The Concert Pianist: An Interview with Malcolm Frager

by Robert L. Gates

Malcolm Frager is recognized as one of the world's foremost concert pianists. A masterful technician who plays with immense clarity and dynamic balance, he has won critical acclaim in Europe, the Soviet Union, Japan, Australia, and throughout North and South America for his bold, yet profoundly sensitive, interpretation of the classics. At the time of Mr. Frager's debut with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1963, one noted music critic startled his readers by saying the pianist's performance "was positively immoral." Harold C. Schonberg, writing in The New York Times, then went on to explain that it "was positively immoral for any pianist to make such difficult writing (Prokofiev Piano Concerto No. 2) sound so easy."

In 1959 when he won the Leventritt Award, America's most important musical competition, and shortly thereafter the famed Queen Elisabeth of Belgium International Piano Competition, professionals were as impressed with his poise as they were with his promise as a virtuoso. "While others fidgeted in the wings," one newspaper noted, "Mr. Frager retired to a room by himself where he switched out the lights and sat in the dark. Later he explained, 'I was thinking about the music.'"

Mr. Frager doesn't always sit in the dark before taking his place on the concert stage, but as an earnest class-taught student of Christian Science he does prayerfully prepare for each performance.

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