Miss Robinson is an Illinois girl who came to Chicago to be Fannie Bloomfield Zeisler’s “artist pupil” (or something like that) and chief assistant. A year ago she was playing the piano efficiently; this year she is using that as a starting-point and proving that she has a real right to the instrument. She has a technical foundation that cannot fail her; it is already equal to practically all the tests she may need to put it to, and she uses it as surely and unconsciously as one uses his feet to walk with. Her playing at present has the clearness and innocence of a brook; if she can get something of the sea into her feeling she will be big. The music Carol Robinson gives is not so far the expression of some incredible longing to make the piano serve as an outlet. It is natural and beautiful—and absolutely untroubled. It is articulate and yet it has not acquired a meaning. It is without a hint of intensity. Carol Robinson has the most interesting part of the struggle before her—the part for which her genius for hard work is merely a preparation: what does she want to say through the piano? James Whittaker’s music is very personal, very sensitive, very charming, and very marked by good taste. It is by far the most musical playing I have heard in Chicago. Mr. Whittaker went to Berlin to study and then to Paris, where he finished and became an ardent exponent of the French school. His technical equipment is not the perfect tool that Carol Robinson’s is; by which I don’t mean that it is at all inadequate, but somehow you feel that he is always conscious of the demands he puts upon it and that it sometimes leaves him unsatisfied. His theory is that most of the methods taught outside the French Conservatoire are “short cuts”; but his work suggests that he succeeds in spite of his theory. For he does succeed in the one great essential: in making music. His relation to the piano is a dedication, and his music is vibrant with feeling. His tone production is a pressure with a fine nervousness in it, and he has the real “pearl” quality in his scales. His Chopin is perhaps, as he himself says, a little “scientific.” His César Franck just misses being deep _enough_. He is at his best in quite modern French music, or in a thing like Grieg’s Cradle Song which he plays very, very beautifully. Brahms he doesn’t want to play, I imagine; but the breadth that Brahms requires and gives is the very quality that would make what James Whittaker has to say (and is saying very charmingly) a bigger and deeper thing. M. C. A. WITH KREISLER _Four weeks in the Trenches, by Fritz Kreisler._ [_Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston._]