Word: chopines
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DIED. SHURA CHERKASSKY, 84, classical concert pianist; in London. The Odessa-born prodigy brought emotional fire and interpretive panache to the Romantic repertoire of Chopin and Rachmaninoff...
Just turning 80, Wild is as productive and more musically rewarding than ever. This week he plays a birthday concert in Carnegie Hall, featuring works by Lizst, Chopin and Beethoven. Sony Classics, meanwhile, has just released a new CD, The Romantic Master, which is largely devoted to Wild's own dazzling transcriptions, among them the delightful Reminiscences of Snow White, a fantasy on Frank Churchill's music for the 1937 Disney animated film. But lest one think that Wild is all flash and no substance, his recent recording of Beethoven's thorny "Hammerklavier" Sonata, on the Chesky label, is grandly...
...anything other than a consummate master of a vanished pianistic style. For the past 40 years audiences have favored the colder, more analytical approach of pianists like Leon Fleischer, Gary Graffman and Maurizio Pollini. The brief romantic revival of the late 1960s highlighted his expertise with such composers as Chopin and Lizst, but Wild has never received the critical acclaim he deserves...
...Rosen the three leading figures of the era are Chopin, Schumann and Liszt. But in his wide-ranging study, where influences are as shrewdly detected as innovations, he illuminates the musical sensibilities of a great many composers. For instance, "That music should be completely audible was as obvious to Mozart as it was irrelevant for Bach," Rosen observes. And, "It has taken more than a century to realize that it is not Berlioz's oddity but his normality, his ordinariness, that makes him great...
...ideas grow from his intimacy with the music. The book comes with a CD (a wonderful idea) on which Rosen plays 16 selections that he analyzes in the book. Rosen has concurrently released a separate recording, also called The Romantic Generation (Music Masters Classics), that contains six pieces--by Chopin, Schumann and Liszt--whose historical importance he discusses as well. One highlight is Rosen's commanding performance of Liszt's terrifyingly difficult tour de force of homage and imagination, Reminiscences de Don Juan, inspired by Mozart's Don Giovanni. In the text, he isolates from that piece a passage that...