Grand Tour

New Zealand Listener, Volume 41, Issue 1053, 30 October 1959, Page 16

Grand Tour

Lm KRAUS is now at the end of her New Zealand tour and it will be, by her own public statement last Saturday, five years before we see her again. She has spent the last few months taking us on a tour of her favourite composers, and a more enlightening and persuasive guide to Mozart, Haydn, Schubert and Bartok could scarcely be imagined. Her account of the Schubert A minor sonata, Op. 143, rebroadcast last week, was a miracle of insight and control. Only pianists who have tried to play this formidable and curious work, feeling it under their hands lumpy and ungrateful, can fully realise the power of this great musician to make the apparently halting statements of a composer in enigmatic mood into the most poignant eloquence. The last movement is the strangest of all, the texture of the music shivering and dissolving into unearthly and terrible realms, and here Lili Kraus gave it the strangest frosty glitter, like an Antarctic snowscape, until the last page where the final despairing statement of the human theme is shattered and extinguished by shoals of octaves, which the pianist hammered out with amazing virtuosity. Her Beethoven Fourth concerto some months ago had the ripest tenderness and warmth, and nothing could be imagined more contrasting in mood than her account last Saturday of the Mozart D minor piano concerto. She gave the work a quality at once lofty and deeply piercing, aristocratic to the last beautifully moulded phrase, yet saturated with the deepest human feeling. Perhaps only a pianist trained as she has been in the Viennese tradition can bring off this air of poignant elegy and dying fall. One hopes that the five years will pass

quickly.

B.E.G.

M.