Word: lilies
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Lili Kraus, a 58-year-old grandmother, has a crush on Wolfgang and she doesn't care who knows it. When she jetted to Manhattan from Vienna last month, riding alongside her was the nearly life-size bust of Mozart that accompanies her wherever she goes. She came to do him honor in the best way she knows how: by playing all 25 of his piano concertos in nine consecutive concerts, the first time such a feat has been undertaken...
Treasure Fund. Draped regally in a gold brocade gown, her hair piled high in a bun, Lili Kraus last week began the first lap of her Mozart marathon. In the opening Concerto No. 4, composed when Mozart was eleven, she unfolded the beguilingly simple melodies with a rippling grace and ease; in No. 9 she engaged the Mozart Chamber Orchestra in a lighthearted dialogue that rang with all the gusto of a back-porch gossip fest. And her reading of the passionate No. 20, the most popular of Mozart's piano works, was clean refinement and intense drama...
Though she has played infrequently in the U.S., Lili Kraus has been a celebrated soloist in Europe for more than 30 years. Daughter of an impoverished scissor sharpener, she was born in Budapest, became a prodigy at six, taught adult students at eight, became a full-fledged soloist at 20. In 1940, while on a concert tour of Java, she was stranded by the war and eventually placed in a Japanese forced-labor camp. Denied access to a piano for most of the three years of her imprisonment, she "continued to play organically," deciding that "either...
Does she plan a vacation from Mozart after her series is ended? "Never," insists Lili Kraus. "It is the kind of enchantment that never leaves...
VERDI: REQUIEM (RCA Victor). The virtues of this new recording are the soloists. Carlo Bergonzi is good enough to make the listener forget Jussi Bjoerling's masterly reading of the Ingemisco. Birgit Nilsson is all fire; Lili Chookasian and Ezio Flagello both have big, warm voices. The difficulties stem from Erich Leins-dorf's conducting of the Boston Symphony. The pace is much too slow. The long, dramatic Otello-like lines enshroud the listener rather than move him. Tullio Serafin's interpretation of the Requiem (Angel) is still the best...