Bird Boy

The odd creature walking onstage at Manhattan's Carnegie Hall looks like one-third each of Woody Allen, Charlie Chaplin and a sparrow. He bobs to the audience, weaves around the piano, pecks the air with his beak, hovers over the piano bench, then alights. "I don't know whether to laugh or cry," mutters an onlooker to her companion. A moment later she knows: when Vladimir Ashkenazy plays, nobody laughs and everybody cries. They cry real tears sometimes, but mostly they cry "Bravo!" and "Encore!"

Regardless of what people have heard about this 28-year-old bird boy, no first-time listener is ever fully prepared for the major poet who lives in a minor-sized body (5 ft. 6 in., 132 Ibs.). When he played Prokofiev's wildly percussive and majestically colorful Second Piano Concerto last week, even the critics were astounded to hear every note of the labyrinthine cadenza; most pianists usually cut it down to their size. After wading through the cadenza, it seemed hardly difficult at all for Ashkenazy to master the rest of the piece--lightening it with brilliant glissandos and surging sonorous chords, concluding with a sudden, speedy dash that seemed to carry him from his piano stool to the wings, away from the house he had brought down about his ears.

Nice Applause. Gorky-born Ashkenazy is a kind of Volga Huckleberry Finn who has made good. He won the Queen Elisabeth competition at Brussels when he was barely 19, the Tchaikovsky Prize in Moscow at 25, and since then has stormed every important auditorium in the world.

Today he lives in London. "It is not a question of systems," he explains. "It is a question of family. I am still a Soviet citizen and I love my country, but my wife [an Icelandic pianist whom he had met in Moscow] prefers to live in England." Nevertheless, Ashkenazy has not been back to Russia since 1963. His parents have not seen their oldest grandchild, Vladimir Jr., 41, in three years; they have never seen their infant granddaughter Nadya. Still, alone of all the Soviet artists who prefer the Western side of the Iron Curtain, Ashkenazy refuses to defect, clings carefully to his Russian citizenship. He hardly notices that each year he edges a little farther away. In the old days, he forgot to put articles in his English ("I had best steak of my life in Cleveland airport"); now he speaks it fluently. He has recently gone out of his way to make a second career as a duo pianist, sharing the billing with St. Louisian Malcolm Frager. And though still wryly withdrawn, he has lately come to admit that he likes Americans in general: "The applause is so nice; American audiences are so very, very warm."

Singing Tone. They are never likely to cool off. They may wonder when he sits down at the piano, but they stay to pay homage to a singing tone, a clarity of expression and a restrained romanticism that weaves Chopin's Ballades into filigrees of fire, plumbs the mysteries of Beethoven, clarifies the passions of Prokofiev. Even the great Emil Gilels, a Muscovite who prefers to play by the Russian rules, agrees with the fans: "Ashkenazy is small, but the grand piano is not too big for him. He does what he wants with it. Others who are big come to the piano, but it is too big for them."

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