Word: allegro
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Citation: "You are described as a life-long allegro, a nest of atoms in a cyclotron, a leaky electric eel, a Mickey Mantle of music (three years ago, that was), a human gyroscope, Presley of the podium, our musical Dick Tracy...
...first quarter of the film, Director Resnais states his theme with great power; in the second he develops it in an allegro of relationship between the hero (Eiji Okada), a Japanese architect, and the heroine (Emmanuelle Riva), a French actress. Later, in a passage of gloomy elegy that evokes the heroine's "amour impossible" with a German soldier during World War II, the film begins to lose a little of its immediacy and drive. And in the long, obscure, lugubriously beautiful finale the theme is lost in sententious variations...
Throughout the rehearsal sessions, Toscanini's voice can be heard explaining, correcting, cajoling, scolding. Sometimes, when he attempts to convey his feelings for the music, language fails him. "Mozart," he cries, "must be allegro. It must smile! Allegro not only with the tempo but with this!"-and he resoundingly slaps his face. At times he speaks like a counseling father: "I don't believe that to be a great man one needs to play only Wagner or Beethoven. Play also Traviata as you are best able to play. I like this music as I like Mozart...
...Harbison and the orchestra appeared to be most at their ease in the lively outer movements, where their energy and exuberance made an especially happy effect; the Andante seemed a bit pallid. But in the Allegro and the concluding "La Tempesta" (Haydn's cloudburst is Austrian naivete and gentility compared with Vivaldi's) they produced a sound richer and larger than the orchestra's numbers suggest. An even bigger sound could be heard in the substantial D minor piano concerto of Bach, in which the sonority of the opening unison belied the fact that the forces involved really amounted...
...only non-German composer was Harvard's own Walter Piston, with his early, acerb Chromatic Study on BACH, and his more recent and highly important Prelude and Allegro. In this and the Mozart, Mrs. Pardue was assisted by a string orchestra of Summer School students, conducted by G. Wallace Wood worth, James Edward Ditson Professor of Music...