Word: beethoven
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Bernstein, 37, has built his fanatic audience in a series of three Omnibus programs. In the first he discussed the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, and used an orchestra to trace the changes Beethoven made in the movement and patterning of his music. Says Bernstein: "Nobody knew whether people would sit still for 45 minutes on a subject like this. I had a notebook full of Beethoven's rejected sketches. We put them back into the symphony to see how it would have sounded if he hadn't been so determined on perfection...
Soft Symphonies. Beethoven and composers who followed him were accustomed to halls in which the reverberation period was comfortably long, i.e., if they clapped their palms, it would take perhaps two seconds for the sound to die to inaudibility. Result: when an orchestra played, it sounded mellow, sometimes foggy. Composers wrote symphonies to be performed under those conditions, and musicians played their instruments no better than necessary to pass muster under the mellow fog. Until the electronic age, except for musicians playing outdoors, everybody was accustomed to the old sound. When Toscanini first walked into NBC's studio...
...Beethoven's 'Archduke' Trio (1811), for violin, 'cello and piano, was the last great achievement of his middle period. It is almost symphonic in concept, and at times bursts the limits of the medium, as Beethoven was to do still more in his last period with such works as the Hammerklavier Sonata, the Grosse Fuge and the Missa Solemnis. The Trio posed for the composer a problem of balance between piano and strings. Beethoven's keyboard part is full of massive chords and rich arpeggios; to help compensate for this the string parts contain many double notes. The result...
...Mozart and Beethoven are so well known as to make inevitable a comparison, with professional standards. The musicians in the Mozart were Edward Filmanowicz and Ronald Hathaway, violins; Frederick Shoup, viola; and Charles Forbes, 'cello. The performance understandably lacked the polish ideally desired; the minuet movement was rather ragged and the first violin had some intentional difficulties. But the Beethoven performance was better than many I have heard from alleged superiors. Robert Freeman handled the exacting piano part with total ease, and Forbes displayed a consistently smooth tone and sure technique...
...order to avoid the usual Christmas program of th Messiah, on Sunday night the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra played Beethoven's 9th Symphony. The most that can be said for this choice is that it gave the musicians a chance to perform some magnificent music. From the audience's point of view, however, the choice was unsuccessful. The work is simply too difficult for the student orchestra to manage...