Word: accompanist
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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With Power to Spare. "Leontyne leads with that voice," says her accompanist. David Garvey. "It is her Rock of Gibraltar." Leontyne's Gibraltar is known technically as a lyric spinto-a high soprano voice with dramatic feeling. No singer today is better capable of straddling both the lyric and the dramatic moods than she is, and none possesses a voice that is more secure throughout its considerable range-the G below middle C to the D above high C. Says she: "I never try an F in public. I sometimes do it in the shower, but there...
...good accompanists seem to share Moore's enthusiasm, documented wittily if somewhat defensively in his 1944 book, The Unashamed Accompanist. England's Ivor Newton explains his passion for accompanying as resulting from "a phobia about being alone." Italy's Giorgio Favoretto is less interested in togetherness than in "uniting the arts of poetry and music," while France's Janopoulo confesses to lacking the "special soul and the kind of conviction that passes across the footlights." Whatever its appeal, accompanying has attracted first-rate pianists, among them the U.S.'s Paul Ulanowsky and Franz Rupp, England...
Like a Surgeon. Although an accompanist should be a partner, he is also, says Ulanowsky, likely to function as "part policeman and part nursemaid." (But, adds Soprano Erika Koth cryptically: "An accompanist is no lover.") Even as incendiary a singer as Maria Callas scrupulously follows the advice of her pianist, Italy's Antonio Tonini, in questions of interpretation. "Tonini pleases me," says she, "because he is an implacable torturer who makes me repeat the same phrase 20 or more times. He has always been for me like an expert surgeon who digs around in one's innards until...
Heard But Not Noticed. The U.S., many critics feel, is now producing the best accompanists in the world. "Pianists here are getting better and better," says Rupp. "I'm sure we all play better than Liszt." Nevertheless, most of the accompanists agree that their art is still low-rated in the U.S., while the situation is changing in Europe. English programs often avoid the word "accompanist" entirely, substituting the more palatable word "piano." In Paris the old program phrase "accompanied by" is replaced by the phrase "with the collaboration...
...even these status signs are not likely to turn the accompanist into a box-office draw. Like it or not, admits Accompanist Craxton, "The greatest moment of an accompanist must always be when the soloist turns to him and says: 'You were wonderful tonight. I didn't know you were there...