Word: albums
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...record her conception of Mozart. Around the frail old woman, in her gold slippers and purple kimono, hovered the engineers. For four and five hours at a stretch they recorded together, listened, recorded again. The fruits of a year's recording, released in a new RCA Victor album, constitute perhaps the most important single contribution to Mozart interpretation in his bicentennial year...
Ornamentation. For tiny (4 ft. 10 in.) Wanda Landowska, the new album marks a return to piano recording after an absence of 20 years (she recorded Mozart's "Coronation" Concerto for the coronation of George VI in 1936). During part of that time she was engaged in her monumental harpsichord recording of the 48 rippling, finger-cracking preludes and fugues that constitute Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, which she called "my last will and testament." When she was persuaded to leave a codicil to that will, she turned again to the piano ("my first love") and to Mozart...
...separate 45-r.p.m. record enclosed in reviewers' copies of her album, Landowska carefully explains to critics how she scaled her piano to the 18th century: "The pedals should be used, but with discretion, so that the harmonic and melodic texture will remain clear, crisp, light and transparent." In addition, "improvised ornamentation" is indispensable. "Those performances which we respect today for their literal devotion," says Landowska, "would have been called barbaric by Mozart's contemporaries, for it was in his art of ornamentation that the 18th century interpreter was judged...
...quick view of this fantastic life and a wide sampling of his work are given in this volume. Included are biographical notes, an album of photographs and excerpts from essays and novels, many autobiographical, e.g., Martin Eden, in which London saw himself as a "rough, uneducated sailor" who ends a suicide. There are also remarkably evocative eyewitness accounts (the San Francisco earthquake, a typhoon off Japan) and 25 short stories, some of them little known. Among the best: Jan, the Unrepentant, a hilarious yarn in which some trappers prepare to hang a suspected murderer, and The Law of Life, about...
...sings with a lack of affectation that allows her small, warm voice to make an immediate impression. She is also as beautiful a girl as you could wish, of which fact Liberty has taken advantage with no less than thirteen large color portraits on her latest album. Despite the visual effects, though, her best LP remains the first, (Lib. 3006) with just Guitar and Bass. If you like your songs sung intimately and on the slow side, she's your dish...