Word: beethovens
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...York City's free park-concert series, and by dusk something like 90,000 people had spread blankets and set up camp chairs around the park's Sheep Meadow. It was possibly the biggest crowd ever to attend a symphony concert, and it listened enraptured as Beethoven's Eroica and Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps filled the evening...
Destination: office. Driving time: Beethoven's Third Symphony, Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto, and, depending on traffic, two or three numbers by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. Driver squiggles into bucket seat, straps on safety belt, injects stereotape cartridge into dashboard holder, and, to the engulfing strains of the 100-piece Boston Symphony, rolls away on wheels of song...
...main problem with the late Beethoven quartets is one of scope. These works stretch the expressive potential of the string quartet to the limit. While they are conceived on a scale comparable to that of any of his major orchestral works, they face the tremendous problem of developing within the bounds of an idiom whose orchestrational possibilities are very limited. As a result, Beethoven sometimes demands more of the string quartet than can be done with the instruments at hand. His Quartet in A Minor, Op. 132, however, carefully skirts any such fault. Ideally played, it demonstrates true virtuoso quartet...
Also on the program were the Concertina for String Quartet by Stravinsky and the Beethoven C-sharp Minor Quartet, Op. 131. The Stravinsky, written in 1920, is a little-heard work that was also scored for wind ensemble. It shows the influence of Russian folk-music, but its construction focuses on an effort to draw a rough, guttural sound from the instruments, and it demands a great deal of technical competence of the players. The Guarneri Quartet measured up in every way to its challenges, and provided a startling contrast to the Romanticism of the Brahms...
Winding up the concert was the big, tired old Beethoven Op. 131. This seven movement work is the sort of piece that helped get under way the esthetic tradition that produced the Albert and Victoria monstrosities. To be played without any break between the section, it has a tremendous capacity for becoming a longwinded, disorganized barrage of pomposity, sentimentality, and self-conscious melodrama. For the first four movements there was a sense of heaviness, as if the music could not build up any motive force of its own and got from one measure to the next only through the brute...