Music: The Shoes of a Man

To Cleveland's pudgy, power-brained Merrill Kenneth Wolf (I.Q. 182) it seemed high time people stopped regarding him as "something of a freak." It was true that he had played Liszt on the piano at 22 months, written a symphony at eight, received his A.B. from Yale at 14 to become New Haven's youngest grad ever (TIME, Oct. 29, 1945). Since then he had spent three years in earnest study with great Pianist Artur Schnabel. Now, at 18, Kenneth wanted to be judged, he said, "solely by the quality of my music."

Last week Kenny Wolf got what he wanted. In Chicago's Kimball Hall an audience of 475 heard him work his way confidently and competently through a stiff program of Bach, Schubert, Brahms and Chopin, applauded him roundly when he finished a complicated, explosive Toccata and a pleasant Andante he had written himself. The judgment of the critics, as Seymour Raven of the Chicago Tribune summed it up: "Mr. Wolf has analyzed his music and taken a firm interpretative view of much of it. Yet he often fails where one would expect a boy to falter when wearing the shoes of a man...To hear him dwell on trifling dissonances as though they all had vast social significance was evidence that the brightest fellow of 18 had some maturing ahead of him."

Before the season was over, more than a dozen other cities, including New York, would have a chance to judge the growth of Prodigy Kenny Wolf and his music.