Word: pianist
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Richter-Haaser's big-time career at the piano began at a time when many a lesser pianist is already beginning to fade from sight. The son of a carpenter (and amateur musician), he studied piano at the Dresden Music School, at 18 started to play concerts all over Germany. A decade later World War II interrupted his career. Assigned to an antiaircraft unit, he did not touch a piano for seven years, except to play in U.S. military hospitals as a P.W. at war's end. When he resumed his piano career in 1946, at 34, after...
...agitation about Richter-Haaser stemmed from an old argument: Should a pianist try for note-perfect accuracy, as most U.S. pianists do, or should he try, in Artur Rubinstein's phrase, to "pull the listener in by the hair," letting the notes fall where they may? (Wisecracking Virtuoso Rubinstein boasted after one performance that he could play an entire new recital with the notes that had fallen under the piano.) Pianist Richter-Haaser belongs to the hair-pulling, note-dropping school, in the spectacular romantic tradition. His performance last week-Beethoven's "Appassionato," Sonata, Schumann's Fantasy...
...keyboard was a musician, all right-but was he a topflight pianist? The question agitated most Manhattan critics last week, but it failed to disturb the crowd that thronged Town Hall to hear an eagerly awaited debut. Regardless of critical quibbles, Germany's 47-year-old Hans Richter-Haaser clearly proved to be one of the biggest keyboard talents to hit Manhattan in years...
...Harvard most of the group attended at least one class, and all of them visited and talked with student groups in their areas of interest. Of course, the "cultural representatives" of the delegation, namely pianist Vlasenko and movie and stage actress Zinaida Kirienko had the most invitations to visit groups in action...
From their first evening when Lev Vlasenko, the group's talented pianist, charmed a small Adams House audience with an informal concert, to their last night when the Americans and Russians threw reciprocal parties for each other, the visiting Russians as a whole tried their best to push politics into the background, to avoid any conflicts...