Blind Briton

The Woman's Symphony Orchestra of Chicago played three works competently before the intermission. Then last Sunday's Orchestra Hall audience craned their necks, watched a young man with horn-rimmed spectacles being led to a piano on the stage. The young man felt the keyboard, struck a note lightly, tentatively. Conductor Ebba Sundstrom tap-tapped with her baton. Into Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto swung the orchestra, followed by the young man who, despite his unorthodox way of holding his hands flat, his arms stiff, played fleetly with sure, supple tone.

Beaming acknowledgment of the applause, 24-year-old Alec Templeton, blind Briton, performed one of the tricks which many in the audience had primarily come to witness. He asked Conductor Sundstrom to name five notes, which he swiftly contrived into a theme with variations in the manner of Bach, Mozart, Chopin.

Blind Alec Templeton was brought to Chicago lately as a specialty performer by British Bandmaster Jack Hylton, whose orchestra plays at the Drake Hotel and over the radio sponsored by Standard Oil of Indiana. By this week, when Real Silk Hosiery was to take over the sponsorship, critics were convinced that an amazing musical talent had quietly turned up in Chicago. Young Templeton was born blind, of Scottish parents, on a farm near Cardiff in Wales. At 2, he played the piano, imitating the notes of a nearby church bell. At 4, he composed a lullaby with which his mother sang him to sleep. At 5, he directed a choir of his playmates. When Alec was 12, his father sold his interest in the farm, moved to London, enrolled his son in the Royal Academy. Father Templeton got himself elected to the London County Council but found it unnecessary to spend any money after his son's first term. Thereafter Alec earned his way with scholarships. At 16, he bested 20,000 pianists in a contest sponsored by the London Daily Express. Alec Templeton won a grand piano, learning the contest piece as he has learned all his large repertoire, by hearing others play, listening to phonograph records, studying Braille texts.

Many a parlor entertainer has a stock of well-rehearsed piano tricks. Many a vaudeville performer can play Yankee Doodle and Old Black Joe simultaneously when his stooges in the audience suggest the titles. Alec Templeton impressed Chicago critics with more remarkable feats. When Glenn Dillard Gunn gave him a theme, he quickly responded with a choral prelude which the Herald & Examiner critic almost took for a Bach-Busoni transcription. Pianist Templeton also showed Mr. Gunn he had not only learned Rachmaninoff's new Paganini Rhapsody from records but also could rattle off his own piano transcription of the complicated orchestra score. Alec Templeton amazed Critic Edward Barry of the Chicago Tribune by making a perfectly good piano sound as if it were horribly out of tune. At a recent Chicago party, Pianist Templeton was asked if he would accompany Violinist Nathan Milstein in Lalo's Symphonic espagnole. The blind pianist replied he did not know the work but would play it if someone ran through it first. Pianist Templeton then negotiated the longish composition with but one error. Awed, Violinist Milstein declared that the error was an improvement on the original.

An exceedingly affable, brown-eyed young man, Alec Templeton arrived in Chicago in the company of his father, who leads him onstage at concerts, makes him practice four hours every afternoon, sleep eight hours every night, drink nothing stronger than ginger ale. Pianist Templeton associates music with everything. After hearing a person's voice he may play a piano portrait in what he thinks is a characteristic key. Thus Pianist Myra Hess is. to Templeton, an intricate piece in E minor. Alec Templeton says Brahms's First Symphony is steak & onions. But his favorite food is boiled apple pudding--"in F sharp and fairly modern."

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