Word: beethovens
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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During the 1930s, most of the long-eared musical world was playing a waiting game. Famed Austrian Pianist Artur Schnabel was slowly recording his way through the Beethoven sonatas-Schnabel would no more hurry a recording session than he would a Beethoven tempo-and each new disk was an event. The whole series ranked as a masterpiece. Schnabel died in 1951, and his old 78 r.p.m. records soon became obsolete in the LP age. Last week Victor brought him back in his finest reincarnation, a package containing all 32 sonatas on 13 LPs, plus Schnabel's own meticulous edition...
...Beethoven was the first composer to make use of ugly sounds in abstract music, the first to make notes speak in everyday prose, to stamp and rave, and stand still to make philosophical statements, and Pianist Schnabel was temperamentally capable of bringing all of these qualities into line with Beethoven's more appealing side. Beethoven was also the first composer to become a bourgeois hero and one of the first upon whom the stupefying epithet "great" was popularly bestowed, an event that forecast the beginning of the present sorry condition of concert music-during the last hundred years...
...music is all there, and what really matters is Schnabel's playing. To hear him is suddenly to see light across the generations that separate the composer from today; to be delighted at Schnabel's surprising methods of treating Beethoven's surprising turns of phrase; to laugh or sigh, sometimes almost to cower in fright. This playing has the kind of sanity that is expressed in one of Schnabel's provocative remarks. "Back around the turn of the century," he once said, "it became the idea that Beethoven's opening theme in the Fifth Symphony...
When Joey Alfidi was forbidden to play any more rock 'n' roll, the boy concentrated on Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven. The longhairs paid off. This week, at the age of seven, Joey took over Manhattan's Carnegie Hall, led the Symphony of the Air (formerly Toscanini's NBC Symphony) in a full-scale program including Mozart's Figaro overture, Beethoven's Fifth and Haydn's Surprise symphonies. His gestures were incisive, particularly in the extreme loud and soft passages; obviously he had learned his scores by heart-no timpanist could miss his cannonball...
...Long Beach, N.Y.. father Alfidi hired the Symphony of the Air and Carnegie Hall at a total cost of $10,000. Papa is sure Joey will become a great conductor. But if not, there is his baby brother, who, says Papa, already hums the first bars of Beethoven's Fifth at the age of two years...