Word: heifetz
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...Greeks had neither violins nor cellos, so it was not exactly as if Pan and Apollo had joined up on Olympus for a return engagement. But to many a Manhattan music lover, it seemed the next thing to it. It had been eight years since Violinist Jascha Heifetz, 63, retired from the concert stage, grumbling that "It requires the nerves of a bullfighter, the vitality of a woman who runs a nightclub, and the concentration of a Buddhist monk." It had been seven years since his fellow Russian, Cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, 61, was last heard in Manhattan...
Carnegie Hall was packed, and as Heifetz stepped onto the stage with the light precision that is the Heifetz way of doing things, the audience rose in tribute. Piatigorsky followed, carrying his Stradivarius cello with a giant's jauntiness, as though he were about to put it under his chin instead of between his knees. It scarcely mattered that the pieces they chose to play for the first concert proved something of a disappointment. The Boccherini sonata seemed stiff, a duo by Martinu stilted. But in the Brahms C Major Trio, the famed Heifetz creamy tone and the Piatigorsky...
Sleepless Night. The two old friends, both early prodigies, are widely different in their approach to music. Heifetz, blessed with the most superb natural dexterity that any violinist ever had, is almost negligently casual about his talent; at his first appearance as a soloist with a symphony at the age of eight, he fell asleep in a chair while waiting to go on. With success he acquired a taste for high life and a distaste for practice. It never seemed to make any difference in his playing. After one hectic binge, he went on to a performance in London...
...Critics struggling to define its excellence find no one around to compare it with. They hark back instead to the years before World War I when French Pianist Alfred Cortot, French Violinist Jacques Thibaud and Pablo Casals were the presiding maestri. Even the great trio of the '40s-Heifetz, Feuermann and Rubinstein-is not in the running, for Stern, Rose and Istomin make up a trio unique in attitude as much as accomplishment. They play as if for themselves, and in the playing each achieves a reach of music higher than any he could gain for himself...
...short phrase from Bruch. To bring out their beauty, he plays on each a different short piece (Tchaikovsky, Vivaldi, Paganini, Handel, Brahms). "The more output and resource an instrument has," Ricci says, "the more difficult it is to handle." He proves that he can handle them all, but like Heifetz and Stern, he favors the Guarnerii, capable of more bite and passion than the more fluid and poetic Strads, which are the first choice of Milstein, Oistrakh, Francescatti and Menuhin...