Word: beethovens
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Last week Leopold Stokowski led the NBC Symphony again, this time in 8-H. Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony never sounded more lush and verdant. Studio audience, radio listeners and critics were happy. The reverberations were all they should be; radio's biggest concert hall had at last become musicianly. Explained Stokowski: ''We found a way to floodlight sound...
Equally characteristic is Arrau's thoroughness. He probably holds a world's record for cycle performances; once he performed all Bach's clavier works in twelve recitals; he has also given complete Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert cycles. To preserve his vitality, he keeps to the Hay diet (separating starches and proteins), eats fruit like a jungle dweller, does Yoga exercises, sleeps ten hours a night. Says he: "A musician owes it to his audiences not to have off days...
...cult. He wants mood most of all in drama; plot, situation and character are all incidental to the creation of the proper feeling. A play, for him, must excite as music does, in a sweeping, comprehensive whole. As he has pointed out, one does not stop Beethoven's Seventh in the Second Movement to inquire if the third oboe player has honorable intentions toward the second violins. Saroyan's fantasies do not investigate any of the more common phases of drama; he projects a pure simplicity and nobility of spirit and does it far better than most other dramatists today...
...Beethoven: "Emperor" Concerto (Rudolf Serkin, pianist, with New York Philharmonic-Symphony conducted by Bruno Walter; Columbia; 10 sides). This noble old warhorse, often recorded before, is freshly revealed in its full grandeur, thanks to a finely conceived performance, a finely balanced recording...
Audiences of the early days nocked to hear the Polish pianist Volovsky "play 400 notes in one measure"; to watch jullien, famed French-English conductor of the 18505, lift a pair of kid gloves from a gold platter and carefully draw them on his fingers before conducting Beethoven; to hear & see 100 red-shirted firemen at the Boston Peace Jubilee of 1869 clanking 100 anvils to Verdi's Anvil Chorus...