SHURA CHERKASSKY

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 466, 22 September 1928, Page 22

SHURA CHERKASSKY

THE BOY WONDER Shura Cherkassky the boy pianist who will shortly be heard in Auckland, created a sensation when he appeared in New York a few months ago. “The New York World” published the following appreciation of the boy’s genius. Shura Cherkassky, recently a child prodigy, now attained to manhood by virtue of his sixteen years, gave a piano recital at Carnegie Hall before a house full of enthusiasts and his more critical master, Josef Hofmann. It may be said at once that in this boy is lodged a talent for playing the piano hardly equalled by any but one or perhaps two virtuosi now before the public. Notwithstanding his tender age, Cherkassky communicates first and foremost a sense of unstinted power, an unlimited reservoir of strength. This strength, however, is never noise, but always the pressure of a tone with the quality of a silver trumpet. Clear, solid, and brilliant, this tone is the same from the top to the bottom of the keyboard. In chords, cantilena, in the swift flights of scales and passages, the tone is beautifully equalised. As for the mechanics of the pianist’s art, the boy’s mastery of his instrument is prodigious even in these days of super-teclinic. He is a youthful artist glorying in musical health, revelling in the sheer beauty of sound and sporting with thunderbolts like some infant Jove.