Word: beethoven
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...Beethoven's music was very sloppy [as Composer Britten said], but there are still enough of us around with no musical training and a protracted childhood admiration of Beethoven who prefer to glow naively in the light of the Eroica than to endure the involute bleatings of Britain's Britten...
...never plays encores. In fact, ever since he turned 40, he says, "it is really my desire not to play in public at all." But last week, at 65, he gave two Manhattan audiences a tantalizing sample of the music he plays and loves best-the piano works of Beethoven, Schubert and Mozart-music which no other living pianist plays so well...
First he played Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4 with his old friend George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra in Carnegie Hall; then, a few days later, a piano recital-the only one he will give all year in Manhattan. Yet in the next fortnight he will play in San Francisco five times. Says he: "Agents [he has none] think I am crazy. But when I go some place, I like to stay awhile. To play, pick up the check and run is silly...
...Beethoven: Symphony No. 4 (the Cleveland Orchestra, George Szell conducting; Columbia, 8 sides). Robert Schumann called the Fourth "a slender Greek maiden between two Norse giants" (the Eroica and the Fifth). In his Columbia debut with the Cleveland Orchestra, Conductor Szell has sculptured her skillfully and gracefully. Performance: excellent...
...wholesale lots. Canning and transmitting musical effects was a huge and complicated industry in which the artist, the advertiser, the salesman and the inventor fought ceaselessly for expression and profit. Its impact upon the people of the U.S. and the world was tremendous-it had given them both the Beethoven Ninth and Too Fat Polka ("I don't want her, You can have her, She's too fat for me"). It had also made possible the use of either Beethoven or boogie-woogie in the sale of elevator shoes or political propaganda...