Short, plumpish Arthur Schnabel, who looked slightly unprepossessing from my vantage point in Row S, Carnegie Hall, proved two things Wednesday night at his astounding concert.
Schnabel proved that he was in reality a giant disguised as a short, plumpish fellow, and he proved for all time that Germany, which let him slip from between her fingers, is hopelessly psychopathic, irresponsible and uncivilized.
How anyone can hear Schnabel play Beethoven sonatas and then let him-go away to play elsewhere is, on any other theory, a mystery. But there have been many mysteries in Germany….
He banished all traces of a rumor that he was “coldly intellectual”, that he “lacks poetic feeling.”
From the opening notes of the Allegro in the B flat major sonata, Op. 22, to the final phrase in the Andante of the E major sonata, Op. 109, which closed the evening on a note of glamor, there was never any doubt of his ability to know and love Beethoven, and to sing, and sing sensitively the variegated patterns of the master. There was virtuosity, and feeling, and ### superb technique, besides an understanding of the philosophical and emotional imponderables involved such as left the audience first stunned and then roaring its applause.
Two evenings before, at Town Hall, another event of surpassing interest took place. Nadia Reisenberg, a sensitive pianist; Simeon Bellison, a virtuoso of a clarinetist, and the distinguished cellist, Felix Salmond, played Brahm’s chamber music.
They played them sympathetically, and were rewarded by much applause, Felix M. Warburg being observed among the applauders.
Ossip Gabrilowitsch, secure in his position of specialist in the romantic music of the last century, played Chopin and Schumann to almost anyone’s taste at Town Hall last Sunday night.
Dr. Walter Damrosch’s first Madison Square Garden concert of the season, for the benefit of the Musicians’ Emergency Fund, will be given next Saturday evening, with Bach and Wagner the only composers represented. But look at the list of artists who will assist the large orchestra: Harold Bauer, George Barrere, Frances Blaisdell, Henri Deering, Dorothea Flexer, Ernest Hutcheson, Herbert Gould, Charles Naegele, Albert Spalding and Theodore Webb.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
