Mr. Frederic Lamond's strongest points as a pianist are not those which the wider public most readily appreciates. He is not one of the pianistic experts in the narrower sense, like Messrs. Pachmann and Godowsky, for whom neat fingering and smooth tone-production are much more important than musical interpretation. Mr. Lamond is before all things a virile player. His style is broad and a little severe. He lacks the peculiar grace and charm of Mr. Paderewski in the treatment of dancing rhythm no less obviously than that faculty, akin to a Japanese juggler's, which enables Mr. Pachmann to bring from the pianoforte a tone more smooth and sweet than was ever before imagined possible. Mr. Lamond's qualities are entirely different. Plastic force, technical and imaginative grasp of the greater composers' greater ideas, a deep and powerful but rather rough tone--these are the characteristics of his playing, and they are characteristics better appreciated in Germany than in this country, where music-lovers think too much of the merely smooth and the merely deft and the "sweetly pretty." It is rather surprising that neither of his recent performances in Manchester should have included any example of Beethoven, of whose greater Sonatas Mr. Lamond is now probably the best living interpreter, with the possible exception of Mr. Busoni. He was of course quite right to play plenty of Liszt, but it may be regretted that he gave so much of the later Liszt--who, conscious of himself as the world-famous magician of the piano, often improvised on rather poor themes, as if to show that any theme, however weak, could be made interesting by his transcendental style of ornamentation--rather than the earlier Liszt who wrote things of such power and eloquence as the "Mazeppa" Etude. Mr. Lamond's mind seems recently to have been running on Liszt's Tarantelle Fantasias. He played the "Venezia e Napoli" Tarantelle at the Hallé Concert and the "Muette de Portici" Tarantelle yesterday--both pieces which are chiefly of interest as proving that Liszt could improvise effectively upon any conceivable sort of thematic material. It would have been much more interesting to hear the "Mazeppa," which Mr. Lamond played in the composer's presence and to his evident satisfaction when last he was in London, a few months before his death in 1886, or some piece in that pregnant early manner. His best performance yesterday was in Chopin's A flat Polonaise--a composition of such excellence that, hackneyed as it is, it cannot in a good rendering fail to give pleasure. Mr. Lamond did full justice to the majestic beauty of the themes, which are all absolutely good, and brought out the famous _basso ostinato_ section in some respects better than we have heard it done since Rubinstein's death. He did not adopt any of the revised versions of the left-hand octave passages favoured by certain distinguished modern performers. On the other hand, he did adopt Rubinstein's version of the ending, with