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With his successes and failings tightly linked together, Barenboim is one of the most intriguing figures in music today. His pudgy little hands fly over the keyboard, and he is a prodigious sight reader. The trouble, some critics contend not unjustly, is that he spends too much time sight-reading and not enough time thinking about the works he already knows. But Barenboim's surface accomplishment is perhaps a peculiar result of the frantic musical life he has so far chosen to lead...
...Cookies. Never gazing hammily at the ceiling as so many romantic keyboard idols do, Ohlsson made it clear that he prefers Chopin the dramatist, without entirely sacrificing Chopin the nocturnal perfumer. Rightly so. In the E Minor Concerto, Chopin accomplished the considerable feat of turning the roulades, trills and other frills of the 19th century salon style into the stuff of major symphonic theater...
SHORTLY after the Tories' upset victory last June, Edward ("Ted") Heath invited a few colleagues in for tea at 10 Downing Street. When someone remarked the new Prime Minister's Steinway had already been installed in the drawing room, Heath sat down at the keyboard and began to play. After he had completed an entire Beethoven sonata, he stood up. "I'm sorry," he said, "but, gentlemen, when I start something, I always finish...
...smallest phrase just so, and then building from there. "It was like making a happening," he recalls. "When the stars were right, I could kind of get out of myself and into something mysterious and wondrous and exciting." Fleisher is still hoping to achieve such moments at the keyboard again. With great determination, he has plunged into the tiny but exciting piano repertory written for the left hand alone by Ravel, Prokofiev and Britten. Mastering the vast orchestral literature necessary for a conducting career will be a tougher job. But if anyone has the musical dedication and the talent...
...Next day, plunging into an icy creek to bathe, I suddenly hear music running through my mind for the first time since I arrived. Taking my Melodica,a kind of keyboard mouth organ, I join the song of the bees while I bathe. Tonight I notice that the faces in the tree trunks no longer appear so grotesque. They even seem to be smiling. The more I give to this environment, the more I accept...