Word: cellistic
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...musical comedy. She sang at the Leningrad Operetta Theater during the war, sandwiching performances between stints of rubble clearing in the streets. In 1952 she graduated to the Bolshoi Opera, is now preparing the leading role in Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Married to famed Russian Cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, Soprano Vishnevskaya has two daughters, lives comfortably in a six-room Moscow apartment, draws a top Soviet artist's salary of $1,500 a month...
...tumultuous reception they have encountered everywhere on their three-month odyssey through Europe and Israel. Said one Tel Aviv critic: "This is the best thing we've had from America." It took a while for the quartet to prove its class to European audiences. Although the four members-Cellist George Sopkin, 44, First Violinist Leonard Sorkin, 43, Second Violinist Abram Loft, 38, Violist Irving Ilmer, 40-had toured the Continent briefly two years ago, they found on this trip that Europeans are still apt to think of Chicago as a breeding ground of gangsters rather than musicians. In Stuttgart...
Said the startled cellist to the conductor: "Are those your metronome marks in the score?" Replied the conductor adamantly: "Yes." And at that point, reports the Boston Symphony's First Cellist Sammy Mayes, Russia's Dmitry Kabalevsky simply "took off." Composer Kabalevsky was conducting his own cello concerto in Boston, and "he wanted it a lot faster than we usually play it. You start flying around like a young gazelle...
...that one listener cracked: "The triumph of the proletariat on Bald Mountain." Nevertheless, the audience shouted its approval, while the Russians, standing on the stage, applauded the spectators in return. "For Symphony Hall," said the radio announcer in the control booth, "it's a rather wild scene." Said Cellist Mayes: "Musicians are the same the world over; one's as crazy as the other...
...Arturo Toscanini wanted a harpist for the Metropolitan Opera Company, and imported him, says Salzedo, "like a piece of cheese." Salzedo stayed at the Met for four years, then organized the U.S.'s first harp ensemble, later set off to tour Europe with a flutist and a cellist. After a stint in the French army in World War I (wounded in action). Salzedo returned to the U.S. and got to work making the harp something better than one of those "extra" instruments rarely heard outside full-dress philharmonic orchestras...