No Encores From Schnabel

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 455, 12 March 1948, Page 25

No Encores From Schnabel

WRITER in The Listener a few months ago expressed the opinion that New Zealand audiences wére given to indiscriminate applause. Hand-clap-ping, he thought, resolved itself into a sort of tug-of-war or endurance test between audience, and performers to see how many encores performers could be persuaded to give, But there are artists -few of whom seem to have been to New Zealand-who make a practice of never giving encores, and the pianist Artur Schnabel, whose recordings are frequehtly heard in NZBS programmes, is one of them. Schnabel told an overseas magazine recently that he layed simply for the sake of playing. "It is really my desire not to play in public at all," he said, Last month, at the age of 65, he gave American audiences a tantalising sample of the music he plays and loves bestpiano works of Beethoven, Schubert and Mozart. He employs no agents. Schnabel said he was never exploited, His parents were very good in that way. He took lessons for only seven years, still hated to practise and seldom did"I practise in my head." His teacher, who was a close friend of Brahms, took him along several of Brahms’s famed walks in the Vienna woods, but Schnabel still loves to discount the press-agent story that Brahms discovered him at his first recital, and praised his genius. Schnabel says: "The only thing Brahms ever said to me was, ‘Are you hungry, boy?’ before we started eating, and ‘Have you had enough?’ when we finished." Artur Schnabel will be heard in recorded recitals from 1YX on Monday, March 15, at 8.0 p.m., 2YH on Wednesday, March 17, at 9.50 am, 1YA Friday, March 19, at 2.30 p.m. 4YO on Saturday, March 20, at 10. 0 p.m.