Word: fosse
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Composers used to like nothing better than to sit down at the harpsichord or pianoforte and improvise on their own works. Bach, Handel and Beethoven were as well known for their improvisations as for their written compositions. Now Composer-Pianist Lukas Foss, 38, is contriving, with the help of a $10,000 Rockefeller grant, to put the long dead custom back into classical music-and make it an en semble...
...ovation. Igor Stravinsky turned to face them, ducked his head with a shy smile, the light tilting off his glasses. Then he stepped up on the podium to receive a different kind of ovation from four of the U.S.'s leading practitioners of his own art: Composers Lukas Foss, 37, Aaron Copland, 59, Roger Sessions, 62, Samuel Barber, 49. Seated at four grand pianos, two on each side of the stage, the four were assembled to play Stravinsky's choreographic cantata Les Noces (The Wedding)in ritual homage to the 77-year-old composer they all call their...
...four participant composers were invited by Stravinsky to appear in the concert last summer. At first they all practiced individually; Foss, the only professional pianist in the group, worked for "only about five hours," but Sessions, who rarely performs in public, found that he had to "practice very hard." The four rehearsed with Stravinsky only three times. "He was," says Copland, "a little worried about us." But even Stravinsky was delighted with the way the performance went off, gave each composer a silver-framed, inscribed photograph as a memento. Why had the four interrupted their own busy schedules to undertake...