Word: cellistic
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...film begins, a world-famous cellist lies dead, mourned in turn by his critic-biographer, six black-veiled mistresses and his wife. Flashbacks detail the end of the great man's life in a series of slapstick sketches played against the ricky-tick accompaniment of Yes! We Have No Bananas. In the sprawling Villa Tremolo, where he keeps his women (among them such Bergman favorites as Eva Dahlbeck, Bibi Andersson and Harriet Andersson), Maestro Felix is heard but seldom seen. The women are the issue, for the artist's playthings, like his public, adore him, scorn him, help...
...sniffs out the "personal details" of Felix's life, even appropriates one of his mistresses. He composes critical jargon so dense that he himself cannot penetrate it ("What the hell do I mean by that?"), writes atrocious music, and finally wheedles Felix into playing it. Once compromised, the cellist collapses, corporeally and artistically kaput...
...been eight years since Violinist Jascha Heifetz, 63, retired from the concert stage, grumbling that "It requires the nerves of a bullfighter, the vitality of a woman who runs a nightclub, and the concentration of a Buddhist monk." It had been seven years since his fellow Russian, Cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, 61, was last heard in Manhattan...
...Cellist Charlotte Moorman, who had a concert to herself earlier in the festival in which she played a duet with a mechanized robot equipped with twirling foam-rubber breasts, is told at 36 minutes to "play and sing for four minutes." She can perform anything she likes, so one night she played a Boccherini piece, another night Bach. At 15 minutes, during "a long pause," she is free to do whatever she wants and made dark plans to give Poet Ginsberg a much needed shave, "if he does not resist too much...
Consider the two pieces played by Michael Flaksman '66, principal cellist of the HRO. The Vivaldi Sonates en Concert in E minor for cello and orchestra were meant for cello and continuo. They sound soupy with a full orchestra. Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 is more at home with a saxophone band than this Vivaldi is with such a lush orchestral arrangement...