Six for the Master

Once each year since 1950, the eastern corner of the French Pyrenees has bloomed with music. The two-week-long festival in the little (pop. 4.400) town of Prades is too rare and delicate a blossoming to be enjoyed through the sunglasses of ordinary tourists; instead of 90-piece orchestras or 100-decibel choruses to remind a man that he is getting his money's worth, the music is small and wrought with loving care for some of the most passionately musical audiences in the world. And the focus of it all is the adored and venerated master--Spanish Cellist Pablo Casals.

Last week Prades was in its annual bloom, and admirers followed the proud, stubby figure of the 78-year-old Catalan exile through the town and crowded his little house. Said one peeved old Pradesan: "If Casals scratches, they have to scratch the same place." But the top-rank musicians who came to Prades were hardly less worshipful. "What does Prades mean to a musician?" said Violinist Yehudi Menuhin to a reporter who caught him strolling through town in shorts, with a bunch of daisies in his hand. "It means the chance to play with Casals. Why does [Pianist] Eugene Istomin come year after year? No other reason except to play with Casals. This festival is just the right size--where everything is within the compass of Casals."

Kiss for the Queen. This year the program was Bach, Schubert and Brahms, and everyone agreed as usual, that the master was at the peak of his power and form. In the L' Eglise Saint-Pierre, on a platform before the altar, the old man sat playing his "tired" old cello with closed eyes. Every seat in the church was taken for the extra-long (2 1/2 to three hours) concerts that are a Prades tradition, and listeners sat or stood wherever they could find breathing space. Front-row center sat Belgium's Queen Elisabeth, noted and knowledgeable patroness of music. Applause was not permitted at the concerts--instead, whenever the audience was moved by a number, it rose in hushed silence at the conclusion.

After one rare evening that ended in a Brahms string sextet played by Casals, with Violinists Menuhin and Arpad Gerescz. Violists Ernst Wallfisch and Karen Tuttle and Cellist Madeline Foley, the Queen left the audience and walked up onto the stage. Menuhin greeted her with a kiss on the cheek, then led her backstage to congratulate the shy Casals and the other members of the sextet.

Box-Office Tonic. Surprise hit of the festival was the nine-member Bach Aria Group from the U.S., organized nine years ago by Oil Heir William H. Scheide, a onetime music teacher at Cornell University. Bach Specialist Scheide, who has long maintained that the cantatas are the heart of Bach's work, figured out that about half of the cantatas' 650-odd arias could be performed by combinations of five instruments and four voices. To prove it, he assembled the aria group, made the discovery, to everyone's surprise that Bach vocal music was a tonic to the U.S. concert box office.

Best-known members of the group, as it performed at Prades, were the Metropolitan Opera's Jan Peerce and Eleanor Steber. Singing as a substitute for Eileen Farrell, Soprano Steber was much impressed by Prades' rarefied musical atmosphere. Said buxom Singer Steber, just back from a tour in Yugoslavia : "I almost got raped there. But here -- such purity!"

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