Word: bach
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Levister: Manhattan Monodrama (Debut LP). In this first collection of his short pieces, says youthful (30) Manhattan Composer Alonzo Levister, he was influenced by ''blues, Bartok, Bach and Baptist shouting," but the sound that comes out is clearly his own. The mood is wistful, the emotion wire-taut, the rhythms occasionally splintered. Most successful: Black Swan, a brooding, velvet-piled excursion into the mind and style of Trumpeter Miles Davis...
Piano Preferred. Nobody is more surprised by her spectacular success in Europe than 42-year-old Rosalyn Tureck herself. Born in Chicago of Turkish-Ukrainian parents, she was giving all-Bach recitals by the time she was 15. At 16, as an applicant for a scholarship at Manhattan's Juilliard School of Music, she staggered the judges by offering to ripple off 16 Bach preludes and fugues. In her second year at Juilliard she learned the Goldberg Variations in five weeks, was later told by the president that it was impossible to play the Variations (unmodified) on a piano...
...concert stage, Tureck impressed the critics, but U.S. concertgoers, more accustomed to the Bach credentials of Harpsichordists Wanda Landowska and Ralph Kirkpatrick, were left relatively cool. After a poorly attended concert in Manhattan's Town Hall, the New York Times critic demanded: "Must this great artist go to Europe to be recognized by her own country?" In 1953 she did just that, with such success that she returned in 1954 for four months of solid engagements. Her concerts at London's Albert Hall have sold out months in advance. Twice she has packed the huge Festival Hall...
Only a Click. Tureck's mastery of Bach is partially the result of sheer, grinding study and immersion in his work. Once, early in her career, she decided that she was learning her Bach too fast, promptly "threw out all I'd done" and started learning over again with an entirely new pianistic technique. She would spend two days mastering four lines. Her playing is unhurried, coolly articulated and generously ornamented, has a miraculous clarity that manages to achieve some of the harpsichord's shimmering brilliance along with the piano's plump sound. Tureck believes that...
Pianist Tureck has given up her old teaching job at Juilliard, settled down in London (she is not married) in a house with a two-story, soundproofed studio. She is recording (for HMV) the whole of Bach's mammoth Clavieriibung. Next year she sets out on a South African tour, and after that she would like to tour the U.S. once again-to see if her compatriots have at last warmed to the Tureck sound...