Good Play

Even the elderly backstage doorman was excited, for he had heard the buzzing in the lobby during the intermission. "They're crazy about you," he told the 15-year-old lad. "Just crazy."

The doorman was right. Manhattan concertgoers, to whom child prodigies were no novelty, were wild about Ervin Laszlo. His flashing performance of Bach, Beethoven, Schumann, Chopin and Debussy might have made any of his elders envious. Second-chair critics, who attend dozens of recitals a year and stoically put up with a lot of willing but perfunctory performers, found themselves using first-chair words of praise. "One searches his memory in vain," wrote the New York Times's Noel Straus, "for another so richly endowed with all of the factors that make for extraordinary and completely satisfying piano playing."

There was little novelty in such notices for Ervin Laszlo. He made his debut at nine, and by the time Hungary turned Nazi, he was a celebrity in Budapest.

The Nazis moved into their home, banded their arms with the yellow Star of David, sent Ervin's father to the Russian front as a gravedigger for the army. For months, Ervin and his mother lived in a dingy, heatless flat, hidden out by the music loving Swedish Ambassador.

After the war, Ervin went back to his piano, and last year won the coveted first prize at the International Music Competition in Geneva. Now an earnest, black-eyed boy who still likes to tinker with machines "for amuse myself," he hopes to stay in the U.S. He is not nervous before U.S. audiences ("It is not a good play, if your hands are trembling," he says sensibly). But in spite of the critics' plaudits at his Manhattan debut, he thinks he has a long way to go to please them permanently: "I must work and work," says he. "One is never ready."

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