Word: concertos
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Ozawa showed considerable craft in selecting his programs. The Chinese love the violin, so there were two concertos, the Mozart Fifth in A Major and the Mendelssohn. Concertmaster Joseph Silverstein was the delicate, meticulous soloist in both. The Boston also used two Chinese virtuosos. Liu Dehai played a concerto for a lutelike instrument called the pipa. In the solos he all but turned into Orpheus...
...other was Pianist Liu Shikun, who performed the Liszt Concerto No. 1 in E-flat. The two Lius were startlingly different in temperament. The pipa player is a genial fellow who entertained the Boston members backstage with Home on the Range ("I learned it for Kissinger's sixth visit"). The pianist, who spent most of the Gang of Four reign in jail, is a man of seething intensity. He came onstage with shaking hands, and shot through the Liszt with authority but blinding speed. At rehearsal, Ozawa had tried without success to slow Liu down. Finally, he said...
...exploited the technical gifts of Baryshnikov, whom Robbins calls "a superhuman instrument." (The Fall segment will also be danced by Peter Martins with different choreography and music, to show off his serene purity of line.) On opening night, The Four Seasons was on the program between two Balanchine masterpieces, Concerto Barocco and Symphony in C. Those ballets were brutal competition for the new work, which nonetheless won the crowd with its buoyancy and élan. Rossini once said that all kinds of music are good except the boring kind. That goes for ballet too. - Martha Duffy
Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto No. 3 (RCA). Not everyone's Rachmaninoff, but electrifying Horowitz...
...benefitted from luminous solo passages by the flute and clarinet and conjured a sensuous picture of Sleeping Beauty; the plaintive and delicate waltz Ravel wrote for Beauty and the Beast received a skillful treatment from the upper woodwinds and contrabassoon. But dynamic imbalances proved frustrating here as in the concerto. Too often the less important lines were simply not sufficiently subordinated; exquisitely played solo passages in the woodwinds in 'Laideronetter,' and for the violin and viola in 'Le jardin ferrique,' were scarcely audible...