Hip Harpsichordist

Twenty minutes of Bach's French Overture on the harpsichord. A pair of Bach sonatas with harpsichord accompaniment. Some Mozart and some more Bach, this time grumbled out on a pipe organ. Such a program has always had its place in concert life, if only as a vaguely ennobling form of musical anesthesia. But if anyone had suggested it to an impresario, he would have been shown, with gentle pity, to the street.

That was before Anthony Newman came along. Last week, with just that program, Harpsichordist-Organist Newman not only sold out Manhattan's 2,836-seat Philharmonic Hall to a mostly young, blue-jeaned audience, but after nearly three hours, had them cheering for more. After Newman played Bach's Fantasia and Fugue in G Minor on the pedal harpsichord, he trotted onstage for a curtain call, shoulders hunched in a simian crouch, folded his hands in a Zen gesture of thanks. Grabbing his score from the harpsichord, he waved it over his head, signaled for quiet and asked, "How'd you like to hear the same piece on the organ?" When the audience roared, he clambered up to the organ and obliged. After his final scheduled piece, Newman announced, "We have to get out at 10:50. Those of you who want to, stay. I'll play Bach's Klavierubung until then." As an afterthought he added, "Come on down front so you'll be nearer the music." Hundreds did, sitting in front of the stage and in the aisles while Newman's hands and feet flew over his instrument's quadruple keyboard and pedals.

Roman Candles. At 31, Newman has emerged as high priest of the harpsichord, a turtlenecked Bachian missionary not seen since the days of the late Wanda Landowska and Albert Schweitzer. Like Landowska, he plays with enormous verve and intense rhythm, sprinkling musical embellishments like roman candles being tossed from an express train. This startles those who learned their Bach straight, but Newman conquers the doubters with sheer personal conviction. There is something reminiscent of Schweitzer in the way Newman's intellectual and religious philosophy, Zen, permeates his music making and mesmerizes his youthful audiences. Even on the shrill organ at Philharmonic Hall, which at top volume sounds for all the world like a herd of angry Buicks, Newman is enormously compelling.

Born in Los Angeles, Newman had a lawyer father and a mother who played the piano for enjoyment. At five, he says, "Bach just wildly turned me on." As soon as his legs could reach the pedals, he took up the organ. After graduating from high school he studied in

Paris with Nadia Boulanger and Alfred Cortot. A year later he went to New York for piano studies with Edith Oppens, later won first prize for a solo organ piece in the Nice International Composition Competition, an M.A. in composition from Harvard and a doctorate from Boston University. Still, it was his gifts as a performer that earned him a Columbia Records contract in 1967 and dazzled the New York critics at a recital in 1971 (wrote the Times: "A keyboard technician of staggering facility, on the scale of Horowitz").

Much as he loves the harpsichord, Newman became frustrated by the failure of its quaint, rather tinkly sound to fill up big concert halls. "It's like listening to someone whisper for a long time," he complained. "After a while, you stop listening." The solution: amplification so subtle as to be virtually undetectable, but it does raise the instrument from a whisper to, say, a murmur.

With a wife, three children, a teaching schedule, recitals and a growing number of recordings, Newman finds little time to practice. No matter. With his facility, he can think about other things besides keyboard problems. Astrology, for example: Newman casts his own horoscope, usually refuses to perform, record or even sign contracts unless the planets are properly positioned. Or communication, his prime concern: "At a rock concert the guy walks out, and the kids are already yelling, participating," he says. "If they like it, they stand up and scream. In Beethoven's time they did the same thing. Where would that happen today?" That's easy --at an Anthony Newman concert.

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