Word: musician
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Paul Whiteman, Ballet Scenes for Billy Rose, an Ebony Concerto for Woody Herman and his jazzband. Scherzo á la Russe was written to fit one side of a Whiteman record (says Stravinsky: "He played it very badly. He has a very famous name but he is a very bad musician...
...loved to prowl among the operatic scores of his father, Feodor, a famed basso who was Chaliapin's predecessor at the Imperial Opera. Young Igor was given a "piano mistress" at nine, quickly learned to read music-and improvise. His parents did not want him to be a musician. They packed him off to the University of St. Petersburg to study law-but only after Igor got their permission to study harmony on the side. At the university, Igor made friends with Vladimir Rimsky-Korsakov, and showed his compositions to Vladimir's famous father ("Alas...
...17th Century than the present one. The workmanship was much better in Bach's time than it is now. One had first to be a craftsman. Now we have only talent. We do not have the absorption in detail, the burying of oneself to be resurrected a great musician...
Candles at the Altar. Arrigo Boito, excitable and fiercely mustachioed, was the son of an Italian painter of miniatures who abandoned his family soon after Ar-rigo's birth. His mother, a Polish countess, set him studying to become a musician. At 19, his cantata Le Sorelle d'Italia won him a traveling scholarship. On his way home from Paris he traveled through Poland and Germany and picked up some heretical ideas that soon got him in hot water at home. Sample: he wrote a poem calling for a composer who could restore the glory of Italian music...
Brahms: A German Requiem (Eleanor Steber, soprano; James Pease, bass; the RCA Victor Chorale and Symphony, Robert Shaw conducting; Victor, 18 sides). Brahms avoided the traditional liturgy, chose his own excerpts from the Bible "because I am a musician and because I needed them." Finished eight years before his first symphony (and foreshadowing it), this was the first composition to win him wide fame. Its moments of beauty more than make up for its minutes of tedium. Performance: good...