Fanfare for Piano

The first contestant was a tall blonde from Oregon with a willowy Grace Kelly look. When she rose from the piano after playing Brahms's Concerto No. 1 in D Minor, the ovation was led by the usherettes at the rear of the hall: only three years ago. Pianist Tana Bawden had been a Carnegie Hall usherette herself. But after the slim, curly-haired young man from St. Louis played Prokofiev's Concerto No. 2 in G Minor, the ovation was even louder: at intermission a Carnegie Hall stagehand was making book on him in the lobby at 2 to 1.

The odds held fast through the third contestant's rendering of Rachmaninoff's Concerto No. 2 in C Minor, and at evening's end the expected announcement was made: 24-year-old Pianist Malcolm Frager was the 2Oth-anniversary winner of the U.S.'s most prestigious instrumental competition, for the Leventritt Award.

For the first time, this year the Leventritt finals were opened to the general public in an effort to give the competition some of the glamour enjoyed by major European competitions such as Belgium's

Queen Elisabeth Concours, Moscow's International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition (which brought previous Leventritt Winner Van Cliburn to fame). Before some of the keenest musical ears in the world,* 58 contestants (all pianists this year) pounded their way through nine days of preliminary competition. By the time they picked the three finalists, the weary panel of judges had listened to some 40 hours of piano playing.

Winner Frager won a $1,000 cash prize and engagements with the New York Philharmonic and the Buffalo, Cleveland, Denver, Detroit and Pittsburgh orchestras. Three times a Leventritt finalist (in 1955, '56 and '57), Frager has played with the Detroit Symphony and other front-ranking U.S. orchestras. The son of a stocking manufacturer, he started playing the piano at four, was giving recitals in his native St. Louis when he was six. By the time Frager graduated with honors from Columbia (major: Russian) he had already won several piano prizes, and taken a turn about a European concert circuit. What mainly impressed Leventritt judges was his bold and apparently effortless attack, his ability to strike emotional fires that sharpened rather than distorted the logic of any piece he was playing. While almost everybody else fidgeted nervously at last week's finals, Pianist Frager retired to the artists' room, snapped out the lights and sat quietly in the pitch dark. "I was thinking," he explained later, "about the music."

* The judges: Abram Chasins, Gitta Gradova, George Szell, Rudolf Serkin, Rudolf Firkusny, Leopold Marines, Xadia Reisenberg, Alfred Wallenstein, Leon Fleisher and two previous Leventritt winners, Eugene Istomin and Gary Graffman.

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