Par 1 Vladimir de Pachmann's last New York recital—the "last for all time," as the programme styled it—which he gave in Carnegie Hall yesterday afternoon, afforded the doubtful pleasure of an afternoon of music combined with an afternoon at the Zoo. A large audience heard and saw him, and the more youthful portion of it was considerably amused, for Mr. de Pachmann, in the twenty years since he first appeared in New York, has seldom been so pantomimic, so full of gestures and grimaces, or so chatty. His playing suffered from the excess of effort he made in other directions, and was not so enjoyable or so convincing as that which he gave at his first recital in the Autumn.

Par 2 His programme was made up of pieces that submit gracefully to his conceptions and methods when he is in this mood, and there was little that demanded the deeper qualities of musicianship looked for in other pianists who are styled great. The most satisfactory performances he gave were of Mozart's sonata in A, with the "Turkish" rondo at the end, and some of his Chopin numbers, as the nocturne in F minor and the Berceuse. The last named could hardly have been of more ravishingly filmy grace and delicacy, of more exquisite iridescence of tone.

Par 3 There was a light brilliancy and bravura in his playing of Liszt's "Rigoletto" fantasy, but probably Liszt played it differently in his days of storm and stress, to which it belongs. There was to be admired in all of Mr. de Pachmann's playing the marvel of his "touch," the superficial magic of his tone, his sighing pianissimo, his purling, rippling passages, his clear articulation. He had less power, apparently, and made less effort to penetrate into the real musical significance of what he was playing than at his first appearance this season. Such a composition as Chopin's B flat minor scherzo suffered at his hands, for he scarcely penetrated beneath its surface at any point.

Par 4 Mr. de Pachmann is a representative of a school of piano playing now almost extinct, a school that concerns itself primarily with grace, fleetness, elegance, exquisitely perfected mechanism, with matters that refine the qualities of the pianoforte to the last degree, and that enhance the listener's senses. But it does not go deep and it rarely plucks out the heart of any mystery. With all its beguilement, it soon cloys. Mr. de Pachmann at his best has given a pleasure of a very real kind, though it is difficult to see how he can be assigned so high a place among the great ones in art as his admirers have found for him. And so, if he has really given his last recital in New York for all time, the art of the pianoforte has lost something that is not likely to be made up to it in kind.