Word: pianists
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André Previn? The Berlin-born music director of the Pittsburgh Symphony, Previn, 53, came to the U.S. in 1939, when his parents fled Hitler. First active as a jazz pianist and arranger-winning four Academy Awards for his film scores-he got his start conducting in a post in Houston but attracted wide notice only after he was appointed to lead the London Symphony. Even in Pittsburgh, he is still strongly identified with English music. Another prominent member of this generation, Thomas Schippers, died at 47 in 1977. The music director of the Cincinnati Symphony was an opera conductor...
...fervor mounts high enough to lend credence to another program note on the play's history, which has become a theatrical legend: Originally written as a Federal Theater Project, Cradle was censored by its federal "employers," who refused to allow the actors to set foot on stage, so the pianist played while actors spoke the lines from their seats in the house. There are rough edges in this production, notably the awkward casting of Lars Gunnar-Wigemark as two very different characters in back-to-back scenes, and roughest among them remains the attempt to square things with the present...
...called mud dance, which had to have been against the law in several states. It was the summer after the famous last-day streak, a season which had nearly brought a law suit from a shocked pair of parents. It was also the summer a middle-aged pianist cracked up altogether. Before her exile, she had wanted to hold a music salon in the barn and charge admission. She had cried a lot, and everyone was sort of relieved...
DIED. Thelonious Monk, 64, brilliant and eccentric jazz pianist and founding father of bebop; of a stroke; in Englewood, N. J. As a teenager, Monk honed his highly personal style-skewed melodies, oblique harmonic progressions-in Harlem during the Depression with Trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and Alto-Saxman Charlie ("Bird") Parker. He developed an angular breakaway from conventional jazz that came to be known as bebop and, finally, bop. His asymmetrical ideas had a powerful influence on modern jazz musicians and a whole generation of horn players, but Monk himself lapsed into virtual obscurity in the 1950s. Rescued by a series...
...Pianist Andor Foldes said in his letter [Jan. 18] that using a computer can "negate everything that music stands for." The composer or the performer decides whether or not a musical offering is accepted by the listener. Many people are not moved by a performance made with pieces of wood, bones and bird whistles, but at one time that was considered music when we had nothing else...