The Truth Seeker

Among today's rich blend of young violin virtuosos, it would take a mouthful as well as an earful to match the likes of Itzhak Perlman, 21, Young Uck Kim, 19, and Pinchas Zuckerman, 18. Their close friend and former classmate scores high on all counts. His name is James Oliver Buswell IV.

Last week James IV, 20, made his Manhattan recital debut in a series imposingly titled "Great Performers at Philharmonic Hall." If Buswell is not quite ready for that adjective, his musicianship shows that he may soon be within reach of it. He is a devotee of the dip-and-sway school of playing, but he has temperament and spunk, a luminous tone and a controlled technique. Out of a contrasting assortment of half a dozen pieces, he delivered a fine, full-blooded performance of Bach's Sonata No. 4, blazed easily through the trickiest passages of Prokofiev's Sonata in D Major, and captured the dark warmth of Brahms's deceptively difficult Sonata in A Major.

Bended Knee. That examination over, Buswell packed his 1720 Strad and dashed back to Cambridge, Mass., to study for exams at Harvard, where he is a sophomore carrying a full load of classes. Though his 50-city concert tour this season means that he will miss 40% of his classes, he bones up on lectures taped for him by an admiring Radcliffe coed. "I take my books on tour," he says, "but it's like a child sucking his thumb. They comfort me, make me feel virtuous. But I'm always disastrously behind." Nevertheless, he caught up well enough during the first term to make the dean's list.

A tall, fair, baby-faced lad whose pronouncements sometimes lean toward the studied and pompous, Buswell entered Harvard because he believes that it is the duty of the performer to "seek an expression peculiar to his generation, and college is one way of discovering what my generation is all about."* As a result, while most young musicians today approach the classics on bended knee, vowing technically precise, note-for-note fidelity, Buswell views his role as that of a "performer in the creative sense, equally creative as the composer."

Frantic Balance. This winning confidence befits the illustrious Buswell line age. James I was president of Wheaton College in Illinois; James II was a Presbyterian missionary; James III is a professor of anthropology at St. Louis University. When Young James's parents moved from Wheaton to New York, he studied with Ivan Galamian--America's foremost violin teacher--whose students included his "competition" and "closest colleagues," Itzhak, Pinchas and Young Uck.

Heady now with the freedom of being away from family and on his own ("The silver cord has just now been replaced by the telephone wire"), Buswell likes the "frantic balance" that college has imposed on his life. "Harvard," he says, "is the kind of place where you feel guilty every time you play ping-pong." It is hectic, but when things get tight, he is renowned in the dorm for his ability to "wonk" (know spelled backward), or cram, for exams. Last week, preparing for back-to-back concerts in Hackensack, N.J., and Akron, James Oliver Buswell IV sighed sagely: "It will be refreshing to get back and be just another one of the students searching for truth."

*Buswell, as well as his thoughts on his generation, were reflected in TIME'S Man of the Year cover (Jan. 6).

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