Word: concertized
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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When Rhapsody in Blue was first played -with young Composer George Gershwin at the piano and Paul Whiteman's big, brassy band shattering the serenity of Manhattan's Aeolian Hall-neither audience nor critics liked their first taste of concert jazz. The Herald Tribune objected to its "complete lifelessness." Most audiences, if not critics, have changed their tune in the 21 years since then...
...fitting false teeth, demanded a refund from her dentist.) The day's weary business done, the judge climbed from the bench and went uptown to his avocation: conducting 100 amateur musicians. Judge Leopold Prince was rehearsing his City Amateur Symphony Orchestra for the season's first summer concert...
...Koch and Elliot Paul with simplicity and reasonable fidelity. Newcomer Robert Alda looks enough like Gershwin and, with the aid of some astute photography, fakes his piano playing skilfully enough to be convincing in the cacophony of Remick's, a music publishing company, and impressive at a concert grand in Manhattan's Aeolian Hall...
...Rhapsody in Blue fails to reveal in full the source and nature of the artistry that lay behind its hero's restless introspection, its music is ample compensation. With no story at all, this two-hour concert of Gershwin music would be well worth the price of admission. The shimmering ragtime of many a half-forgotten early hit, beaten out by an invisible Oscar Levant; the brazen love call of the Winter Garden smash Swanee, groaned in all its original agony by blackfaced Al Jolson; Anne Brown's superb soprano raised again in the music of Porgy...
When the long-awaited news finally arrived, it was a big letdown. Sergei Prokofieff's monumental opera, War and Peace (promised by Stalin to the Metropolitan Opera after a Soviet premiere) had a concert run-through last week at the Moscow Conservatory. An audience of professional musicians, squirming through the sceneryless nine scenes, vigorously applauded the classic melodies, found the unwieldy Tolstoyan libretto tough going and concluded that the opera was far from finished...