Word: pianistics
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Many a first-rate pianist has taken up conducting as a career. For Leonard Bernstein, the late George Szell and Daniel Barenboim, it was largely a matter of having a large and effusive talent-or sheer ambition-that simply had to spread into other fields. When Pianist Leon Fleisher took the podium last week at Manhattan's Philharmonic Hall, however, it was a case of dire necessity. Though he was once the foremost pianist of his generation, his right hand has been partly crippled since 1965, and he is trying to establish himself in a new career...
...Toreadors suddenly becomes Deutschland über Alles as crowds roar "Sieg Heil!" Then Spiro Agnew denounces effete snobs-and the band plays Stars and Stripes Forever. It is as devastating as a knee in the groin. Children shrill the Gypsy Song, break into a tapdance and a pianist plays an ornate set of embellishments on the first phrase of the Habañera; he knows all the tricks but cannot remember the melody. The Card Song is swallowed by a monstrous Dies Irae, and everything ignites into a Moog-synthesized musical holocaust. The montage of electronic sound forms a requiem...
Szell was an extraordinary pianist, and though he could not play a single orchestral instrument, he knew exactly what each could do, often proving he knew more about it than the players themselves. His beat was sharply defined and unfailing as an atomic clock. He was a scholar with a mania for research and a memory that neatly stored away the data in mental cubbyholes for instant retrieval. Though he cared deeply for paintings and literature and was a gourmet, music was his passion. Everything and everybody, including himself, was to be sacrificed to its perfection. He was fearsome, unforgiving...
Died. Jimmy Conzelman, 72, pianist, actor, author, raconteur, but most of all one of pro football's earliest and best-loved coaches, who stunned the sports world by guiding the underdog Cardinals, then of Chicago, to a championship in 1947, the first and only time they have hit the jackpot during 36 years in the National Football League; in St. Louis...
...final work on the program was Terry Riley's In C. It consists of fifty-three musical figures played by any number of instruments in random configuration while a pianist repeatedly and rapidly plays eight notes on high C and C'". By Foss's definition, it is not a piece of music, but "Like a sky with clouds. You look up, and think you see everything, but then you look up a few minutes later and everything is changed." The piece has a kind of hypnotic fascination; still I would tend to agree with Foss that...