Pianist Abroad

The little woman in black walked slowly from a wing of the ornate Kurzaal at Scheveningen, The Netherlands, bowed to the scattered applause, and took her place at the piano. For the next 90 minutes she kept her eyes fixed on the keyboard while her groomed fingers agilely feather-dusted and trip-hammered through Bach's Goldberg Variations. At the last note, she slumped in her seat as wave after wave of applause broke over her bowed head.

Such response is routine for U.S.-born Pianist Rosalyn Tureck--in Europe. Although Tureck's name is only vaguely known to most U.S. concertgoers, to European audiences it is fast becoming the word for some of the most authoritative Bach interpretation to be found.

Ever since she went to London four years ago, critics have fallen over themselves in praise. Said the London Times: "It is not possible to exaggerate the artistic value of her performance. When Miss Rosalyn Tureck plays Bach, all talk about the necessity of having a harpsichord to recapture Bach's style seems little short of nonsense." The Tablet: "Without doubt, the greatest Bach pianist of today." After last week's performance, Amsterdam's Algemeen Handelsblad said: "One could exhaust oneself in expressions of praise . . . Her interpretation sets a new norm, a standard for the style in which Bach deserves to be played today."

Piano Preferred. Nobody is more surprised by her spectacular success in Europe than 42-year-old Rosalyn Tureck herself. Born in Chicago of Turkish-Ukrainian parents, she was giving all-Bach recitals by the time she was 15. At 16, as an applicant for a scholarship at Manhattan's Juilliard School of Music, she staggered the judges by offering to ripple off 16 Bach preludes and fugues. In her second year at Juilliard she learned the Goldberg Variations in five weeks, was later told by the president that it was impossible to play the Variations (unmodified) on a piano. "Luckily," says Rosalyn Tureck, "I hadn't known that." After graduation she joined Juilliard's faculty.

On the concert stage, Tureck impressed the critics, but U.S. concertgoers, more accustomed to the Bach credentials of Harpsichordists Wanda Landowska and Ralph Kirkpatrick, were left relatively cool. After a poorly attended concert in Manhattan's Town Hall, the New York Times critic demanded: "Must this great artist go to Europe to be recognized by her own country?" In 1953 she did just that, with such success that she returned in 1954 for four months of solid engagements. Her concerts at London's Albert Hall have sold out months in advance. Twice she has packed the huge Festival Hall, and has had capacity audiences at Wigmore Hall spilling onto the stage.

Only a Click. Tureck's mastery of Bach is partially the result of sheer, grinding study and immersion in his work. Once, early in her career, she decided that she was learning her Bach too fast, promptly "threw out all I'd done" and started learning over again with an entirely new pianistic technique. She would spend two days mastering four lines. Her playing is unhurried, coolly articulated and generously ornamented, has a miraculous clarity that manages to achieve some of the harpsichord's shimmering brilliance along with the piano's plump sound. Tureck believes that it is unfair to perform Bach on the harpsichord in the concert hall. "Its place is not in the concert hall," she says. "What you hear is a click, if you hear anything at all."

Pianist Tureck has given up her old teaching job at Juilliard, settled down in London (she is not married) in a house with a two-story, soundproofed studio. She is recording (for HMV) the whole of Bach's mammoth Clavieriibung. Next year she sets out on a South African tour, and after that she would like to tour the U.S. once again--to see if her compatriots have at last warmed to the Tureck sound.

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