Pianists: Rescued from Limbo

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As they watched Pianist Alexis Weissenberg play Chopin with the New York Philharmonic, the audience at Manhattan's Lincoln Center last week could eas ily have felt a twinge of memory. Weissenberg bore a strong resemblance to a younger pianist named Sigi Weissenberg, who had made his U.S. debut playing Chopin with the New York Philharmonic 20 years earlier. Alexis even had some of Sigi's pianistic traits—triphammer virtuosity, brilliant tone, a briskly commanding approach to a score—but they were tempered with subtler shading and a surer sense of structure.

A puzzling case, young Sigi. He was one of those comets in the musical sky that turn out to be meteors, burning out and falling below the horizon. Born in Sofia, he studied under Bulgaria's foremost composer, Pantcho Vladigerov, and made his way to Manhattan's Juilliard School by way of Turkey and Israel. In 1948 he won the prestigious Leventritt award. His career was launched in a blaze of critical superlatives. But over the years, instead of flourishing on the concert circuit, he faded. In 1957 he disappeared from it.

Whatever became of Sigi? Alexis knows. He is Sigi—now a seasoned 39, sadder but wiser, a vigorous survivor of a career gone sour, a revenant from the limbo of semiretirement.

Free and Faithful. Alexis Sigismund Weissenberg realizes now that his problem was not the critics who switched from cooing to carping. Nor was it the managers who booked him into that deadly round of whistle-stop tours called Community Concerts. His problem was the quandary of every young performer: "He must perform early for an audience to develop his personality. On the other hand, the inner gifts need development privately. If these are developed in front of the public, many things are exaggerated, experimental, uncertain."

Weissenberg's way out of this quandary was to take a sabbatical. Freed from financial worries by an inherited income, he moved to France, determined to "read more, live more, and rethink everything." His playing became "freer," he says. "I mean free in the sense that you are absolutely at one with yourself, and whatever you do is faithful to a single intuitive interpretation, whereas at earlier stages we are all so influenced by different interpreters that our playing is a patchwork."

As time passed, Weissenberg's sabbatical threatened to stretch on indefinitely. Then, in 1966, Conductor Herbert von Karaj an re-established him in Europe overnight by choosing him to open the season with the Berlin Philharmonic. Last year the comeback was completed in the U.S. when Weissenberg dashed off an exhilarating version of Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3 with the New York Philharmonic. As his performance of Chopin's Concerto No. 2 last week showed, his playing nowadays bristles with the strength of a new maturity.