Music: Chopin Marathon

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The marathon at Manhattan's Carnegie Hall was half over, and no one seemed to be tiring. By last week 2,760 seat-holders and 100 standees had heard half of the more than 170 piano compositions Chopin wrote; in another month of weekly recitals they will have heard just about all of them.

Presiding and performing at this one-course feast is 50-year-old Pianist Alexander Brailowsky, a small, lean Russian. Like another great Chopinist, Ignace Paderewski, Brailowsky studied in Vienna under Leschetizky, but it was not until he was already a box-office favorite in Paris that he got the idea of giving all of the master's works.

In 1923, a year before his first concert tour of the U.S., he took a summer off to work out the Chopin cycle. In a cottage in the French Alps Brailowsky card-catalogued all of Chopin's piano pieces. For months he played a new game of solitaire, juggling the Chopin cards into six well-balanced programs. Said he: "To play them in chronological order would have been a stupid idea. Often I spent hours trying to decide if a certain etude should go before a mazurka or after it."

Memorizing the Memorable. He programed 51 mazurkas, 27 etudes, 25 preludes and all the polonaises, nocturnes and waltzes, left out only about a half dozen works. The pieces he eliminated were, he says, "works that Chopin didn't like at all. His Sonata No 1­it's not Chopin at all. He tried to make a sonata in classical form, and it wasn't his. It would be a waste of time to play it, and no service to Chopin." When he had arranged his programs, Brailowsky memorized all 172 pieces. In 22 years he has played the cycle 15 times in Paris, Brussels, Zurich, Mexico City, Buenos Aires and New York. Never before has his Chopin marathon sold sot well in Manhattan, helped this year by the movie-fed boom in Chopin.

Brailowsky's Chopin is more restrained but also more mannered than the gusty performances of his late, great friend Sergei Rachmaninoff. Brailowsky likes to think that he plays with the igth Century delicacy Chopin himself used. Says he: "The Polish and the Russian, we understand each other." But Chopin is not Brailowsky's favorite composer; Beethoven and Mozart come first. A typical Brailowsky concert runs from Bach or Scarlatti to Prokofiev—but always includes some Chopin. In Buenos Aires he played 17 recitals in eight weeks without repeating any work.

In the U.S. Brailowsky is in the top ten of pianists but ranks below masters like Artur Rubinstein and Vladimir Horowitz both in prestige and at the box office. But in South America he outdraws them all, and Latin women bombard him with flowers and kisses. Tickets for a Brailowsky concert bring black-market prices. Says Brailowsky: "There is the line like you saw here for nylon stockings."