Word: beethovens
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...CLIBURN: BEETHOVEN "LES ADIEUX" SONATA; MOZART SONATA IN C (RCA Victor). Cliburn's delivery of Beethoven's sonata of cheerful goodbyes and of Mozart's sonata of precise jollity is deft, fey and spacious, but Beethoven and Mozart have been known to reveal greater depths under more scholarly hands...
...music wonk predicted that "this was the year they would do Gotterdammerung on a card table." He wasn't far off. Saturday night the Music Club mounted what was billed as a concert performance of Beethoven's only opera, Fidelio...
From the beginning this project suffered from delusions of grandeur. Fidelio is traditionally a work of which even professionals are terrified. Beethoven was not one to let the physical limitations of the human voice restrict his compositional imagination, and Fidelio contains some of the most fiendishly difficult vocal and instrumental part-writing in the whole operatic literature...
...finale. On the whole, however, the forces assembled at Sanders had to cope with so much music of such weight and difficulty that they had little chance to do anything with their parts but get through them. Much of the performance was simply dutiful and at times even boring. Beethoven's exquisite score certainly deserves more than that--that is, more than even the best undergraduate musicians are capable of giving it under the circumstances of extracurricular music at Harvard...
Nobody was spared his wrath, not even he. Sometimes he denounced his own conducting and violently slapped his own face. Once, dissatisfied with the NBC Orchestra's performance of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, he cried, "I was stupid! You were stupid! Only Beethoven was not stupid." Indeed, the music itself was what mattered most to him. All of his talents-his firm beat, fantastic ear, uncanny sense of style and structure, and even his rages-were marshaled toward a faithful re-creation of the composer's intention. During a rehearsal of Tchaikovsky's Pathetique Symphony...