Apathy took a holiday last week. For three successive evenings Sanders was as packed as the fire regulations would allow by an audience that listened in perfect silences to Alexander Schneider and Ralph Kirkpatrick play Back, Mozart, and Scarlatti, and them stomped, cheered, and shouted for more.

The reason for this enthusiasm can be found partly in the excellence of the two performers, and partly in the broad appeal of the music itself. But the fact that the music was played on the instruments for which it was written--violin and harpsichord--is what made the concerts truly memorable.

The difference between piano and harpsichord is more than one of degree. It is very nearly one of opposites. The piano's strings are struck by a hammer; those of the harpsichord are plucked. When played in combination with a piano, Bach and Mozart violin sonatas can be brilliant, noble, dramatic, tender, melodically beautiful--but they can never express the intimacy that should characterize classical chamber music. When played by harpsichord and violin, this intimacy is never lost. The two instruments blend into each other almost as if they were one; and the music seems to become a part of the listener's consciousness, rather than the object of his attention.

It is something of a formality to add that Kirkpatrick, on the harpsichord, and Schneider, on the violin, performed with unusual sensitivity and balance. Harpsichord or no harpsichord, Mozart, Bach, and Scarlatti can sound as they did last week only when played by uncommonly fine artists.