Word: concerto
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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DUNSTER LIBRARY. Brandenburg Party. Open sight-reading of Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 21 and Symphony No. 30; and Bach: Concerto for Two Violins. Bring your music stand. Sunday, February...
...Moscow psychiatrist leaned forward intently. "You will write your concerto," he intoned. "You will work with great facility ... The concerto will be of excellent quality." On the couch lay Sergei Rachmaninoff, 27, in a hypnotic trance. At the time (1900) Rachmaninoff was noted as a pianist and conductor. But as a composer he was notorious. His First Symphony had been premiered three years earlier to unanimous disapproval, so shattering his confidence that in the time since he had been unable to compose at all. Of his monumental block, Rachmaninoff recalled years later: "I felt like a man who had suffered...
Soirée Idol. The psychiatrist's patience and persuasion worked. A year later Rachmaninoff finished his Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor. It became his most popular work and, after the Tchaikovsky First Concerto, the most popular piano concerto in the repertory. As for Rachmaninoff, he went on to lead one of the few 20th century musical careers that can accurately be called spectacular. Only the Pole Josef Hofmann could be compared with him as a virtuoso pianist, and even Hofmann behaved deferentially around Rachmaninoff. No other concert pianist, except Prokofiev, had Rachmaninoff's stature...
...five-album, 15-LP release from RCA makes amends handsomely, if belatedly. The set contains, for example, not just the famous recording of the Second Concerto made with Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1929 but also another version with the same performers from 1924. Then there is Rachmaninoff partnering Fritz Kreisler in a fancy-free performance of Beethoven's Violin Sonata in G, Op. 30, No. 3 (1928). There is a stupendous performance of Beethoven's 32 Variations in C Minor, which might well have been retitled 26 Variations since Rachmaninoff omitted variations...
...trim, aristocratic-looking man, Lieberson still walks each morning from his town house on Manhattan's East Side to his office in CBS'S dark gray stone skyscraper (known to employees as the Black Rock); he still finds time for tennis and doodling on an unfinished violin concerto, still entertains such friends as the Leonard Bernsteins, Richard Rodgerses and Dick Cavetts. He frequently gets away with his wife of 27 years, Ballerina Vera Zorina, for long weekends at their second home in Santa...