Grande Ambiance

The audience sat rapt and bewitched. Not a feathered toque or a velvet pillbox moved in Boston's Symphony Hall. There was something vastly appealing about the frail, hunched woman as she bent over the keyboard; her playing of Beethoven's Concerto No. 3 was filled with a rare kind of fire, poetry and sadness. Bucharest-born Pianist Clara Haskil, 61, was making her first U.S. appearance in 30 years, with Charles Munch and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. When she finished, the hall reverberated to stamping feet and shouts of "Bravo!"' She was called back an un precedented five times.

Offstage, Pianist Haskil is a plain woman who wears no makeup to conceal the traces of suffering that line her face, but her features are livened by wisdom and humor. She was a prodigy, made her debut in Vienna at the age of nine, and won a Grand Prix at the Paris Conservatory at 14. After World War I, illness forced her into temporary retirement; later she took up playing sonatas with such greats as Ysaye, Enesco, Casals. She has appeared at the Casals festivals in France, and it was one of her younger colleagues there, Pianist Eugene Istomin, who helped persuade her to venture a return to the U.S.

Boston critics were as ecstatic as the audience. The Herald's Rudolph Elie called it "one of those magical revelations that occurs in music once in a generation . . . the most beautiful performance of Beethoven's Third Concerto I ever heard or expect to hear again."

In Philadelphia, the same day, a lanky, 22-year-old pianist named Philippe Entre-mont had his own triumph. When he auditioned for the Philadelphia Orchestra two years ago. Conductor Eugene Ormandy called him "one of the great younger pianists of our day." hired him on the spot. Last week Entremont made his Philadelphia debut--with a spiky-rhythmed modern concerto by France's Andre Jolivet, and Rachmaninoff's caramel-flavored

Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini--and fully lived up to his sponsor's judgment.

Pianist Entremont seemed to have a talent as impressive as the late William Kapell's--speed, big tone, a sense of soul, flair. Even if he had flubbed a tricky rhythm, nobody would have known it, for Entremont played with a momentum that swept all before him. Few in the audience liked the Jolivet concerto much at first, but when the final notes faded there was a roar of approval. The orchestra refused to share the pianist's reward, simply sat tight and applauded too.

Entremont got his first piano lesson at eight, from his mother, herself a Grand Prix pianist. At twelve, he was winning his own prizes. Now starting a 50-concert American tour, accompanied by his pretty, redheaded wife, he thinks he might like to live in the U.S. "I like the people," he says. "For the performer, the audience creates a grande ambiance"

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