Word: hofmann
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...resort town why you shouldn't feed wild bears, and you'll hear a rueful answer. They move in. For years the residents indulged the neighboring wild bears, treating them as entertainers. Restaurant owners left their garbage Dumpsters open so tourists would gather. Locals like Mammoth Times editor Wally Hofmann brought houseguests. "We'd sit in the car with a bowl of popcorn and wait to see a bear," he remembers. Then the bears stopped going home. They settled down to live in abandoned buildings and started having cubs...
Hamelin is a throwback to golden age piano virtuosos--wizards like Ignaz Friedman, Josef Hofmann and Leopold Godowsky--whose keyboard pyrotechnics lit up concert halls during the first 40 years of this century. He is fascinated by the piano's expressive range, its ability to produce almost orchestral varieties of sounds and colors, seemingly bound only by the performer's own limitations. These varied works--by Rachmaninoff, Alkan, Busoni, Godowsky and others--are wickedly difficult, yet Hamelin plays them, often at dazzling speeds, with color, power, a long line and unfailing elan. He also performs three of his own witty...
Examples abound in the Pearl series. The easy virtuosity of Pauline Alpert's Rain on the Roof, with its cascading arpeggios and delicate filigree work, matches the best that classical contemporaries like Josef Hofmann or Josef Lhevinne had to offer. Her performance of Gershwin's Fascinatin' Rhythm out-Gershwins the great man himself. Confrey's rhythmically tricky 1921 showpiece, Kitten on the Keys, is novelty's signature tune, but his Humorestless, a clever musical pun on both Dvorak's Humoresque and Stephen Foster's Old Folks at Home, is equally typical of his exuberant style. Most ambitious...
...listeners that it is the only instrument capable of emulating both the tender nuances of vocal music and the thunderous range of the orchestra. When Wild plays, the pallid noodling that often passes for pianism these days vanishes: one hears the grand echoes of Paderewski, Rachmaninoff and Josef Hofmann...
...misuse. Marilyn Horne, 57, has lost none of her taste or technique, but the nap is off that mezzo velvet. Hildegard Behrens, 54, an inspired dramatic actress, is now far easier to look at than listen to in the arduous roles she favors. A dozen years ago, handsome Peter Hofmann, 46, was a Wagnerian's dream of a heldentenor; today he mostly sings...