Word: chopines
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...main program was devoted to four Beethoven sonatas, to which Richter added works by Schubert, Schumann and Chopin as encores. Swaying, gyrating, twisting his face into gargoyle grimaces, Richter at times lowered his jutting jaw until it almost touched the keys, at other times threw his head back in a kind of trancelike reverie. His bravura passages had a grandeur with no hint of pounding, his pianissimos a feather lightness, and his crescendos or decrescendos were so tightly controlled that they seemed to swell and diminish like the modulations of a well-trained voice...
...that it had not been one of his best nights. At home, he is less known for his Beethoven than for his Liszt and Schubert. Unlike most Soviet artists, he is also an ardent champion of moderns. He generally insists on playing only one composer at each concert, explains: "Chopin after Beethoven is like watercolors after oil painting.'' At 46, Richter still gives some 120 concerts a season in Russia, labors at the keyboard for as long as ten hours at a stretch, and has been known to sit down for a three-hour practice session immediately after...
Normally held every five years (the schedule was interrupted during the war), the Chopin contest this year attracted 78 young pianists (age limit: 30) from all over the world. The 36-member jury, about half of whom were from the West, sat day after day in the balcony and deposited their secret ballots in a box to which the Chief of Justice of the Supreme Court had the only key. (Previous competitions have always been won by either a Pole or a Russian, and in 1955 there had been charges of political rigging...
This year Pianist Pollini was clearly ahead from the start. Playing with deep concentration, lips parted and sharply profiled face tilted slightly upward, he worked his way through a selection of Chopin etudes, preludes and mazurkas, giving each of them beautiful tone and lyric line, crystalline clarity and virtuoso technique to burn. Said a judge after he played Chopin's E-Minor Concerto in the finals: "I don't think he missed a single note." The only criticism of Pollini was that his staggering technical facility and his octave-wide span sometimes tempted him into playing...
...memorized ten pages in 15 minutes. Although he has won various piano prizes, Maurizio was not widely known when he set out for Warsaw. But his teacher. Carlo Vidusso of the Milan Conservatory, believed that he was ready. "Technically," said revered Artur Rubinstein, world's foremost interpreter of Chopin, "he already plays better than any of us on the jury...