Tour by Lili Kraus

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 363, 7 June 1946, Page 9

Tour by Lili Kraus

HE first public appearance in New Zealand of Lili Kraus, the famous Continental pianist who is at present in Australia, ‘will. be in the Auckland Town Hall, on a date not yet fixed. She will arrive here this month. Her Auckland programme will include works by Bach, Mozart, and Brahms, and Beethoven’s "Waldstein" Sonata. Lili Kraus is already well known to New Zealand radio listeners through many recordings of music by Mozart, Schubert and Beethoven. She and her husband, Dr. Otto Mandl, and their two children, were interned throughout the Pacific war in Java, where she had been playing with the violinist Simon Goldberg. She was released last year, and reached Sydney in November. This year she has been making a tour of Australia for the Australian Broadcasting Commission.

The Yorkshire Post wrote of her playing of a Beethoven sonata: "Lili Kraus easily bears comparison with Schnabel, one of her masters. The present writer. having heard practically all the Beethoven sonatas played by Schnabel, believes that Miss Kraus is the equal of that master in interpretative power and insight. Her playing of this sonata was almost miraculous." Neville Cardus, the English critic now in Australia, wrote of a Beethoven performance: "The uncommon quality in the interpretation was a graciousness of nature that rippled every note-so much so that in a rapid figure they were not easily to be picked out; in fact, 1t was the phrase and not the note that seemed the unit in this sensitive pianist’s phrasing .... yet there was never the heavi"ness so many times mistakenly brought to the classic style." :