Word: falla
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...lovely in a pale taffeta gown, stepped out on the stage of Manhattan's Town Hall, composed her hands and began to sing. Her voice, ranging from a mellow low contralto to a brilliant mezzo-soprano, glided through songs by Gluck, Haydn, Schubert, Rossini, Mahler, Ravel and De-Falla; the performance came to an end with the Sleep-Walking Scene from Verdi's Macbeth. The audience shuffled their programs to look at the name again. Thirtyish Elena Nikolaidi, making her U.S. debut and almost unknown outside Athens and Vienna, had achieved one of the smash hits...
...young Swiss esthete among Paris' musical Young Turks, he had conducted many an uproarious premiere of their raucous and startling works-as they seemed then. Stravinsky's Les Noces, De Falla's Le Tricorne, Ravel's La Valse, Honegger's Pacific 231 (which is dedicated to Ansermet) had first come to life under his baton. Between premieres and table-pounding talk with Picasso, Diaghilev, Prokofiev and Stravinsky ("a man of great culture-and the best businessman I ever knew"), Ansermet mastered the classics-without losing his appetite for the moderns...
...Falla: El Amor Brujo (the Hollywood Bowl Symphony Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski conducting, with Nan Merriman, mezzo-soprano; Victor, 6 sides; the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Fritz Reiner conducting, with Carol Brice, contralto; Columbia, 6 sides). Reiner's version of this Debussy-scented Andalusian suite, which includes the popular Fire Dance, is less vivid than Stokowski...
...pile of coins. But its connoisseurs find in the harpsichord rarefied and rustling harmonies, comparable to a choir of flutes and mandolins. When Landowska began, nobody was writing harpsichord music; it was a dead art. Composers like Francis Poulenc (her student for a year) and the late Manuel De Falla wrote harpsichord music for her. Said she: "It was a battle, you have no idea what a battle it was, to impose the harpsichord upon the musical world. When I started before 1900, the tradition...
Died. Manuel de Falla, 69, famed Spanish composer, who drew from the folk songs and rhythms of his native land inspiration for his ballets (The Three-Cornered Hat, Love, the Sorcerer), whose name has become a synonym for contemporary Spanish music and whose works are a part of the permanent repertory of the world's top musicians; after long illness; in Alta Gracia, Argentina...