Word: pianistically
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...least one of the honoraries usually goes to a prominent figure in the arts. Dancer Martha Graham and pianist Arthur Rubinstein seem like good bets to pick up parchments...
...where his father was a pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, the establishment that Adam Clayton Powell Jr. later made famous. He started playing the harmonium when he was six, and his proud father took him to Carnegie Hall to hear Paderewski, hoping that Fats would become a classical pianist. Waller had other ideas, however, and when he was in his teens, he fell under the tutelage of Willie ("the Lion...
...Maryland happened to pass by the church with a cassette recorder just before the recital. He went in, heard the beginnings of the astonishing performance-the sort of huge sound that Anton Rubinstein reputedly possessed -and taped it. The discovery was akin to some great archaeological find. The pianist was Ervin Nyiregyházi (pronounced near-edge-hah-zee), a Hungarian-born prodigy who made his debut at six, toured Europe as a Wunderkind and conquered Carnegie Hall in 1920, at 17. Then, following a string of public and private disasters, including the first of nine marriages, he vanished from...
...born in Budapest. His father was a tenor in the Royal Hungarian Opera chorus, and his mother an amateur pianist. At three, Nyiregyházi could reproduce on a toy piano the melodies that his father sang. At four, he began piano lessons and composing. His first piece, he recalls, was "sort of Japanese-my father had been singing Madama Butterfly-and in the key of A-minor...
...with the Berlin Philharmonic at the age of twelve, playing Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto, then completed a string of European tours over the next five years. Along the way, he happened upon the work of Liszt, then out of fashion. The great romantic, perhaps the most dramatic pianist of all time, became Nyiregyházi's mentor and model. "It was like discovering a new world," he says. "Such lyrical and dramatic intensity, such emphasis on the grandiose and imperial...