Word: musicians
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...long ago they heard of another amateur musician who had just written a bit of music: Actor Lionel Barrymore. They asked for permission to premiere his newest work in Chicago. It turned out to be a piano concerto-which was a little disconcerting. Explained First Violinist Lester Baker, a railway freight statistician: "As a rule accompaniments are so uninteresting to play, but the melodies of the Barrymore concerto lay so well on the various instruments that our members felt impelled to rise to the occasion." Barrymore made just one stipulation: that he be allowed to choose the soloist. He chose...
...brought jam to tea-drinking Englishmen is a 30-year-old R.A.F. musician named Sidney Gross. Before the war he was a night club guitarist who liked to play American style with a few friends after hours. Then he heard the Glenn Miller and Artie Shaw bands play for the R.A.F. "When most English players hear Americans, they are so depressed they want to put their instruments away," says Gross. Instead, he wanted to go and do likewise...
...Lomaxes discovered that a Negro folk musician would sing either religious or "sinful" songs, but seldom both. To find the "sinful made-up" songs they had to go where there were plenty of sinful Negroes-the State penitentiaries. On a Mississippi prison farm Convict Joe Baker (alias Seldom Seen) told them: "I never had been in no trouble wid de law . . . but one fellow kept messin' up my homely affairs, so I blowed him down." Then he sang...
...stood with bowed head, facing the Moscow State Philharmonic. He seemed to be counting off the rumbles of artillery. At the 20th, he raised his baton and began the world's premiere of his newest symphony. The bald-headed conductor was Russia's great est living musician, Sergei Prokofiev...
Prokofiev is the greatest musician today! Nobody else can write with such technical perfection, with such instrumentation. And all the time there is beautiful melody ! " Peter and the Wolves. Not all Boston's music-goers share Koussevitsky's enthusi asm for his fellow Russians - Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich - but they respect his judgment. Koussevitsky rates 39-year-old Shostakovich as a great-composer-to-be and 54-year-old Prokofiev as a great composer who has already arrived...