Word: beethovens
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
YEAR'S BEST SYMPHONY RECORDING: Beethoven's Ninth, Toscanini conducting (Victor...
...Beethoven: Sonatas for Cello & Piano (Janos Starker & Abba Bogin; Period, 2 LPs). All five of the master's efforts for cello and piano. The cello is played with fire, tenderness and unerring accuracy by Hungarian-born Janos Starker of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. His partner is a talented young (27) American pianist...
Virtually every great composer has given up some blood to the critics' gantlet. John Ruskin (whose true critical specialty was art) described Beethoven's music as sounding like "the upsetting of bags of nails." Chopin's music was damned in its entirety by London's Musical World as "ranting hyperbole and excruciating cacophony." Tchaikovsky was assured by the Boston Evening Transcript that his new Fifth Symphony was "pandemonium, delerium tremens, raving, and above all, noise worse confounded." And Tchaikovsky himself was not above recording a terse opinion about Brahms: "That scoundrel . . . What a giftless bastard...
...motionless over the keyboard and his heavy head bent reflectively, he had an air of a man determined to prove his case quickly. When he began to play a Mozart sonata, its contours were practically flawless, but the playing was so rigidly controlled that the effect was almost oppressive. Beethoven's Sonata Op. 110 was more relaxed, but it was only when he came to the impressionist music of Debussy and Ravel-billowing up tinted clouds of tone and lacing them with bright spiderwebs of melody-that Gieseking seemed at full ease at last. Probably no pianist...
Music Appreciation. In San Marino, Calif., Eakle Wesley Cartwright Jr., 22, who was charged with setting fire to his family's house three times in a single week, surprised firemen on each occasion by calmly sitting in the living room playing classical records, explained to police: "Beethoven thrills...