Word: beethovens
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...Vermeer Quartet presented a highly commendable concert July 24--well-rehearsed, carefully controlled, and enjoyable. The three works on the program (Haydn op. 76, no. 1; Beethoven op. 74; and Berg op. 3) are masterful pieces in interestingly contrasting styles. In matters of performance technique and ensemble, there is little to criticize and much to praise: intonation was generally very good, especially in unison passages; the four voices were usually well balanced and blended, without sacrificing an essential degree of individuality; tempi were sometimes a bit on the slow side, but never dangerously so; the softer dynamic markings were occasionally...
...tone, gave a gourmet's response: "I cannot pour chocolate sauce over asparagus." The metaphor, though exaggerated, describes to some degree what happened in the first half of Monday's concert--thick, sensuous topping (quite enjoyable in the proper context) amorphously coating the crisp organic forms of Haydn and Beethoven. I hasten, however, to make it perfectly clear that the group's well-intended savoring of each morsel never reached the point of outright bad taste...
...absence to work on his Ph.D., writing a doctoral thesis on algebraic topology, dealing with the property of geometric figures that, like rubber bands, do not change under bending or stretching. "What good is topology?" he says. "It's a pure field of learning. What good is Beethoven...
...late Igor Stravinsky's life was the best documented of any composer's since Beethoven. Why? Largely because of a bespectacled, quizzical-looking musician named Robert Craft, 48. For the last 23 years of Stravinsky's life, Craft served the old master as rehearsal conductor, aide, intellectual catalyst, amanuensis and surrogate son. Moreover, Craft worked with Stravinsky on innumerable magazine articles and six semi-autobiographical books-a series that is supplemented this week by the publication of Craft's Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship 1948/1971 (Knopf...
Last week Ponti began a recital at London's Queen Elizabeth Hall with a Beethoven sonata at 7:50 p.m. By 8:20 he had flung himself into one of the fiercest challenges in the entire piano literature: both books of Brahms' Variations on a Theme by Paganini. He continued with Chopin's powerful Sonata in B Minor, another sonata by Scriabin, a wrist-cracking Etude for the Left Hand by Blumenfeld, and finally Stravinsky's Three Scenes from Petrouchka, a piece that bristles with so many notes that much of it is written on three...