Word: modernists
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Berger, Bronx-born, began improvising at the piano when he was ten, and once thought of a performer's career. But he was supporting himself as a music critic and ghostwriter by the time he was 20. In the early '30s, he covered modernist concerts for the tabloid Mirror while the more austere dailies were filling their columns with Rachmaninoff. Except for spells of teaching (at Mills and Brooklyn Colleges) and study (with Darius Milhaud and Nadia Boulanger), he has been at it ever since, is now the Herald Trib's most influential critic next to Critic...
Moscow applauded the Seventh Symphony at the world premiere last fall, and Pravda itself stamped it doctrinally O.K. Philadelphia's dignified matinee audience, which had half expected to be buffeted and assaulted by modernist clangor, had a pleasant enough half hour, called Conductor Ormandy back for four bows. Sergei Prokofiev had done what he had been told to do: his symphony could be understood by almost anybody on a single hearing. A Philadelphia matron summed up his last work in a sentence. "It sounds," she sighed happily, "just like Gilbert & Sullivan." For Sergei Prokofiev, the composer who once seemed...
...Pittsburgh Symphony led the parade. Under the baton of William Steinberg, and with Violinist Isaac Stern as soloist, the up & coming Pittsburgh gave a high-spirited performance featuring Gustav Mahler's First Symphony and Modernist Bela Bartok's Violin Concerto. Listeners and critics were especially impressed by the orchestra's brilliance and enthusiasm...
...Symphony came next, for its first visit in 13 years. Its conductor, Rafael Kubelik, was in an awkward spot, since the Chicago is not renewing his contract (the Metropolitan Opera's Fritz Reiner will succeed him). But he picked an ambitious program, including Beethoven's Eroica and Modernist Bohuslav Martinu's Double Concerto for Two String Orchestras, Piano and Kettledrums, and led his musicians in some expansive, grand-manner interpretations...
...last week Manhattan heard a new chip off the old Bloch, his String Quartet No. 3. It had much of the modernist vigor audiences have come to expect from Ernest Bloch, but listeners also caught a new air of mellowness and reflection...