Word: pianistics
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Although there is a general impression that the Harvard Music Department feels music should be seen and not heard there are some excellent concert artists on the music faculty. One of these is assistant professor Laurence D. Berman. As one enthusiastic undergraduate said. "He is a fantastic, incredible pianist." Students who took the second half of Music 1 last spring were privileged to hear Berman illustrating his musical ideas at the keyboard. Those in Music 154 remember his playing the Liszt "Vallee d'Obermann" or improvising Chopin etudes. They remember his legendary ability sight-read scores. But those outside...
Daniel's field has more lions in it. If not the best pianist in the under-30 group, he is certainly one of the busiest and most versatile men in music history. He gives 200 concerts a year on five continents. In London he is moving into television. He is getting busier and busier as a conductor, too, in the international style in which he does everything. When friends urge him to slow down, he reminds them of what the late Sir John Barbirolli once said: "When you're young you should have an excess of everything...
Intriguing Figure. Both Daniel and Jacqueline were hard at work at their chosen instruments by the age of five. Born in Oxford (father was an accounting executive, mother a pianist-composer), Jacqueline went to a London cello school at six, began studying privately at ten. Buenos Aires-born Daniel was a true child prodigy. His parents (both music teachers) moved to Tel Aviv because they thought that Israel was the place to educate a Jewish boy. At ten he was traveling the capitals of the world giving recitals in short pants. Hustle, shrewdness and charm did the rest...
Quite simply, Barenboim has not yet decided what kind of pianist he really wants to be. Five years ago, he rippled off Mozart sonatas and Beethoven concertos in a smooth, glassy style, as opposed to the passionate, warmly phrased playing of the late Artur Schnabel, Van Cliburn, even Daniel's friend Vladimir Ashkenazy. Barenboim's more recent recordings of Mozart's concertos Nos. 17, 20 and 21 are still too bland and bloodless. This year's set of the complete Beethoven 32 (like his current Tully Hall cycle) has weaknesses, notably a prevailing glibness...
...with Teutonic priggishness. "Since only a few weak poems in the popular vein remained of that adventure," the young artist noted in his diary in 1901, "I was once again completely available for the higher sort of love." He found it a few years later in Lily Stumpf, a pianist of irreproachable virtue, married her, and never looked back...