Word: appassionata
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...Andante Con Moto" (1992) began the evening. It is a series of 14 variations on the slow movement of Beethoven's "Appassionata" sonata, with an optional opportunity for an improvised cadenza before the final variation. The theme itself is not stated anywhere in the piece, and one catches only a few glimpses of it throughout--an occasional dominant seventh chord, or the five-note descending scale that concludes each half of the Beethoven movement. Rather than indulging in much direct quotation, Rzewski's variations preserve certain abstract qualities of the original. Beethoven's registral disjuncture, for example, is taken...
...first portion of the program. Several crescendo passages in the first and last movements of the first sonata seemed tentative and lacking in the forceful intensity that the listener expected. In addition several of the piano passages were uneven in tone. His rendition of a passage in the Largo appassionata movement of the second sonata, however was breathtaking in its delicate beauty...
Beethoven: The Complete Piano Sonatas (Pianist Alfred Brendel, Philips; 13 LPs). The 32 sonatas, which explore every facet of the keyboard, are an Olympian effort for a performer. Brendel, a meticulous scholar and flawless technician, concentrates on incisive detail rather than drama. If such sonatas as the Appassionata lack grandeur, one can still admire the impeccable musical lines...
...local English-speaking community and co-produced by Joyce. Stoppard's Carr is a rambling codger in a floor-length dressing gown as he tells us Stoppard's story in flash-backs, wreathing himself in cigarette smoke as he pounds out a travesty of Beethoven's Appassionata sonata whenever he wants the audience to realize he is saying something meant to be profound...
...passionately wonder why the young people only want to see the avant garde experimentalism of Mayadovsky and not good, solid Chekhov. The only art that could move Lenin to tears in his last years, Krupskaya tearfully recounts, was--and the spotlight falls on Carr once again playing it--the Appassionata sonata...