin had been inserted in him. When he gets going there’s no stopping him. He took off and was like a teen-ager. All of his infirmities and his age disappeared. He became one with the music he claimed he’d never heard before, and went at it with complete enthusiasm. When it was over, Bonnie had to take his arm and lead him out of there.”

Last Friday morning, Nate was at home practicing the Brahms G minor Piano Quartet he was scheduled to play in Minnesota, but by noon, he was coughing badly. Seriously ill in the afternoon, he spent the time listening to a favorite student’s recent recording of Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto. In the hospital the next day, his systems failing, from behind the oxygen mask he asked his wife to bring him the Brahms score so that he could study it some more. As Hersh put it, “That was the way to go,” pursuing his passion for music.

________________________Robert Commanday