Word: ardente
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...Pianist Richter, he insisted that it had not been one of his best nights. At home, he is less known for his Beethoven than for his Liszt and Schubert. Unlike most Soviet artists, he is also an ardent champion of moderns. He generally insists on playing only one composer at each concert, explains: "Chopin after Beethoven is like watercolors after oil painting.'' At 46, Richter still gives some 120 concerts a season in Russia, labors at the keyboard for as long as ten hours at a stretch, and has been known to sit down for a three-hour...
...Toscanini's absorption in the music is nowhere better demonstrated than when he raises his cracked old voice in song. During the Traviata rehearsals he is sometimes the ardent young Alfredo, singing the aria De' miei bollenti spiriti, sometimes the gravely dignified Germont, making his moving plea to Violetta-Pura sic-come un angelo. In the most fascinating section of all, the old man launches into Violetta's famed Sempre libera, sounding hoarse, wildly off key, but somehow convincing in the aria's feverish abandon...
Most critics panned the work, but the audience seemed to dig it despite the fact that it followed that popular old war horse, Les Sylphides. The audience's reaction, observed one ardent avant-gardist, was entirely natural. "Thunder," said he, "is alive. Sylphides is like old toothpaste stuck in your teeth...
...Walter Pater's famous, puzzling phrase, "all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music." Abstractionists often make this an argument for dispensing with subject matter, as pure music does. But Burchfield, an ardent hi-fi fan, imbues his landscapes with musical qualities while keeping them close to nature. From the grace notes of its stiff-frozen weeds and goldenrod to the black surge and sudden blazings of its sky, Burchfield's new picture eloquently sings...
...forced to quit college for six years when his family's fortunes hit rock bottom, finally worked his way through school as a part-time janitor and drugstore clerk), and a witness of the dust storms that scourged South Dakota in the 1930s, Humphrey became an ardent advocate of Franklin Roosevelt. Phi Beta Kappa Humphrey wrote his master's thesis at Louisiana State University on The Philosophy of the New Deal...