Word: pianist
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...American pianist Earl Wild, who just turned 85, is the last of the great Romantics, a tradition of spellbinding virtuosos that began with Liszt and flowered before World War II with the "Golden Age" pianists--such legends as Paderewski, Hofmann, Godowsky and Rachmaninoff. Like them, Wild produces gorgeous sounds at any speed or volume, possesses vitalizing musical instincts and revels in the kinetic and sensual possibilities of the piano: its potential to evoke the grandeur of an orchestra and lyricism of a singer...
Born in Pittsburgh, Pa., Wild showed precocity at age three; by six he had a fluent technique. While still a teenage student of the distinguished Dutch pianist Egon Petri, he was already a concert-hall veteran. In 1937 Arturo Toscanini engaged Wild to fill the coveted position of staff pianist for his NBC Symphony Orchestra. Toscanini could be irascible, but he and Wild hit it off. "We both loved music so tirelessly," Wild says. The fiery maestro made Wild famous in 1942 by inviting him to play Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue in a nationally broadcast concert...
Schulte, along with pianist James Winn, opened with Arnold Schoenberg's Phantasy for Violin with Piano Accompaniment. The pair played with near-perfect coordination. One immediately noticed how Schulte's idiosyncrasies, like his rather unusual handling of the bow, were used to effective ends. His attack was extraordinary, and he released his bow with a preciseness and rapidity that seemed both risky and impossible...
Perhaps it is an inherent problem with the performance of chamber music in a space the size of Symphony Hall: if you play too softly not all of the audience can hear, and if you play too loudly you sacrifice tone and expression. The pianist Rohan De Silva managed to inject into the softer passages an intensity that made them carry throughout the auditorium, but Perlman's performance-and this is possibly the only criticism that can be made about it-at times lacked the dynamic variation that would be allowed by playing in a smaller room...
...greatest artists are always those that are many men thick. That's a constant in the world of art. We're in a renaissance. The greatest musicians I know accept the whole history of music. Marcus Roberts, who I named before, pianist Cyrus Chestnut, trumpeter Nicholas Payton, these are artists who deal with all of the music. They're not being addressed properly, but they're here. The archaic thought that abstraction is the only way to be modern, I don't know who still believes in that. Also, the idea that one period of something defines it instead...