Word: alban
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...recordings made recently of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire and Alban Berge's Violin Concer-to bring to this country for the first time in permanent form two of the greatest works by two of the greatest modern composers. For those who have known Schoenberg only through an early work--the mawkish puddle of Post-Romantic sentimentality known as Verklarte Nacht--the recording of Peirrot Lunaire demands a re-estimation of his true greatness--and weakness...
...Alban Berg: Concerto for Violin and Orchestra (Louis Krasner with the Cleveland Orchestra conducted by Artur Rodzinski; Columbia; six sides). Much of the music of Viennese Composer Berg, who died in 1935 (a disciple of Atonalist Arnold Schonberg), sounds like tortured, caterwauling doubletalk. But in this concerto, his atonalism is for once eloquent and heartfelt; it is Composer Berg's elegy on the death of his friend Manon Gropius, daughter of famed Architect Walter Gropius. The Clevelanders and Modernist Krasner give a stirring performance...
...Pope Pius XII gave up his customary summer rest in his Alban Hills villa of Castel Gandolfo, but moved into the head gardener's cottage in the Vatican gardens in hope of finding relief from the Roman heat...
Most violinists were content to let him keep his unplayable piece to himself. Not so Louis Krasner. This bald, soft-spoken Boston fiddler had already won sympathetic cheers for fighting his way through a similarly cacophonous, crossword concerto by Schönberg's pupil, Alban Berg. Stung by this new challenge, Krasner sent for Schönberg's piece and started in on it. For thankless months he sawed, plucked and stabbed away at its impossible chords and tuneless, jittery rhythms. "It was six months." said he, "before I began to understand...
...centuries fishermen on little (one square mile) Lake Nemi, 20 miles from Rome in the Alban Hills, reported mysterious fouling of their nets and shadowy hulks beneath the blue-grey water on clear days, told tall tales of two legendary floating palaces once belonging to monstrous Emperor Caligula, now rotting in the mud. In 1446 curious Cardinal Prospero Colonna made the first attempt to raise the pleasure barges, succeeded only in irreparably damaging their superstructures with the iron grappling hooks...