Word: beethoven
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...thoughtful musical commentary, Copland on Music, is being published by Doubleday this week. A fairly consistent concertgoer, Copland rarely listens to recordings because he finds it discouraging that a record always sounds the same. "It would never occur to me," says he, "to sit down and listen to a Beethoven symphony. Recordings are really for people who live in Timbuktu...
...Meeting. During the Depression, Fritz recalls, he was so broke that he could not pay $12 due on his rented piano. When three moving men appeared at his furnished room to take the piano away, Fritz sat down to play for the last time Herbert, then Liszt. Beethoven. "Finally I was covered with sweat and I looked around. It was dark out. The three men were sitting on the floor. One called the others aside, and they talked for a few minutes. Then each man took out $2 and gave it to me. This could only happen in America...
Sviatoslov Richter is beset by a problem that many a pianist would welcome: his audiences refuse to let him go home. Having astounded Carnegie Hall with an all-Beethoven program in making his Manhattan debut (TIME, Oct. 31), Russia's great pianist returned last week to Carnegie to practice his extraordinary technique on works of other composers. The best way to dismiss his audiences, he discovered, was by quietly closing the keyboard of his concert grand...
Composers used to like nothing better than to sit down at the harpsichord or pianoforte and improvise on their own works. Bach, Handel and Beethoven were as well known for their improvisations as for their written compositions. Now Composer-Pianist Lukas Foss, 38, is contriving, with the help of a $10,000 Rockefeller grant, to put the long dead custom back into classical music-and make it an en semble...
...played for the first time by the New York Philharmonic this week. Between numbers, Foss's ensemble will do improvised "commentaries" on the songs. With the spread of controlled improvisation, Foss thinks the day may come when a typical concert will begin with bits of Bartok or Beethoven and, in between, feature the members of a chamber group spinning out their own trackless flights of fancy...