Word: mendelssohn
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...Harry Mendelssohn (Jason Alexander) is the ultimate anticomputer nerd. He is threatening to dynamite the library where he works if its card-catalog system is replaced by PCs. Brian Dickey (Peter Falk) is the police negotiator--Columbo raised to the nth degree--trying to talk him out of anarchy. Lee Kalcheim's play, at Los Angeles' Geffen Playhouse, sets them dueling metaphorically over the fate of modern civilization. Sometimes his targets are too easy (no more Starbucks jokes, please), but he has written fine, funny parts for the edgy, earnest Alexander and canny, counterpunching Falk. And his ending...
...music. Springfest gives students a break from the tedious train of Yo-Yo Ma's, Boston Philharmonics and Mendelssohn String Quartets who regularly file through Harvard's hallowed music halls playing works from centuries past. The council imports a more timely, more popular act so that (at least for one weekend) the most studious students on earth can get down to fanfares intended for common...
...universally low. This is due in part to the fact that such music is popular: It appeals not to aesthetes, but to the musically unsophisticated masses. If the musically knowledgeable enjoy it all the same, it is not by virtue of their knowledge: One can learn to appreciate a Mendelssohn concerto; the same is not true of, say, a given track on the latest Violent Femmes CD. One either enjoys it or not--there's no learning involved...
America's poet of the piano plays 15 of Mendelssohn's Lieder ohne Worte (literally, Songs Without Words), plus eight Bach-Busoni and Schubert-Liszt transcriptions. The hand injury that threatened to sideline Perahia only a few short years ago is now nothing but a fast-fading memory: the poise and lyricism of the exquisite playing heard on this meltingly beautiful CD are worthy of comparison with any of the century's greatest pianists. His tone is warm and inviting, his interpretations quietly romantic. Vladimir Horowitz--who once gave Perahia a few pointers--would have reveled in the results...
WORK Violin Concerto Romeo and Juliet's theme by Mendelssohn by Nino Rota...