Word: fortissimo
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Student nurses, with dark capes billowing behind their white uniforms, pranced into a back ward at Central Oklahoma State Hospital at Norman one day last week. Their exaggerated steps kept time with the firm beat of The Stars and Stripes Forever, played fortissimo over the public-address system. In their hands, accenting the rhythm still more, they held tambourines, clappers, castanets, maracas, and even bongo drums. Other nurses, also armed with noisemakers, stood around among the patients...
Strictly Business. Perched on his high stool at rehearsals, Conductor Reiner is strictly business. In quiet passages the tip of his baton ticks off the beat with the precision of a stop watch, in fortissimo it slashes the air like a rapier. When a phrase is not up to snuff, he raps sharply for silence, speaks quietly but in a no-nonsense tone, e.g., "I would suggest you play that adagio." When he is pleased, he warms the players' spirits with quick nods of approval...
Schuman's G-Minor Sonata gave her the opportunity to display her considerable technical powers. Despite the composer's maddening instructions ("As fast as possible," he demands at one point in the Rondo, and, a few measures afterwards, "still faster"), the sudden fortissimo outbursts, fast octave scales, and other bravura passages rattled along without mishap. And while Beethoven's Twelve Variations on a Russian Dance Tune may lack profundity and grandeur, they are good, clean fun and Miss Drooker made the most of them. Her elastic, but consistent phrasing gave logic to the variations, without binding them in a formalistic...
...generally subdued part of the concert seemed tonally veiled--noticeably different from the exuberance of most productions. Not until the chorus, Glory to God in the Highest was the veil lifted. The trumpets, which had been silent through the first half of the concert, suddenly joined with a choral fortissimo entrance in what was one of the evening's greatest moments...
...biggest boom in any symphony orchestra, but most of the time he just sits and counts on his fingers while the rest of the musicians play. To show himself off he can do two things: 1) beat the daylights out of his instruments when he comes to a triple fortissimo, and 2) watch for his chance to perform one of the rare works in the repertory in which the percussion is the whole show...