Word: gulda
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...Newport event this year will feature, besides its pure-bred jazz performers, the music of a new convert named Friedrich Gulda. Gulda is a classical pianist from Austria--about the best Beethoven pianist now extant--who has decided to devote half of his musical time to jazz, and who will introduce some of his own jazz compositions at the Festival...
There was jazz news in Manhattan last week, too. Rising young (25) Austrian Concert Pianist Friedrich Gulda (TIME, Jan. 31, 1955) arrived for a Carnegie Hall recital with recordings selected from a dozen of his Vienna broadcasts under his arm. Six of the programs were of Beethoven sonatas; the other six were of his own jazz combo playing his compositions and arrangements. U.S. jazz experts listened, found his tunes to be pretty as pops-fine fodder for jazz improvisations-and his arrangements forthright and thoroughly disciplined. They proclaimed Gulda's jazz some of the best they had ever heard...
...first movement of Beethoven's Sonata Op. 2, No. 3 was marked Allegro con brio, which Gulda interpreted in terms of jet-age speed and atomic-age heat, and every fast movement for the next hour and a half had a breathless here-we-go-again quality. It would have been just another dead-eye Fred taking pleasure in his fingerwork. except that Gulda's pianissimo was sweet as a barrel of honey, his legato glided like a gull, and his perfect shading gave each movement a convincing contour...
...climax of Gulda's third visit to the U.S. since his ill-fated arrival in 1950. At the age of ten, in Vienna. Gulda was impressed into a Hitler Youth group, and that was enough under the McCarran Internal Security Act to land him on Ellis Island. After a protest storm in the press Gulda finally played-to rave reviews-and took the next plane home. His political history cleared up, he later gave about 200 concerts on tours of the U.S., Europe and South America...
...Youth. Pianist Gulda is a young man as sure of himself off the concert stage as on it. Says he of his work as a spare-time composer: "I am a very severe critic, and once I let a piece pass out of my factory, it is good." Shrugging off the fact that he now wears glasses: "Musicians have no expression in their eyes anyway." On piano music: "Beethoven suits me best because I thoroughly understand it. I find Mozart difficult, and dangerous. I play Prokofiev because people expect me to-I do not consider it important." On teaching...