Word: bachs
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Their opening presentation of five pre-Bach works lacked clarity and precision, and tone quality was on the shaky side. They improved later in the program, but the zestful, well-disciplined Radcliffe group still stole the show. G. Wallace Woodworth led the chorus in a rather dull religious song by Mendelssohn, followed by Verdi's striking Laudi Alla Vergine Maria. Based on a section from Dante's Paradiso, the latter's style is far removed from the broadly lyrical writing of the most popular operas. There is a restraint here that makes its sacred quality all the more effective...
White-maned and sturdy, at 65, Pianist Fischer gave a program that few living pianists would either care or dare to present. On each night he performed four concertos of Bach, conducting members of the National Orchestra of Belgium and assisting soloists from his seat at the piano. Nodding his big head, or gesturing slightly with a momentarily free hand to indicate the tempo, he kept superb command of the ensemble, while producing immaculate music from his own piano. Characteristically, it was Bach of uncommon serenity in the slow passages, of robust vigor in the strong ones. (Fischer on Bach...
Swiss-born Edwin Fischer has built his reputation as an exponent of the classics. For him, The Well-Tempered Clavier of Bach, which he recorded years ago, is the "Old Testament," and Beethoven's sonatas are the "New Testament." He is also at his best with the music of Mozart, which he plays on a grander scale than that favored by the tinkly music-box school of Mozart interpreters. Composers such as Chopin seem to elude Fischer, but when he sticks to Bach and Mozart, few pianists anywhere can match him. Wrote a Paris-Presse critic last year: "After...
...week Bob Shaw was back in Carnegie Hall with proof that, wherever he has been sitting for the past 24 months, he has found some of the answers-if not yet all the right ones. For the first of an ambitious series of seven concerts featuring choral "masterworks" since Bach, he presented his professional 40-voice Robert Shaw Chorale arranged behind a 45-piece orchestra. In the opening Mozart Requiem he proved that he now has one of the most highly trained and carefully blended chorus-and-orchestra combinations in the world, capable of far more clarity than a booming...
...erected a façade of innocuous jobs (publisher's assistant, bookkeeper, language teacher, corset salesman), took on Western airs and a Western wife. She was Ivy Low, radical daughter of an English writer. He came to admire the works of Henry James, Jane Austen, Beethoven and Bach; he took up contract bridge. But Litvinoff remained Bolshevik to the core-a blunt, opportunistic, skeptical revolutionary, with a keen, mousetrap kind of mind that was wired always to orders from home...