Pianist from Bow Bells

The wonder was that Carnegie Hall was even half-filled. Few U.S. music lovers had ever heard of an English pianist with the single-note name of "Solomon." But the few who had heard him play once in Manhattan ten years ago, or had heard him since on imported records, would never have missed the chance to hear him again.

Stocky Pianist Solomon walked briskly to the piano, bald head gleaming under the lights, bowed with almost perfunctory politeness, and sat down. For a full two minutes he peered with patient poise around the hall until his matinee audience settled down into pin-drop silence. Then he began to play the magnificent Bach-Liszt A Minor Prelude and Fugue with the kind of unobtrusive ease and authority that lets an audience relax and forget there is a pianist onstage. In fact, Pianist Solomon even seemed to be enjoying the music himself. Everything else on his program--Scarlatti, Schumann, Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy--had the same soaring quality, the same mastery of style, technical finish and complete naturalness of phrasing.

"A Cockney All Right." This week Solomon would leave Manhattan as quietly as he had come. Carnegie audiences would hear him again next month after a concert in Canada. And now, having demonstrated that he was one of the world's great pianists, there were assurances that the rest of the U.S. would get to hear him before another ten years rolled by.

At 46, ready-witted, poker-playing Pianist Solomon (full name: Solomon Cutner) is ready to display his wares more widely than he ever had before. A tailor's son, he was born in London "within sound if not sight of Bow bells--I'm a cockney all right." At eight, when he made his debut in Queen's Hall, his last name was dropped from the billing, and he never picked it up again. He played on provincial concert tours until he was 14--"until some people got interested in me and let me retire and study piano."

"Discreetly of Course." He played often in England, where he has long been a leader in the unimpressive field of British pianists, but it really took World War II to bring Solomon out. When he was not touring for the troops, he worked as an air-raid warden in his district of Kensington, fighting fires, digging out bomb victims, pausing only after the night's work to look at his hands.

He played in North Africa and Palestine and, after D-day in Normandy, "followed right behind--discreetly of course," playing on "everything from upright grands to downright shames." At war's end, he was made a commander of the Order of the British Empire.

Since then, although he is a man who likes his golf and his garden in St. John's Wood, Solomon has gotten more into the spirit of concertizing; in April he will make his first appearance in Finland. As for the U.S., he hopes now to come back "every year for the next ten years."

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