Word: franck
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Playing the Franck F minor Quintet is bound to be risky. The work is so familiar to most chamber music enthusiasts that they can detect even the slightest mistakes. But Gregory Tucker and the Stradivarius Quartet gave a performance that came close to perfection in both technique and interpretation. The group wisely stressed the score's broad outlines, and lightly passed over some of its more distressing chromatic sections. The only real flaws were some late entrances by violinists Wolfe Wolfinsohn and Harry Kobialka, but these were fortunately infrequent...
...Angels. Three minutes later, a small, brisk motorcade drew up at the school's entrance. From the lead car, a snappy, red M.G., jumped two young men who identified themselves as Inspectors of Criminal Police, Royal Court Division. Another young man calling himself Chief of Protocol Baron Jacques Franck left the second car and asked to see the mother superior. "No preparations," he insisted. "Just call a governing council meeting, for the presentation to the King, then call an assembly of the students and serve a wine of honor." "What kind do you advise?" asked the agitated mother superior...
Stanger returned after intermission to conduct Franck's D Minor Symphony. This old favorite offers numerous interpretative problems, most of which the young conductor solved adequately. He ignored some of the details--thus sparing the audience from the excessive chromatics in melody and harmony which can make the music tedious--and gave a broad, sweeping rendition, powerfully conceived and delivered. However, this de-emphasis of detail sank to downright sloppiness in the second movement. Intonation was foul, pick-ups inaccurate, and the melodic line sounded jerky...
...understanding, local though it was, came just in time. Not long afterward, Franck was run down by an omnibus; in six months he was dead...
...public, on first hearing Franck's String Quartet in 1890, was scarcely bothered by such details. Dignified, muttonchopped Composer Franck was recalled by the applause time after time. "There," he said, "they are beginning to understand me at last...