Music: Contrast

In the heart of wartime London, on Trafalgar Square, there was one place where you could hear music every weekday: the National Gallery. In noontime concerts there Pianist Myra Hess provided a music-filled haven for weary, worried war workers, fighting men and blitzed citizens. By war’s end she had sold 800,000 tickets — at a shilling a head — to 1,698 concerts, 147 of which she played herself. King George made Myra Hess a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire for it. She was even prouder of the fact that “taxi drivers learned to love Mozart.”

Last week in Manhattan, 56-year-old Dame Myra Hess, greatest of all contemporary women pianists, played her first U.S. recital in 7½ years. The concert had been sold out weeks in advance. In the audience, earnest young piano students used scores to follow her program of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms. Manhattan’s concertgoers found her style cool, careful and womanly: a grateful contrast to some of the pedal pounding and frantic gymnastics that passes for virtuosity these days.