When the upright piano arrived at Gila Goldstein’s Tel Aviv home, it was supposed to be for her 9-year-old sister.
But it was 4-year-old Gila who was playing songs off the radio by ear within a week.
In the 35 years since, Goldstein’s audiences have grown from delighted fellow kindergarteners to concert audiences worldwide. The lauded pianist will make just her second trip to San Francisco on Sunday, May 16, when she plays a solo recital of Bach, Chopin, Brahms and the Israeli composer Paul Ben-Haim at the Old First Church on Sacramento Street.
It is a program chock full of a few of Goldstein’s favorite things.
“I basically choose what I love,” said the pianist in a phone interview from her New York home, where she has lived ever since her graduation from the Rubin Academy of Music at Tel Aviv University in the late 1980s.
“I open almost every recital with Bach. Chopin is just gorgeous music, I don’t know how else to describe it. It speaks to my heart. Music, it must speak to my heart. It’s very difficult to describe what music does to me.”
Goldstein handpicked five of the Polish pianist’s 51 mazurkas, or folk dances, for the recital.
“Each is a masterpiece. It has everything in its three minutes. It’s almost like a poem,” she said in her unmistakably Israeli lilt. “Short poems have so much in them. You know, less is more.”
Goldstein is best known in the international piano scene as an “interpreter” of the work of Ben-Haim, Israel’s most revered composer. Born Paul Frankenberger in Germany, Ben-Haim fled his native land in 1933, settling in pre-state Israel and changing his name. He was deeply influenced by the Middle Eastern music he discovered there in his long and prolific career (he died in 1984).
For Israelis, said Goldstein, listening to Ben-Haim’s work is like an American appreciating the works of George Gershwin or Aaron Copland — he became “almost a national composer.” Goldstein, who released a CD of Ben-Haim compositions in 2001, hopes to acquaint the world with Israel’s top composer.
“It’s not easy for a composer in Israel to be promoted internationally,” she said. In her eyes, Ben-Haim is on an equal footing with someone like the Hungarian Bela Bartok, also “the national composer of a small country.”
Ben-Haim “just had his own language. He was very inspired by the local ethnic sound in Israel, the Arab music, the Jewish music, the Yemenite music. It was a new sound for him; he came from the very Western tradition of Strauss and Mahler.”
When she isn’t touring solo or recording, Goldstein is a rehearsal and touring pianist with the Harlem Boy’s Choir, a position she has held for the past seven years.
Coincidentally, one year after she joined the choir, the singers took off on a tour to Israel. Goldstein added “translator” to her job title, she noted with a laugh.
“It was amazing, very emotional and very moving. They sang some [pieces] in Hebrew and opened every show with the national anthem,” she recalled. “I was like a tourist in my own country.”
Though she is a devotee of Bach, Brahms and Ben-Haim, if she could share the piano bench with any fellow musician, living or dead, it would be the fiery Argentine-born pianist Martha Argerich, in a New York minute.
“She’s like a force of nature,” said Goldstein, who grew up admiring the “old generation” of pianists including Vladimir Horowitz, Artur Rubinstein and Glenn Gould. “She just takes music-making to such a level. She goes so much beyond the score, and the level of spontaneity is just incredible.”
Being a professional musician isn’t just roses and curtain calls.
“You think [concert pianists] are only having fun. And, of course, we do. But it takes an enormous amount of discipline and concentration to practice and prepare a program and memorize [it]. It’s mentally, emotionally and physically tiring. It’s almost like a sport,” she said.
“So, it’s really not a normal lifestyle.”
Gila Goldstein will appear at 5 p.m. on Sunday, May 16, at the Old First Presbyterian Church, 1751 Sacramento St., S.F. Tickets: $15 general admission, $12 seniors and students. Children under 12 admitted free. Information: (415) 474-1608 or www.oldfirstconcerts.org.