Word: diabelli
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Shure is a pianist who likes his music meaty. At this Dudley House recital he cose to assault two of the most awesome pinnacles of the piano literature, the Schubert Sonata in Bb, Op. posthumous, and the Variations on a Theme of Diabelli by Beethoven. Reaction was mixed and tended to the extremes, but there was general admiration for the sheer endurance feat of getting through all those notes...
Shure is known for his performance of music by German composers, particularly that of Beethoven. It was this composer's Opus 109 that was the most successful portion of Monday night's highly stimulating concert. It is a work much akin to the "Diabelli" Variations, featuring as its last movement a masterful and exquisite set of variations. But Shure's Opus 109 was much more digested than his Dudley "Diabelli." In this work he exhibited the acute but sensitively analytical mind for which he is noted among musicians. Every detail of the composition's intricate structure had been thought...
...program was ambitious, a no-compromise mixture of the new, the old and the damnably difficult. In Schoenberg's slow, brooding Five Piano Pieces, he stretched and examined each phrase with all the intense care and concentration of a surgeon. In Beethoven's Diabelli Variations, an awesome challenge to pianists twice his age, he impetuously jiggered tempos and juggled rhythms without catching the full depth and breadth of the music. In Mozart's Sonata in F Major, he was all lucidity and logic, rippling through the trickiest passages with an almost playful ease. His interpretations were introspective...
BEETHOVEN: DIABELLI VARIATIONS (RCA Victor). Thirty-three variations on a waltz by the Austrian composer Anton Diabelli pose a formidable test for the virtuoso talents of 32-year-old John Browning. Much talked about but seldom performed, they strain the pianist's technical mastery and his emotional ambience. Browning, who is one of the best of the "percussive" school, passes the technical trials splendidly, but in the melancholy later variations, when he should be exploring Beethoven's darker nature, he appears to be marking time before the florid finale...
Moderate Cantabile might better have been titled Adagio Funereo; it is much too long, much too lugubriously languid. On the other hand, Director Brook's musical score-he developed it himself from a sonatina by Diabelli -is sensuous and tender. And Armand Thirard's photography is almost too dreamily lovely to believe. The film was actually shot at Blaye on the River Gironde, and in Thirard's frames, the big river, the wide land, the vast sky and the quiet clouds all seem to be shimmering mysteriously in the depths of a tremendous pearl...