Word: beethovens
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What is the most popular classical music? Eight years ago Manhattan's radio station WQXR (which plays no jazz) polled its listeners, found Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 the favorites. Listeners now think less of Tchaikovsky's dog-eared concerto, but Beethoven is more popular than ever...
...Gould and Samuel Barber. But, instead of picking our noses to find something to grumble about, let us realize that Serge Koussevitzky is a very fine conductor, the Harvard Glee Club and Radcliffe Choral Society is a very fine choral group, the Boston Symphony is a superb orchestra, and Beethoven's Missa Solemnis is one of the greatest artistic creations of Western civilization. A good time...
...years now, the "poison" of Arturo Toscanini has been seeping out into the world. Drugged by it, millions of music lovers (and not a few critics) have come to regard all of the Maestro's music with dumb and unquestioning adoration. Certainly he has brought the music of Beethoven, Schubert, Wagner and Verdi to life as no other man has. He is now a white-haired little man of 81, and when a human being reaches that age, his critics, remembering his finer hours, are apt to temper their judgments with mercy...
...Verdi stared at her from the piano's littered top. "Nelli," he pleaded, "please do use the expression on your face that you feel in the music. That will bring out the words and the music too." It was an old insistence of his. In rehearsal for Beethoven's Ninth Symphony he had stopped a soloist and asked him, "Do you know what you are singing about? You are singing of brotherhood, but in your face you look like you hate everyone. That will show in your music...
...does not trust music that does not touch his heart. He feels that he was a pioneer in his youth, and that it is now up to younger conductors to pioneer the music of their generation. His ambition now, he says, is "to come closer to the secrets of Beethoven and a few other eternal masters...