Word: iturbi
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...ring no resounding bell, but they do bag 1) an average musical wartime romance (Private Gene Kelly v. Colonel's-Daughter Kathryn Grayson), 2) a brisk, hefty variety show featuring a clutch of M.G.M. stars and three bands (Kay Kyser, Bob Crosby, Benny Carter), 3) Pianist José Iturbi in his screen debut...
...doctor, gets slap-happy in his examination of Ann Sothern, Lucille Ball and Marsha Hunt, who want to be WAVES. Red Skelton is a soda jerker with an allergy for ice cream. Judy Garland makes scat-singing like "Tchai-tchai-tchaikovsky" bearable in Let There Be Music. Senor Iturbi, forced by the curious exigencies of the screen to prove that he is almost anything else but a ranking pianist, trots out some fair boogie-woogie, takes care to play nothing worth hearing in one of the best recordings a screen piano has ever received...
...music students, 50,000 school bands and orchestras, though he tempers this estimate with such revealing anecdotes as Samuel Goldwyn's Hollywood-scented remark to Jascha Heifetz: "Money isn't everything, Mr. Heifetz. I can make you famous!" More typical of today, Author Ewen thinks, is Jose Iturbi's story of how he found the radio of a roadside lunch-wagon tuned to a Sunday evening symphony. The clatter melted into silence as customers, dishwashers, waitresses succumbed to the music's spell. But the counterman wasn't satisfied. "He scowled at four hamburgers sizzling...
...Iturbi has been in the U.S. since 1929, has worked hard to get into big-league conducting (Ford Sunday Evening Hour, Eastman Rochester Symphony). One of his stunts has been to conduct from the keyboard, while playing a Liszt or Beethoven concerto. He enjoys periodic crescendos of rage (against jazz, hot dogs, flash bulbs, etc.), makes a point of being nearly late at concerts. He plays a Baldwin piano, and wherever he goes he is attended by a sort of caddy, supplied by the Baldwin people to look after the piano, piano stool, pianist. Plaintively the caddy says...
...Because Iturbi declared, during the Spanish Civil War, that his homeland needed "a strong man," he was picketed by U.S. leftists as a Fascist. Iturbi made his sympathies plain on last week's I am an American program...