Word: cortot
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Noteworthy noisemakers in the fine arts were a couple of oldsters: in London, Sculptor Jacob Epstein, 66; in Paris, Pianist Alfred Cortot...
...Paris, about 20 years ago, three good friends recorded Schubert and Beethoven trios. Their performances are still definitive in chamber music. Pianist Alfred Cortot and Violinist Jacques Thibaud were France's two most distinguished instrumentalists. Spaniard Pablo Casals was the world's most famed cellist...
Before the war they split. Cortot, a collaborationist, became Vichy's secretary for music. Casals, a fiery Spanish Loyalist, hid out in France during the war, performed at Loyalist benefits. Now 70, he has announced that he will never play publicly again until Spain is liberated from Franco. Jacques Thibaud, less politically minded than either, gave concerts in Vichyfrance, but also performed clandestinely in Switzerland and Spain. In France, aging Jacques Thibaud is regarded with somewhat the same mixture of admiration and affection that U.S. audiences feel for Thibaud's close friend, Fritz Kreisler...
Thibaud is gloomily sure that the great Cortot-Thibaud-Casals trio will never play together again. "I have not been very lucky with my fellows," says he. "They have become politician. Cortot very bad, Casals a little...
...Fischer is not the only pianist who is content to stay where he is. Alfred Cortot, well over seventy and in semi-retirement, gave a recital of the twenty-four precludes and twenty-four etudes of Chopin. During the Rencontres Internationales at Geneva in September, at which Europe's leading intellectuals met to try to bring some unity to the post-war's ideological tangle, Wilhelm Bachaus appeared to give a recital of Beethoven sonatas and another of piano quintets with the redoubtable French Lowenguth quartet...