LILI KRAUS IS COMING HERE AT LAST

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 360, 17 May 1946, Page 18

LILI KRAUS IS COMING HERE AT LAST

HE National Broadcasting. Service announces that arrangements have been made for Lili Kraus, internationallyknown pianist, to tour New Zealand in a series of public concerts and broadcast recitals. Her visit will be followed by others equally interesting. Miss Kraus is the first concert artist of established world repute to visit New Zealand since the war ended, and such is her reputation that lovers of fine music will be eagerly awaiting her arrival. The introduction of Lili Kraus to New Zealand listeners as an artist in person rather than a name announced over the air from the label on a record might well follow the name of one of the serials at present running from New Zealand stations. We might call her story. "Departure Delayed." Arrangements for Lili Kraus to come to New Zealand were already in train as early as 1938, and she was making her way eastward on a world concert tour when she and her family were overtaken by war while in Java, and spent the long war years in a concentration camp in Batavia. After her release, Miss Kraus wrote to the NBS from Sydney saying, " ..... We have gone through a very hard time, and lost all our belongings; we and our. two children arrived here from the Japanese prison camp virtually with only the clothes we stood in. The children have not been to school for six years... ." A long and weary experience told in a few words. Miss Kraus has just concluded a long series of radio concerts throughout Australia, under the Australian Broadcasting Commission, and the reception given

her playing by audiences and critics has been most enthusiastic. Neville Cardus, eminent British musi¢ critic, wrote thus of one of her Sydney performances: "Lili Kraus, more than any other pianist I have heard for years, plays Schubert with the right, onward, yet vagrant, lightness of movement. Given the exact touch and bloom of tone, the music seemed scarcely to begin; the sounds (not of this world) came upon the air un-selfconsciously going their ways with that happiness which in Schubert moves us almost to tears because it is so unconcernedly happy and young."