Music: 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...

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