First Concert by Lili Kraus in New Zealand

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 367, 5 July 1946, Page 18

First Concert by Lili Kraus in New Zealand

N June 20 Lili Kraus played at the Auckland Town Hall in a concert directed by the National Broadcasting Service. In the week before she had broadcast three times from 1YA, and had played at a lunch-hour concert, and at the Auckland University College and the Teachers’ Training College. This was her first public performance in New Zealand. I had ‘heard all of these other recitals. They were generous programmes, played the only way she seems to know how to play-that is, generously, withholding nothing. If the halls and the piancs were by no means what her audience thought she should have had, she seemed unaware of it herself. The evening before the Town Hall concert she played at the Training College: Mozart’s Sonata in A Minor, Schumann’s "Carnaval" and a posthumous sonata of Schubert. There is still discussion in Auckland as to whether anything she played at the Town Hall outshone her Schubert sonata the night before, or the Mozart sonata in the University Hall, or the Beethoven Opus 109 at the Tower Studio. In all these places I had seen

her dwarfing other people who had played there. At the Town Hall I knew I could see her in perspective against other pianists who had played there in the last twenty years. The National Anthem was a Prayer Lili Kraus opened her Town Hall concert by playing "God Save the King" as if it were a prayer and not a call to arms. Before she could continue she had to leave the platform to borrow a large handkerchief to clean the piano, because the keys were damp. The applause for this, which may have bewildered people listening in, was for the way she did it. This was not the fidgeting and flicking of a nervous pianist. It was a demonstration of how to clean a piano. When she began to play Bach’s Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue in D Minor, I think the first impression-something that comes fresh and startling every time she begins a _concert-was of vitality of tone. This brings a sudden awareness of the strings of the piano, of the structure of the instrument and its purpose. The dynamic range of the Fantasia showed at once that this quality is . in every note she plays, in the swift and gentle ones as much as the solitary

powerful ones. The Fantasia was rich and warm and coherent, perfectly played. The Fugue was constructed on a subject with a marked diminuendo towards the end, so that in the inner parts it melted into the whole rather before the end of the phrase. The whole Fugue was faster and less rhetorical than I have thought of it before. There are probably at least twenty grand ways of playing this Fugue -Bach is the most arguable of com-posers-and this was certainly one of them. I didn’t feel, as I do when Lili Kraus plays Mozart or Schubert, that there is no other possible way but the one she is revealing. What I did feel was that there was no other possible way of playing the piano but the way she played it. She doesn’t pldy on her instrument, she plays with it; there isn’t a bar where the music is diverted from its own shape into pianism. It is the same with her technique-it is used for the music, and if one watches to see how she will manage a passage of known technical difficulty, all that one learns is that one was quite mistaken in thinking it a difficult passage. Long before the Bach was finished I had forgotten my irritation at the fitful and _ ill-ad-justed spotlight which was being thrown down on the pianist, and my fears of

the large, malignant cellophane flowers that were glowering from pots on either side of the stage. A Welcome for Mozart Lili Kraus then played a Mozart Piano Sonata, K.333, in B Flat. She took the first and third movements with that almost reckless brilliance that I feel Mozart is often asking for, though it is no use offering it to him without this sureness and clarity as well as speed; the second movement, too, was perfect, and I still cannot understand how the tone she gave to this cquld be so gently lyrical in effect and yet so rich in a large hall. Mozart’s Piano Sonatas have not, I think, been played in the Town Hal! before, though they are widely known and devotedly studied in humbler places; and in the applause for K.333 there was a welcome for Mozart as well as for this interpretation. The Brahms that followed reaffirmed what the Mozart ‘had revealed — the clarity of her transitions from movement to movement, from phrase to phrase, from forte to piano. There are no aimless or perfunctory bars and she is never caught resting in that no-man’s-land of mezzo-forte. If she is there she is on her way somewhere else, the path clear in her mind. In the same way she

