Word: pianist
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Only now and then, as Pianist Louis Kentner and the London Philharmonic Orchestra performed the Scherzo's British premiere last week, could Bartok fans find hints of the more familiar dissonances and pounding rhythms of the composer's later career. This was vintage stuff, dating back to Bartok's early romantic period. And after a long orchestral introduction, Kentner opened a floodgate of lush, big-fisted chords...
...death, in 1945, the Scherzo was found among his papers by his son Bela in Budapest. Today, like all of Bartok's music, it is embroiled in a discordant legal hassle between his heirs and the Manhattan lawyer who is executor of the estate and who has given Pianist Kentner exclusive performance rights to the Scherzo for the next two years...
...with ease upon a bountiful life in music: lots of money, dozens of cars, two wives, three psychiatrists. In person, though, he has always been a sour-luck man whose glance wilts a flower. As a result, he managed to overwhelm his great talents as crooner, composer, actor, drummer, pianist and arranger and become an engaging failure. Good old Mel, his friends in music say, the public never liked him. But he is also a singer of jazz, and in that difficult and unfriendly medium, he has lately become one of the best around...
...piece is one of Liszt's grandest, but it is dull in most performances. It is long and has no easily graped structure; apparently, a pianist with the technique and imagination of Horowitz is needed to tie its stretched out variations together...
Morath now plays about 50 college dates a year, and sometimes holds after-show clinics for scholarly ragtime buffs. Morath himself was playing The Maple Leaf Rag on the piano before he could read; his mother was a silent-film pianist in Colorado Springs...