Richard Farrell Impressed the Americans

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 467, 4 June 1948, Page 17

Richard Farrell Impressed the Americans

S we go to press the New Zealand pianist Richard Farrell is on his way to Auckland, somewhere in the air between San Francisco. and Whenuapai. All going well, he will start his eight weeks’ concert tour of the Dominion with a recital at the Auckland Town Hall on Tuesday, June 8. Hé comes back to New Zealand direct from New York, where he has completed, at the age of 21, four years of study at the Juilliard School of Music under Madame Samaroff Stokowski. Farrell has been praised by critics curing his semi-professional appearances in the United States for the maturity of his interpretations, his brilliant technique, and the rugged vitality of his playing, coupled with a tone of liquid beauty. He brings back with him a repertoire that includes, besides the standard works of the great classical and romantic composers such modern compositions as Hindemith’s Sonata No. 2,,Copland’s Piano Sonata (1941), and Prokofieff’s Sonata No. 7 (1941). Richard Farrell had his first piano lessons from Mrs. Florence Fitzgerald end Gordon Short, of Wellington. Coming from a musical family, he seemed to have music in his blood, and from an early age used to sit quietly listening to the gramophone as long as anyone would play records for him. At two he had learnt how to work the gramophone himself, and his parents used to marvel how-although he couldn’t read -he would go to the music cabinet and always select the more "classical" records. Evidently he learnt to know the

look of the records he liked best-Gil-bert and Sullivan, and operatic overtures and arias. At the age of six he sang French songs over the air, and a few years after this he composed a lament | on the death of Archbishop Redwood. Absolute Pitch By the time he was 12 hé could identify, without looking, any note of music that was struck on the piano, that is, he showed he has a sense of absolute pitch, a rare gift even among musicians. Mozart was said to have possessed it at the age of’ seven. To-day Richard Farrell is regarded as one of the most promising of the younger pianists, and he has won special notice through his prodigious musical memory. Shortly after his arrival in New York in 1945 he played Copland’s new Piano Sonata entirely from memory at a student recital. Copland, who was present at the concert, was most impressed. "Although I composed it myself," he said afterwards, "I can’t memorise it." ~ Richard Farrell’s interpretations of Beethoven, Brahms and Mozart, which New Zealand audiences are to hear, are rich and mature. He hopes to include also in his programmes a liberal sprinkling of Chopin, Schumann, and Liszt, and several of the more rarely played piano. pieces of Ravel, Debussy, and Granados. Although he has developed from a child prodigy into an experienced concert pianist, Richard Farrell still has one youthful ambition unfulfilled. When he was very young he used to say, "I'd rather be a conductor than anything." He has recently moved a little nearer to that goal, however, because while he was at the Juilliard School in New York he won a scholarship in conducting granted by Koussevitsky. While he is in New Zealand Richard Farrell will give concerts in the four main centres and in several of the larger provincial towns, All of his concerts will be broadcast. He is due back in New York in September,