Word: concertos
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...often accused of emotional aridity, a charge which is beneath contempt. One has only to listen to Persephone, the slow movement of the Piano Concerto, Apollo, Orphcus, or the lullaby of The Rake's Progress. But every bar of his music is lyrical in the highest sense, that of selfless restraint. Chekhov, a similar artist in this and other respects, once wrote to a friend, "The more sensitive the matter in hand, the more calmly one should describe it-and the more touching it will be at last." Stravinsky has composed in the belief that feeling is deepest when least...
...bore the name Herd, was a hard-driving ensemble with a precision-drilled brass attack, modulated by a sophisticated Ellingtonian touch. The first Herd's explosive rendition of such numbers as Apple Honey and Northwest Passage appealed to just about everybody-including Igor Stravinsky, who wrote the Ebony Concerto for Woody in 1946. The second Herd (1947-50) tried to hitch up with bebop, but muffled its big beat in the process and dropped $175,000. In the '50s and early '60s, Herman leaned toward one pop trend and then another, but basically stuck to a swinging...
...Concertos performed on Wednesday and Thursday evenings suffered the most. The First Concerto, on Wednesday, was static. The orchestra followed Rudolf in his highly correct and well paced interpretation, while Serkin played his own version, accenting different notes than the orchestra, making the humorous passages of the last movement so fast and racy that it sounded like Milhaud. The Fifth Concerto was almost unbearable. The Emperor has grown so familiar to the BSO that the orchestra dismisses it lightly. Only a few forte passages of the first movement and the opening of the second had any sort of inspiration...
...which Serkin had previously given. The Chorus Pro Musica, prepared by Alfred Nash Patterson, was in excellent tone, as might be expected from any vocal group which Patterson has conducted. After this opener, the night's program was well established. For the first time in the week, a piano concerto came off flawlessly. The Fourth Concerto had neither the over-familiarity nor the mechanical feeling which had characterized the Festival on the previous nights. For the first time, the listener felt some sort of satisfaction as the intermission began...
...have long been accustomed to a one-sided search for one particular piece in a maze of two-faced records. Is that Mozart's 40th on the flip side of Haydn's 88th? Is Beethoven's "Waldstein" Sonata on the other side of the Schumann Piano Concerto? Now this petty but annoying problem is all but solved. More and more companies are offering omnibus collections of great composers in one volume, uniformly boxed and carefully indexed...