Word: groote
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...repertory is pretty much what the trade calls "knitting music." But a platoon of composers in Holland last week was hard at work on some new and surprisingly engaging left-hand pieces to be played by a recent recruit to the field: 45-year-old Dutch Pianist Cor de Groot...
Until last summer. Pianist de Groot was a two-handed recitalist of solid international reputation. Then, during a recording session, he felt a sudden cramp in his right hand, was barely able to finish playing Liszt's Melancholy Waltz. Although X rays disclosed no abnormality in the hand, neither cortisone nor treatment by a neurologist was able to restore full use to De Groot's fingers. He set about learning what left-hand compositions he could find, soon decided that there were not enough to keep a concert career going...
...that point, De Groot's friend, composer Juriaan Andriessen, announced that he was going to compose a piece for the left hand. As the news spread, other composers volunteered to do the same. Virtually every top Dutch composer is working on a piece for De Groot to be finished before February, in time for a new radio series. The new works will nearly triple the left-hand repertory...
...meantime, De Groot is filling out his concert season with old standbys, e.g., the Brahms version of Bach's Violin Chaconne, which he played last week to critical huzzahs on the Dutch radio. He is also rearranging pieces by Debussy, Grieg, Liszt, Rachmaninoff. And if the day should ever come when he exhausts both the old and the new repertories, he sees an almost endless future in recording. Under the name "Guy Sherwood," for instance, he appears in a radio series on which he plays numbers such as Kitten on the Keys, for which he has deftly recorded first...
Collector Adelaide Milton de Groot, 82, is one of that expatriate generation that produced Baltimore's Gertrude Stein. The pick of her collection, ranging from Delacroix to choice Modiglianis, is on view at Manhattan's Perls Galleries, to benefit the League for Emotionally Disturbed Children. Heiress to several family fortunes, Collector de Groot lived in Paris' Gare de Lyon hotel for six years, was soon so chatty with art dealers that she was lunching in their back rooms. Her collection is a reminder of what bargains went begging in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s. Now snug...