Word: beethovens
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...BEETHOVEN: FIDELIO (2 LPs; Nonesuch). A less grandiose effort at another demanding opera is on the whole more satisfying. Beethoven's only opera draws much of its beauty from a succession of duets, trios and quartets; and all hands, under the direction of Carl Bamberger with Hamburg's Norddeutscher Rundfunk Orchestra, are nimble, experienced ensemble singers. As Leonore, Gladys Kuchta reaches everything but the heights of Abscheulicher!; Julius Patzak, who had been singing for 35 years when this record was made, still sounds fresh and sturdy as Florestan; the best performance on the record is Melita Muszely...
...performance, but the audience at the Aspen Music Festival in Colorado hardly seemed to notice. Onstage, the pianist leaned more intently over the keyboard and subtly adjusted his tone to bring the music out over the sound of the shower. Wet or dry, it was an excellent performance of Beethoven's last and perhaps greatest piano sonata (in C minor, Opus 111), a piece that alternates between demonic fury and lyric contemplation and requires more than mere competence to bring...
...year-old Jacob Lateiner, whom most professionals would call "a musician's musician," which is another way of saying that he lacks the glamour and glitter so dazzling to most nonprofessionals among concert audiences. The pros, on the other hand, call him one of the finest interpreters of Beethoven since Artur Schnabel. "The remarkable quality about Lateiner's playing," says Composer Elliott Carter, "is his depth of understanding." It is an understanding that Lateiner has distilled from scholarly scrutiny of the original manuscripts of the music he plays. A collector by inclination (rare books, German expressionist drawings...
Smiling but Silent. On opening night, however, the wondering quickly turned to wonder. Seated at the foot of the altar in the Gothic Saint-Pierre Church, Schneider, Serkin and Casals played Beethoven's Trio in E-Flat Major with a passion that made no concession to age. Casals' luminous tone filled the vast church like waves of sunlight, touching the life's breath of the music. At concert's end, the audience of 1,000 rose from the hardwood pews smiling but silent-the only tribute allowed in the church. Later, when the old man walked...
Leading up to it were two works, the Mozart Quintet in F Major, K. 168, and the Quartet No. 2 (1958), of Leon Kirchner. Whereas the Beethoven is obviously a tremendous intellectual challenge to performers, the Mozart is deceptively simple. The Guarneri Quartet, fortunately, was not deceived. The pitfall with this, as with many other Mozart works, is that the player or players will not make the most of the symmetry of the music, and will turn out aperformance that is drab and uninteresting. While one may argue that the music is overly simple, one must remember that this...