PIANISTS ON TOUR

Evening Post, Volume CXIII, Issue 1, 2 January 1932, Page 17

PIANISTS ON TOUR

MARK HAMBOURG'S BOOK

When, exactly sixty years, after Alexander 's death, his grand-nephew, Alexander 111., .a man of very different mettle, visited tho town of Voronosch, iv South Russia, he niado v great impression on a six-year v,,1 boy, Mark Uiimbourg, the son of a Jewish musician.. But the prospects of any Alexandered Russian wero not reassuring-; and so at the age of 10 tho little precocious fellow—he "hated" practising tho piano—was brought by his father, neither of them speaking anything but Russian, to London. Since that time Mr. Hainbourg, by virtue of his art as a very great pianist, has spent a largo portion of his life in wandering over tho world, which, to his sensitive mind, suggests even more than tho "thousand and one notes" used by him in his sub-titlo to "From Piano to Forte." That is just tho kind of title that those who know Mark Hambourg would expect him to chooso for a book of reminiscences,. and tho book itself is just tho kind ono would expect from his whimsical personality. When 'ho was in Wellington a few months ago ho remarked that he had then written his book, but was busily engaged, at tho roquost of the publishers, in expurgating about a third of it owing to libels in the offing.

The result is an attractive book of varied interest, beginning with his meeting in London anti-Tsarist idealists like . Tchaikowsky, Stepniak, Kropolkin, and, later, Lenin, who borrowed, and repaid, money from Joseph TTels, the soap maker. The large-minded -Felix Moschcles introduced him to a wider circle, and three yeara In Vienna with tho marvellous Loschotizky opened new avenues. His professional tours round tho world havo mado him a cosmopolitan, while his marriage with one of Lord Muir-Mackenzie's daughters introduced him to another audience, including Lord Haldane and Lord Oxford, for whom music was a "closed book."

Ho has many good stories to tell, and has a gift of neat characterisation, as when he says that Cobden Sanderson looked like an "intelligent squirrel,", and remarks that Wilhelmy varied his labours as a violin teacher by "drinking a quantity of magnificent wine and selling less magnificent violins." What is even more interesting are his views on music, for his career coincides with the routing of the "heavy Gorman style" of piano interpretation, largely through Slav influence, so that he lived to see Rachmaninoff 's Prelude the first favourito of wounded soldiers, with the Moonlight Sonata second. Altogether, "Prom Piano to Forte" is a very engaging book by a-keen intelligence.