“David Golub, a pianist and conductor, who was seen as Isaac Stern’s accompanist in the 1979 film ”From Mao to Mozart” and who performed regularly with several chamber ensembles, most notably the Golub-Kaplan-Carr Trio, died on Monday at his home in Milan. He was 50 and lived in Milan and New York.

The cause was lung cancer, said Nancy Shear, Mr. Golub’s press representative.

Mr. Golub was born in Chicago in 1950 and grew up in Dallas, where he began his piano studies. He was accepted at the pre-college division of the Juilliard School when he was 14, but chose to continue studying in Dallas.

When he was 18, he enrolled at the Juilliard School and moved to New York. But during his second year of studies there, he decided to take six months off to reconsider his technique.

His teacher, Beveridge Webster, was a specialist in the French repertory, but Mr. Golub had become increasingly drawn to the Russian Romantic school of pianism, which demanded a different approach to both the weight and color of a pianist’s sound.”