Word: ops
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...more enjoyable was the Beethoven C minor quartet, Op. 18. Although among Beethoven's first batch of string quartets, this quartet shows the vigor, delightful humor, and insistence on making the instruments serve the music that characterizes Beethoven's later quartet writing. The liveliness of the work seemed to wake up the performers; they started with good, solid attacks and supplied plenty of dynamic ups and downs. Cellist Lawrence Hamilton's full tone and adequate technique supplied a foundation to the ensemble, and second violinist Gretchen Anner played her solo in the trio of the third movement accurately, if without...
...demonstrated her technical ability, and some musicianship, however, in her solo, Brahms' "Variations on a Theme of Robert Schumann, Op. 9." She brought out the melody from a complex texture, occasionally blurring it with too much pedal...
Beethoven's grand "Tempest" sonata (Op. 31, No. 2) dominated the program. Mr. Boyk's interpretation could be challenged here more than anywhere else. For example, he began at a Killing tempo, and it ended up wounding him; the first movement was too fast. While he had never swelled beyond a forte in the first two numbers of the program, here he used his six-foot build to advantage: the Steinway really stomped. Again in the third movement, an "Allegretto," Boyk travelled presto. As a result, he had to stretch rhythms at the crucial transitions. But the music's momentum...
...awhile last week, the elegant grey squares looked and sounded more like Algiers than the ordered heart of France. Jostling into the Place de la Concorde, the Etoile, the Place de 1'Opéra, the Champs Elysées, and half a dozen other Paris landmarks, tens of thousands of Algerians came swarming from slums and shantytowns to protest a new 8:30 p.m. curfew that applies only to Moslems...
Ravel's opera was a critical success but a popular failure at the Opéra-Comique in Paris in 1926 (the love duet of the cats, with its mewing violins, enraged the audience). Nevertheless, L'Enfant contains some of Ravel's most appealing music, as a fine new Deutsche Gramophon recording conducted by Lorin Maazel-the first of the opera in stereo-again demonstrates...