Music: Poet of the Piano

With Rubinstein, Horowitz and Richter still around, this is not exactly a poor age for the piano. But no need to fear the historians’ old canard about each epoch of artistic plenty being followed by drought. The best of today’s pianists are already being pressed by some younger challengers, among them Vladimir Ashkenazy, 38, the Russian-born star who now lives in Iceland, and Italy’s Maurizio Pollini, 34. They, in turn, have to look over their shoulders at even younger contenders.

One of them comes from—why not?

—The Bronx. He is Murray Perahia, 29, a slight, dark, fine-boned pianist who looks rather like some 19th century poet. The music he favors is gentle too. Playing Mendelssohn or Chopin, he closes his eyes, lifts his face toward the ceiling, and effortlessly—sometimes while smiling whimsically—spins out a bright melody. Yet later on in a program, he can also hammer out Bartok with enough flash and thunder to rival anyone’s musical fireworks.

Although Perahia began studying piano at six, he was no performing prodigy. Until he reached his mid-20s, he was mainly a team man, playing chamber music with such artists as Alexander Schneider, Rudolf Serkin and Pablo Casals, whom he met at the Marlboro Music Festival. At the Mannes College of Music in Manhattan, Perahia studied conducting with Carl Bamberger. “I was very involved in absolute music, in how certain notes react to one another,” he says. Only after he graduated did he become fascinated by the demands and mysteries of solo performing.

In 1972 Perahia laid aside his baton for a Steinway. He was 25, short on experience, and well aware that he needed a competition success to make a name for himself. Fighting nausea all the way, he won England’s important Leeds International Pianoforte Competition. That brought him 50 performing dates and a contract with Columbia Records, which had not signed a new pianist since Andre Watts in the mid-1960s. His concert fees started to rise. (He now makes $5,000 per engagement.)

Then a year ago, just as his career was beginning to soar, Perahia grounded himself. Success, he explains, “took me by surprise. Suddenly there was no time for anything else. I was labeled a specialist in Chopin and Schumann. Now that’s not bad. But I also wanted to learn more Handel, Brahms and Haydn, whether or not I played them in public.” He also decided he was “not really a piano buff,” that he was more “interested in the ideas behind the music” than in one instrument.

Broader Interest. Perahia spent his sabbatical in London. He went to the theater and read constantly: Huxley, Woolf, Joyce, Homer. He discovered a musical colony that is far more diverse than the one camped along Manhattan’s Central Park West. Praising the BBC’s role in educating English audiences, Perahia claims that interest in serious music is far broader in Britain than in the U.S. “In London,” he insists, “there isn’t anybody on the street who hasn’t heard that Benjamin Britten is composing again.”

But when his sabbatical was over, Perahia was ready to return to work. “I really missed giving concerts,” he says. In February he began a coast-to-coast U.S. tour in which he appeared as recitalist, chamber musician and symphony soloist. Last week he played Schumann’s piano concerto at Manhattan’s Avery Fisher Hall with Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic. In a style that is classically clear, Perahia illuminated the familiar. Melodies flowed from his fingers in a pure cantabile that would be the envy of many an opera singer. Finally, unable to resist his melting tones, a few in the audience yielded to the temptation to hum along with Murray. Schumann probably would not have minded.