Lili

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 936, 19 July 1957, Page 8

Lili

| tm KRAUS is back, and she gave her first recital on YC link last week. I wonder how many listeners felt as I did: the years dropping like scales from the mind, back to 1946 with the war just over, but the musical famine still on; then this goddess among us, opening for us with her art a whole new world of sound. I owe her much. She first made me listen to Mozart and Bartok, and made me aware for the first time of Schubert as a serious composer. Over her best playing in those vears there hung what I can describe

only as a golden bloom, and I have wondered since whether it was because she was merely the first of a long line of impressive musicians, whether her striking personality and my youth were responsible, or whether nostalgically, I was simply gilding the past. But now I have heard her again, playing the Beethoven F Sharp Major Sonata and the Eroica Variations, and I know that my tender ears were not deceived; there is the same wonderful ripe bloom on her tone, the highest finish of performance, and all the evidence of the ceepest musical insight. In the matter simply of keyboard athletics, she can make some resounding names look foolish, and of the playing as a whole, I can only say, gratefully and inadequately, a musician is back among us. Her great gift, surely the supreme one for a musician, is to lead one into the heart of the music itself without a single irrelevant distraction. Only ohe artist in hundreds offers this purity of intention. My regret is profound that she will not he playing more often here, and I envy all those fortunate souls who will be hearing her

for the first time.

B.E.G.

M.