Word: orchestra
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...affair with Ruggero is a self-deluding attempt to recapture a lost moment from her youth, and in the last act, she realizes she has been acting out a fantasy, not conducting a love affair. The opera comes to a close with her wistful sigh floating high above the orchestra. Despite its frivolous trappings, La Rondine has a core of cynicism and bears about as much relation to Lehar as Ravel's fierce La Valse does to the waltzes of Johann Strauss...
Listening to the sandhills is much like hearing unfamiliar and cacophonous music. Cranes cannot be said to sing. Rather, they are a whole orchestra that can reproduce at one and the same time the sound of geese honking, frogs croaking, cats purring, whistles blowing, castanets clicking, trumpets blaring, flutes trilling and even the roaring cheers of a fully packed football stadium. "As soon as you hear it," nods Don Howell, a retired telephone company man from nearby Grand Island, "you just know they're cranes...
...supple sense of phrasing, so Horowitz's pianism offers many subtleties: the absolute independence of each finger, which makes it sound as though he were playing with three hands, and a rainbow tonal palette that realizes Liszt's ideal of turning the piano into an 88-key orchestra, with every instrument from the flute to the double bass represented...
...more notes than Tchaikovsky wrote," he later recalled. Beecham tried to rally, but there would be no catching up. "I was doing it my way. He was doing it his way," says Horowitz. "On the first night, Beecham came in second." The pianist finished several bars ahead of the orchestra. The audience erupted in a frenzy. In the New York Times, Music Critic Olin Downes captured the intensity of the moment. "A whirlwind of virtuoso interpretation," he wrote, adding, "Mr. Horowitz has amazing technique, amazing strength, irresistible youth and temperament." At the next performance, Beecham got a measure of revenge...
...instance, shut the door to a Hello, Dolly! troupe after the American bombing of North Viet Nam and kept the Bolshoi Ballet at home after the 1967 Middle East war. Washington retaliated in similar ways after the Soviet invasions of Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan. Canceling a ballet tour or an orchestra performance is an easy way for both countries to show displeasure, but American diplomats are hopeful that this time around the ballerinas and the piano players will not be pawns in the game between East and West. Both capitals appear committed to make this exchange agreement work, and there...