Veteran Prodigy

Before he sits down to play a concert, Pianist John Browning follows a simple routine: he eats an early dinner (steak and baked potato), takes a short brisk walk to the concert hall, touches his fingers to his toes 25 times. The acrobatics, he explains, are to get the blood out of his stomach and into his hands, where it belongs. Over the years, the exercises have proved remarkably effective--at 28, Browning is one of the most gifted pianists of his generation. Last week, playing with the New York Philharmonic under Guest Conductor Georg Solti, he reminded audiences just how fine he--and his generation--can be.

Although Browning has yet to achieve the international reputation enjoyed by such contemporaries as Van Cliburn and Glenn Gould, he has had his share of triumphs: a winner of the coveted Leventritt Award in 1955, a gold-medal winner in 1956 at Brussels' Queen Elisabeth Concours (in which he finished second to Russia's Vladimir Ashkenazy). Unlike Cliburn, who is often identified with Tchaikovsky and other romantics, and Gould, who polished his reputation on Bach. Pianist Browning has not been linked with any school, but favors Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert--German and Austrian composers that he feels he can "go into for 30 or 40 years and never touch bottom." And his style, as he demonstrated again last week when he played Mozart's rarely heard Concerto in B-Flat Major, lies somewhere between Cliburn bravura and Gould introspection. The B-Flat Concerto was ideally suited to Browning's talent. A witty virtuoso piece, it gave him a chance to display his brilliant technique, particularly in a rippling right hand. But there were also the long lyric lines that seemed to uncoil effortlessly from Browning's piano, the remarkably transparent but sonorous tone.

Son of a violinist father and a mother who was a professional accompanist, Browning followed in Cliburn's footsteps, studied with famed Teacher Rosina Lhevinne at Juilliard. He tours--in the U.S.

and Europe--eleven months of the year, will give more than 100 concerts this year alone. Although he is a superb performer of the German-Austrian repertoire, he is also a first-rate player of the moderns, for whom he changes the height of his adjustable piano bench--two inches higher for Prokofiev than for Beethoven--because he believes a high bench helps him produce some of the percussive effects of modern music. Little is left to chance. Everywhere he goes on tour, Browning carries a small black book--its pages crammed with the serial numbers of melodious pianos located in the towns he plans to visit.

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