Page 8 Advertisements Column 5

Press, Volume LV, Issue 16422, 16 January 1919, Page 8

'Musical circles in America are keenly i interested in a new prodigy, a 17-year-old-Russian Jew, Jascha Helfetz by name, whose skill with the violin has been producing quite a sensation. Critics on some of the leading papers are paying the highest tribute not only to the perfection of his technique but -to tho rare artistic quality of his playing. It is said that at the age or eight months he could be stilled only by the tones of his father's violin—his father being a member of a symphony orchestra at Vilna. Ten months later the infant was clearly able to detect wrong notes, purposely played. _ At tne age of three he received his first instruction on the violin, and was able to accomplish in a month or even a week what would take other children a At the ago of four be so impressed the authorities of the Imperial Music School witn his ability as to obtain admission to their classes. At six he was playing Mendelssohn's Concerto at Kovna, before an enthusiastic audience or a thousand people. Some old Georgian houses in Westminster, which had degenerated into slums and been let out in single-roomed tenements, are now greatly in demaod as residences by well-tento people.