"Great Artist"

A woman in the audience clapped so hard she lost the diamond out of her ring. The violinists of the New York Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra couldn't get backstage fast enough to congratulate the soloist. An almost unknown young French violinist, Ginette Neveu, had given a more flashing performance of Brahms's much-played Violin Concerto in D Major than Manhattan had heard in many a season.

Grandniece of the late famed French Organist Charles Marie Widor, Ginette learned fiddling from her violinist mother, gave her first concert with the Concerts Colonne in Paris when she was seven. From then on, prizes fell to her: at eleven, the first prize of the Paris Conservatory (for her own reward, Ginette requested and got a toy pistol from her mother), at 15, the coveted Wieniawski Prize in Warsaw. She was 20 when the war broke out. "Under the occupation life was so difficult, the future so uncertain, music took on another meaning in my life," she says. "It became a necessity."

Said she (in French) to admirers who crowded backstage at Carnegie Hall after her concert: "It is such a pleasure to play with a great orchestra." The pleasure was not all hers. Wrote the New York Herald Tribune's Critic Virgil Thomson: ". . . The finest, from every point of view, of the younger European artists ... we have [heard] here since the war . . . those masterful and strangely concentrated young people who came to maturity midst bloodshed and treason. In any company (and American competition runs high these days), Miss Neveu is a great artist."

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