Michael Stern, a symphony conductor and the son of the late, great musician Isaac Stern — arguably the greatest violinist of the 20th century — is selling his late mother’s apartment at the legendary Beresford, at 211 Central Park West, for $7.65 million.
(It was asking $8.99 million with a different brokerage firm earlier this year.)
Michael, who is currently the music director and lead conductor of the Kansas City Symphony, grew up in the building, but in a different 10-room duplex with a giant terrace that is now owned by the comedian Jerry Seinfeld.
After Isaac divorced Michael’s mother, Vera Stern — who married Isaac 17 days after meeting him at a party, and who remained married to him for the next 45 years — bought this sixth-floor unit for $2.4 million and lived there for the next two decades. “My mother lived in the same building, on the same elevator line, for more than 60 years,” Michael Stern told Gimme Shelter, adding that the Steinway B piano he grew up with is still in the apartment.
“It’s a wonderful thing,” Michael Stern said, adding that musicians including Itzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zuckerman, Daniel Barenboim and Yefim Bronfman, often dropped by and played piano there as well. Vera Stern died last year, at age 88.
The three-bedroom co-op comes with a semi-private elevator landing.
The apartment opens to a gallery, a living room on the park with a woodburning fireplace and a large dining room. The listing brokers are Ellen Cohen and Lorraine Dauber, of Stribling.
The elder Stern also owned a second-floor unit in the Emery Roth-designed building, which he bought for his mother and which he also had sound-proofed and used as a studio, Michael Stern said.
Stern transferred ownership of the studio to his third wife shortly before his death at age 81. (They had married five years prior to his death.)
The property transfer led to Stern’s three children, including Michael, launching a lawsuit against the executor of their father’s estate, whom they said was “manipulated by Ms. Stern and her greed” and ended up squandering their father’s legacy by selling his personal items, including his beloved violins, bows and music collection, via a “glorified eBay garage sale,” to pay off Stern’s debts, according to previous press reports. Michael’s siblings are David, a conductor in Paris, and Shira, a rabbi in New Jersey.
Ukrainian-born Isaac Stern, who once joked that US-Soviet cultural exchanges were essentially the exchange of Odessa Jews from one country to the other: “They send us their Jews from Odessa, and we send them our Jews from Odessa” — was also known for his pioneering trip to China in 1979, for continuing to play Bach as air raid sirens howled in Jerusalem during the first Gulf War in 1991, for leading the movement to save Carnegie Hall and for discovering Yo-Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman.