Teen-Age Virtuoso

Because he is small (5 ft. 6 in.), mop-haired and young (19), Israeli Pianist Daniel Barenboim sometimes resembles a rebellious child who would rather be playing baseball than fondling the keys. Playing with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra last week on a U.S. tour that opened with a triumphant appearance in New York, he swiveled around in moments of inaction and regarded the orchestra's string section with an intensity so fierce that it seemed ready to wither the first violinists. But Barenboim's dis concerting mannerisms are only the mark of an extra-attentive and highly sensitive musician who believes that each perform ance is "an experience to be lived. I listen because their part is just as important," he says. ''I never think of piano playing --only of making music." Barenboim makes music uncommonly well -- as audiences in the U.S. and Europe have become increasingly aware. Other pianists of his age and training may be his match in technique, but few young pianists can muster the depths of thought and feeling that seem to come to him naturally. His reading of Chopin's Piano Concerto No. 1 last week had an unusual breadth, a feeling of spaciousness, an easy-breathing pulse. It had its purely bravura moments -- trip-hammer scales that Barenboim's small, elegant hands looked incapable of -- but the overall effect was one of quietly exalted strength.

Barenboim claims that "I was listening to music before I was born." Both his parents taught piano in Buenos Aires, where Daniel became"just another pupil" when he was five. He did not remain so for long. By the time he was nine, he had given recitals in Argentina and Europe, and was performing in Tel Aviv, where his parents had settled. He won the first America-Israel Cultural Foundation scholarship to study in Europe, and at 13 became the youngest student in the history of Rome's Academy of Santa Cecilia to win a master's degree. Hearing of the prodigy. Artur Rubinstein several times invited Barenboim to his home to play. Present on one occasion was U.S. Impresario Sol Hurok. who signed him up at 14 for his first U.S. tour. (This is his fourth.)

Barenboim has honed his talents on a wide variety of masters: Bach, Mozart. Schubert. Brahms. Beethoven (by age 14, he knew all 32 of the Beethoven sonatas). He works at the piano only about two hours a day, because "you may lose freshness if you sit all day practicing." sometimes plays the violin to help him understand what the composer has written for the piano and feels that every musician should do some composing (as he does) to give his playing "a quality of understanding." Though he has made six recordings, he does not enjoy listening to them. "One of the symptoms of development is change." he says. "You do not want to return to something you did long ago."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.