Patricia Zander, pianist, mentor who 'lived and breathed' music

PATRICIA ZANDER (Courtesy of New England Conservatory)

Patricia Zander carried the limelight with her wherever she went; she didn't seek it, but it shone within her.

As a pianist, she toured the world in recital with cellist Yo-Yo Ma for a decade, though following a shoulder injury 22 years ago she stopped performing.

Ms. Zander was already a sought-after teacher when Ma came to work with her as a Harvard freshman in 1972. After she stopped playing in public, she continued to be active, influential, and charismatic in every other dimension of musical life. For more than 40 years she taught, challenged, and mentored generations of performers who passed through her studio in the New England Conservatory or her Cambridge living room; among them were baritone Sanford Sylvan, pianists Judith Gordon and Max Levinson, and violinist Stefan Jackiw.

Ms. Zander died in Youville Hospital yesterday morning after a seven-year struggle with cancer. She was 66. Against medical advice, she taught through the end of the school year in May - and then listened to auditions for next year.

"For Patricia," Ma said, "music was something to be lived, something to be breathed, at all times. The notes were a code towards something, the energy of life, I guess I would call it. There was so much vitality, rhythm, and forward motion in her playing; she characterized everything in the music vividly and viscerally."

Composer John Harbison said: "That Patricia lived as long as she did is a testimony to the power of music, and of involvement in music, to draw people back into the world. She was intent on giving every last thing she had to impart to her students."

Ms. Zander was born Patricia Dolman in Dorset, England, on March 12, 1942. She grew up in cottages on the grounds of stately homes where her father worked as a gardener, and a passion for gardening followed her the rest of her life; during her last days, she wanted to smell freesia one last time. Her mother worked as a housemaid.

As a young woman, Ms. Zander worked below stairs, too. She learned to play the piano by ear and did not realize until she was nearly 10 years old that music could be written down. As a teenager she supported herself by playing for dance classes, reproducing by ear concert and ballet music she had heard on the radio.

Conductor Benjamin Zander, to whom she was married from 1966 until 1976, recalled that when she auditioned for the Royal College of Music in 1960, she improvised the left-hand part in Chopin's "Fantaisie-Impromptu" so convincingly that the jury wondered what unusual variant edition she had discovered.

At the Royal College, Ms. Zander studied with the noted pianist Cyril Smith and won the schoolwide concerto competition with Beethoven's Fourth Concerto. Mr. Zander said: "It was the most heavenly performance of that piece I have ever heard, on or off record. Every year I would ritually ask her to play it with the Boston Philharmonic, and every year she would graciously decline."

At the Royal College, she played chamber music with many subsequently famous fellow students, like Mr. Zander, a cellist in those days, and the clarinetist Gervase de Peyer. In 1963-1964, she spent a fellowship year in France, studying music with the legendary pedagogue Nadia Boulanger and piano with Vlado Perlemuter.

"We grew together," Mr. Zander said. "We influenced each other very much in the beginning, and over the years she grew to become the musician I revered the most. I learned more from her than she learned from me."

In 1964, Ms. Zander came to Boston with her husband and swiftly established herself as a major figure on the local scene. She taught first in the chamber-music course at Harvard before joining the faculty of New England Conservatory in 1976. There, for many years, she supervised the artist diploma program for the school's most advanced students.

Composer Alan Fletcher, now president and chief executive of the Aspen Music Festival and School in Colorado, served in various administrative posts at NEC for 16 years. "During the time I was there," he said, "no one cared more for the school and did more for it than she did, and all in a very quiet and delicate way. During difficult times, hers was the voice that others listened to."

Mr. Fletcher cited the wide range of her interests and friendships outside the musical world, and pointed out her strong relationships with composers, especially Earl Kim, Leon Kirchner, John Harbison, and himself. "There was no one else in the world I would entrust my music-in-progress to, in the times when it was most vulnerable. She gave such rich, intense, real criticism, with nothing held back."

Ms. Zander always cut a stylish swath, and her throaty, prolonged laugh was famous. A certain impish glint in her eye meant she was about to say something wicked.

She was intensely devoted to her family, and Ma said she was always amazed at the development of her daughter and her grandchildren and exclaimed that what they achieved was so far beyond anything she ever could have imagined.

"That was true for her students as well," he added.

She read voraciously in many fields; she was as expert, loving, imaginative, and precise at the stove as she was at the piano, and she was a vibrant hostess. She was always surrounded by interesting people and enjoyed setting them on unusual tasks, like singing through neglected gems from the great American songbook or reading through a Shakespeare play or an Oscar Wilde comedy.

"Her focus was both wide and intense," Ma said. "She had a very pure idea of music, of what it is, and she never stopped striving toward it."

Ms. Zander leaves her daughter, Jessica Zander of Winchester, and two grandchildren. Services will be private and there will be a memorial gathering at New England Conservatory in the fall.