Word: ek
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...East Bloc talks, but his partners are no longer willing to insist on this. The Poles, Czechoslovaks, Hungarians, Bulgarians, and to a lesser extent the Rumanians, were careful to harmonize their overtures with those of Moscow. After all, one of the reasons former Czechoslovak Party Chief Alexander Dubček got into trouble last year was that he hinted at closer relations with Bonn. Dubček's mistake was doing...
Second Youth. Janáček was born in 1854 in Moravia, now part of Czechoslovakia. He studied music in the town of Brno, married there (unhappily), suffered through the early death of his two children, and enjoyed no major success as a composer until he was 60. About that time, he fell in love with Kamila Stössl, 38 years his junior and the wife of an antique dealer. The affair was apparently platonic; nonetheless, it brought the composer an astonishingly productive second youth. From the time of his meeting with Kamila, his music surged with an energy...
...ek was fascinated by the melodic curves of speech. He would eavesdrop on conversations in the street, jotting down musical notations of individual speech patterns. He claimed to have recorded 60 distinct ways in which the word yes could be pronounced. He was also fascinated by bird calls, animal cries, and the whispering of leaves. Conversations between his dogs were carefully transcribed onto music paper. Czech Conductor Karel Ančerl, now music director of the Toronto Symphony, recalls the first time he saw Janáček: "I was returning home from a party with a few friends...
...Believer. An intense nationalist who had a Pan-Slavic fascination with Russia-one reason why his work is exceptionally popular in the Soviet Union -Janáček was a bitter atheist. "A church is concentrated death," he once said. "Tombs under the floor, bones on the altar, pictures that are nothing but torture and dying. Death and nothing but death. I don't want to have anything to do with it." Atheist or not, Janáček had a profoundly spiritual appreciation of the value of life. One of his most powerful compositions is the Slavonic Mass...
...ek's work has been kept alive over the years by a handful of conductors such as Rafael Kubelik of Munich's Radio Orchestra and Charles Mackerras of London's Sadler's Wells Opera. Another devoted fan is Walter Susskind of the St. Louis Symphony, who remembers Janáček from his student days in Prague. He compares Janáček's originality with that of America's Charles Ives. Like Ives, Janacek was a weird, lonely figure who owed little to his musical ancestors and had no true descendants. His method...