Word: cadenza
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Pizzicato passages, stratospheric glissandi, cadenza after cadenza-the balding, blue-eyed violinist tackled each without hesitation and butchered each in turn, always about a quarter-tone off pitch. Eventually, the concertmaster mercifully took the solo play away from the wounded virtuoso. The Aspen, Colo., audience was delighted by the shenanigans. They had, after all, paid as much as $50 to see and hear Jack Benny's violin act which, like his familiar monologues, is a masterpiece of comic tim ing. Benny, 75, and his fiddle have raised well over $5,000,000 at similar benefits, and this one netted...
...every part. You have an art of your own. I left a reading of every word with a sense of completeness; the Bach violin partitas began sounding through my mind as I got up. You caught the heart of the Bachian Restoration in a magnificent end-of-year cadenza. What is better for space travel than the accompaniment of Bach? Long live Bach...
...with the master's style. Mozart's most essential and yet most elusive quality is balance, the result of his unique musical genius. Though it can be emulated, it can never be reproduced. Notwithstanding certain lapses of taste--e.g., a modicum of Beethovenian bravura at the conclusion of the cadenza--and lack of classical proportion, the prodigiousness of the feat was unquestionable...
...plays two ragas worked out by Shankar (the rest of the album is given over to a solo by Shankar and a performance of Enesco's Sonata No. 3 by Menuhin and his pianist sister Hephzibah). On the first, a violin solo, Menuhin spins out a contemplative opening cadenza, progresses to some pizzicato syncopations, then, over the pitty-pat of tabla (drums), skips and slides through a series of jaunty embellishments on the theme. On the second, he and Shankar engage in a long, rousing call-and-response pattern and a roller-coaster ensemble of rising and falling arpeggios...
Having bowed to tradition in the Bach, the Laredos proceeded to perform the contemporary Sonata Concertante of Kirchner. This is a long work, full of virtuosic writing for the two instruments. Long, cadenza-like solo passages occur throughout, mostly for the violin. One of these--a broad, violin-spanning "theme" in double stops--opens the work and recurs periodically throughout the sonata's two movements, lending the work a somewhat cyclical character. There is nothing small about this piece, and the Laredos performed it with passion, intensity and brillance...