Word: beethovens
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...early 20th century repertory, in the music of such composers as Tchaikovsky, Strauss, Sibelius, Ravel and Debussy. Here he conducts with color and sweep, with glowing sonorities and vivid details. If he has seemed short on profound emotion or penetrating insight, notably into classical composers like Mozart and Beethoven, his musicianship-his pitch, timing and ear for balances and shadings-has always been impeccable. Having inherited a great ensemble from Stokowski, he made it greater. He has hired virtually all of the orchestra's 106 members and molded them into a unit renowned for its tonal sheen and bravura...
...those that lived through The War and knew Nazi Germany; and for the younger generation, for whom the swastika and the "heil" are the lost trapping of a confusing, all too-recent past. Even Hans-Jurgen Syberberg's seven-hour nightmare, Our Hitler, with its pounding Wagner and Beethoven, acknowledges Oskar's drum. It beats in time to the modern German effort to recreate Hegel's sense of history, Goethe's sense of self, Nietzche's sense of strength and Gunter Grass' cheeky sense of post-modern myth--the eerie drumbeat of barbarism, mysticism, and boredom...
THERE IS A CONSTANT undercurrent in this film, background monologues that threaten to convert Our Hitler into a polemic, recordings of speeches by Hitler, Goebbels, Goering. The props, the voices, the music (mostly Wagner, Beethoven, Mozart and Nazi Party songs) play off each other to produce the ideological confusion that is the character of this film, that was also Nazi Germany...
...individual and such a pianist. Becoming active again around 1967, he made a belated New York debut in 1968 that was well worth waiting for. By the early 1970s he was ready to resume recording, and a succession of superb discs has followed: the Chopin Etudes, the late Beethoven sonatas, last year's Grammy Award-winning set of Bartok concertos. Last week, as Pollini completed a three-week swing through the U.S., including two stunning recitals in Carnegie Hall, he left behind little doubt that, at 38, he has moved into the forefront of the world's pianists...
...flourishes and exaggerations even in the most romantic repertory. Some listeners consequently miss a certain warmth and spontaneity in his playing. Although capable of producing beautiful sonorities, he is admittedly not the poet or colorist that, say, Vladimir Ashkenazy is. Nor, despite his limpid, shapely way with Mozart and Beethoven, does he share the Austro-German classical tradition of an Alfred Brendel. Yet everything he does arises from such a deep, individualized conception, and is brought off with such musicality and unforced virtuosity, that it carries its own commanding authority...