Word: orchestra
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...ease, as author Annie Dillard once wrote, is the way of perfection, violinist Gil Shaham may be the classical music world's most polished performer. By the end of his performance with the Boston Symphny Orchestra Saturday night, he had convinced the rapt audience at Symphony Hall that Mendelssohn violin concertos simply grew out of his gleaming Stradivarius without effort, toil or even a few hours' practice...
Radcliffe Union of Students, Co-President; Women in Science at Harvard-Radcliffe, Co-President; Biology Advisory Committee for Undergraduate Program, Student Advisor; Harvard Toscanini Chamber Orchestra; Ghungroo...
...graduate of the Royal Conservatory in Brussels, Rieu spent the early part of his career playing anonymously in symphony orchestras. "I was sitting there," he recalls, "playing for one conductor after another who did everything wrong, and I knew I could do it better. So one day 10 years ago, I told my wife, 'Either I die now, or I do something else.' I quit my job and started my own orchestra, and had success immediately--the halls were filled...
Rieu is hardly the first musician to fill concert halls by playing Viennese waltzes and polkas. Johann Strauss II composed On the Beautiful Blue Danube and dozens of other classic waltzes for his own touring orchestra, which he led while simultaneously playing the violin (a practice emulated by Rieu); countless other purveyors of light classical music have flourished since. What sets Rieu apart is timing. Today's conductors and soloists, however gifted, mostly lack the charisma of the previous generations of classical-music giants such as Leonard Bernstein and Vladimir Horowitz, and they have largely failed to capture the imagination...
...string for publicity shots. All he does is look handsome and make music--a concept as old-fashioned as the music he makes. Therein, in fact, may lie the real secret of his success: the perpetually hummable tunes of the 19th century waltz king after whom Rieu's orchestra is named. "When I want a melody/ Lilting through the house,/ Then I want a melody/ By Strauss," Ira Gershwin wrote in 1936, and six intervening decades of swing, rock and hip-hop have done nothing to diminish the truth of his words. Handsome fiddlers come and go, but Strauss...