Word: pianistics
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Brahms: Concerto No. 2 (Sviatoslav Richter, piano; the Chicago Symphony under Erich Leinsdorf; RCA Victor). In this first Richter recording made in the U.S., the great Russian pianist gives a performance as taut as a bent bow. At the end of the session, Richter turned to Conductor Leinsdorf and said: "Please explain to the orchestra that I could do no better." Nor could anyone...
Instead of sinking their money in a leather-topped bar and zebra-striped divans, they hired a good sound engineer to build an acoustically perfect room. In a typical program, Ruff and Mitchell, assisted by Composer-Pianist Robert Helps and Drummer Charlie Smith, presented the U.S. premiére of Paul Hindemith's Sonata for Alto Horn and Piano, followed it with a Ruff-Mitchell composition titled Fugue for a Jazz Trio. The club features a regular string quartet from Yale, and will draw heavily on the talents of such Yale faculty members as Violinist Howard Boatwright, Pianist Seymour...
Like a Surgeon. Although an accompanist should be a partner, he is also, says Ulanowsky, likely to function as "part policeman and part nursemaid." (But, adds Soprano Erika Koth cryptically: "An accompanist is no lover.") Even as incendiary a singer as Maria Callas scrupulously follows the advice of her pianist, Italy's Antonio Tonini, in questions of interpretation. "Tonini pleases me," says she, "because he is an implacable torturer who makes me repeat the same phrase 20 or more times. He has always been for me like an expert surgeon who digs around in one's innards until...
...showdown between partners, the bigger name usually wins. Moore recalls that when he played for Chaliapin, the great Russian bass used to ham up the end of Schumann's Die beiden Grenadiere with a great theatrical gesture, causing the pianist's Nachspiel to be lost in the applause. "There was nothing I could do," says Moore. "Chaliapin was a great big chap more than six feet tall...
Incense to Idols, by Sylvia Ashton-Warner. Proving that the power and insight of her first novel, Spinster, sprang from an exceptional talent rather than from mere autobiographical circumstance, the New Zealand schoolteacher dazzlingly describes an amoral and shatteringly beautiful pianist for whom men-except for an unbending, God-obsessed minister -queue up to destroy themselves...