can make a lightning transition from one composer to another without bringing anything of one to the next, or trailing even a wisp of that purely personal quality by which some pianists make one almost more conscious of who plays the music than who has written. it. Hard on the heels of the Mozart came a Brahms Rhapsody, an. emotional and technical volte face, which was grandly dramatic. When the Town Hall clock failed to check the Brahms, two fire engines were called out, but even then the pianist seemed to stop more for her audience’s sake than for her own. She replayed the Intermezzo and then dealt with that defiant Rhapsody in E Flat Major in. such a way as to send these disturbances from our minds, utterly routed. _ When the interval came I began to regret that I had undertaken to write about Lili Kraus’ playing, I had seen in the past few days what happened to people when they tried to find words for it-the seasoned concert-goers of Auckland had been going round saying that they were walking on air, that they had drunk the milk of Paradise, and so on; and indeed that is what they looked like. They had started out to write to friends in the south to tell them why they must on no account miss "hearing Lili Kraus, and found that in the end they had a. page of truly wonderful adjectives in front of them, and a literary effort unfit even for a school magazine. It is easy enough to say what is wrong with a person’s playing, but when it is right-in the complete sense that hers is-there are no words. Somé explanation had to be found to satisfy the people who hadn’t heard Lili Kraus and were wondering what was wrong with us all-and some explanation too for those of us who had been hearing her play and wondering why everything seemed suddenly to have come right. It might be this way-people who work with music daily, either listening or playing, find a great deal of pleasure in it, but they are looking beyond this all the time and working towards those moments where there is joy of quite a different quality, a conviction that the composer’s music has been re-

created as he heard it when he wrote it down. This conviction is unqualified when it comes, but in ordinary musical life it comes only in short, rare moments-just enough to keep people working hard hoping for more. What Lili Kraus does is simply to deliver such moments nearly all the time she is playing far more continuously than any other musician I have heard. When she plays Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert -the three to whom her understanding has perhaps brought her closest — they seem to reach us through the clearest channel a human being could make for them. These Auckland audiences have been put into thi$ state of exhilaration and amazement by the full force of the music itself. A New Lili Kraus? Great musicians do not often come to New Zealand while they are in their best years. When they do, when we know that we are having an evening that might make us the envy of any city in the world, it is strangely exciting. Nobody who had heard all that Lili

Kraus played in Auckland in one week could imagine that her vitality, her technique, her repertoire-those things that her internment might have taken from her-are less than they were before. As a human being, as a musician, she cannot have stood still during this time. The excitement of the Town Hall concert was unique — perhaps we heard a new Lili Kraus, one that the other side of the world does not know yet. After the interval the audience returned with a look of hope that I have never seen before at a piano recital. Usually by this time there is a feeling that the main dishes have been carried out and that there is nothing to look forward to but a few saucers of nuts and raisins. This evening there was still a lordly dish to come-the Waldstein Sonata, Chopin had been remembered in the way he himself is said to have asked to be-by the playing of Mozart’s music instead of his own, As the lights went out after the interval I began to think about the Waldstein Sonata. I had often wondered what might be heard in the last movement, the Rondo, if it were played by a pianist whose technique was equal to it but not an end in itself, by a musician who had noted Beethoven’s suggestion Allegretto Moderator and had thought about the mood that might lie behind it, and the full possibilities of the relationship of those first few bars to the final Prestissimo. Now I thought I might know. As Lili Kraus slowly explored the depths of the Molto Adagio she seemed to be in the very closest touch with Beethoven’s intentions. As she moved up to the Rondo there was a pause-and then it was like seeing a seaplane taking off from the water almost out of earshot, watching it and now hearing it, too, coming closer, gathering speed without haste, the sound coming in louder gusts until with a sudden roar it was right overhead. When I came to myself I marshalled up other performances I had heard of the Waldstein. Beside this they were like the noise of a motor-cycle when a young man starts it up and rides it round and round the block. Wrapping them all up in this simile, I threw them overboard

for ever.

D.F.

T.