“Miss Krebs on Saturday afternoon closed her series of four musical entertainments. As usual, she had a very large, critical and discriminating audience—quite as attentive as they were musically intelligent. The whole series has been eminently successful, and well calculated to fire the ambition of the young artist. Her name has become unusually current among our musical people, and her musical talents a theme of discussion and admiration. The programme of Saturday was drawn from the rich treasury of five leading German composers, a school in which she has been so carefully trained and educated, and whose fame she is destined to uphold by her wonderfully dexterous and pithy interpretations. In the ‘Sonata’ of Beethoven, she balanced and developed the musical tissues of the piece with a keen appreciation of its genius-woven modulations and its varied details. The fugue, from Bach, though bristling with difficulties and gnarled sounds, and as unintelligible to the many of Euclid’s elements, was outlined, traced and manipulated with the firm, sure and pliant hand of a master. What a musical pyramid for a young artist to scale! The ‘Warum’ and ‘Toccata’ of Schumann were neatly and carefully translated, and breathed all the qualities of the composer through the performer. The ‘Rondo’ of Chopin, played with Mr. Mills as a duet, was a perfect flood of harmony, the four hands like so many concordant rivulets, giving it beauty and vitality.
The ‘Don Juan Fantasie,’ by Liszt, so tender and caressingly persuasive, so rich and fresh from the musical urn of Mozart, afforded Miss Krebs an opportunity to show how near she could approach the tender, and mellow and the plaintive in music. The musical ideality of these emotions of our nature is very difficult to elicit from concrete sounds, and is the severest ordeal through which the composer and performer can pass. The hearer often looks to the latter for that which is not to be found in the former, and his own mind may be so hazy about the matter as to have no clear ideas as to its conditions. Besides, these emotions vary with the varying epochs of life, and differ in kind as well as degree. Bellini’s emotions trembled all but exclusively on the thread of extreme delicacy, and all but morbid tenderness. Beethoven, on the contrary, united great vigor to these beautiful qualities, and hence the great difference between these two men of genius. The interpreters of music are subject to a like classification. If Miss Krebs had less vigor she might approach to a more exacting idea of the tender and the delicate, but there would be a corresponding loss in other important respects. From her performance of the ‘Don Juan Fantasie,’ she may be safely credited with an average combination of both, vigor, however, preponderating.
As the gentle twilight follows the strong glare of the midday sun, so will her increase of years and her ripening powers be followed with a [finish?] of touch, a tenderness of expression and a flow of musical feeling which wait on, rather than control, her powers at present.”