Word: pianists
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After the last horrendous arrabbiato, in which pianist and orchestra were joined by a chorus of 72 men, the audience sat stupefied for several seconds and then released a roar of approval that persisted through eleven curtain calls. Soloist Pietro Scarpini and the Cleveland had safely and on the whole admirably negotiated the longest and, in the opinion of many pianists, the most difficult piano concerto ever composed. It was, in fact, a monstrosity, as some critics limply acknowledged. But they had to concede, along with Cleveland's crusty old George Szell, that it was "a monstrosity full...
...anniversary of his birth-now being celebrated through the efforts of the vigorous new Busoni Society-Italy's Ferruccio Dante Michelangelo Benvenuto Busoni is remembered by the music public as a mere arranger: the man who transcribed Bach's organ music for the pianoforte. In fact, says Pianist Artur Rubinstein, Busoni was "the greatest pianist of his time." Many musicians consider him a titanic technician and volcanically creative interpreter; all agree that his radical re-examination of the instrument and its literature struck a body blow at the romantic style and inspired the modern approach to the piano...
...father Ferdinando was a village Vivaldi who blew a mean clarinet- and all the cash he could get his hands on. He had improvidently wed a gifted but relatively impecunious pianist who promptly presented him with a son. At three, Ferruccio was playing scales. At six, he was forced to practice four hours at a stretch by a father determined to produce a moneymaking prodigy. At seven, he made his debut in Trieste, and for the rest of his life, with brief intermissions, he was chained to the concert circuit like a monkey to a street organ. Father had expensive...
Apes & Cockatoos. He was a concert pianist, an intimate friend of Chopin and Liszt, and one of the finest post-Beethoven composers for piano. He was known as the Berlioz of the piano. His music reflected none of the warm rhapsodical reveries of Chopin and Liszt but, rather, foreshadowed Mahler and Bruckner. A moody, eccentric loner, Alkan retired from public life at 42 to study the Talmud, teach, and compose. One of the pieces he composed, curiously enough, was a funeral march for a parakeet...
When he returned to the concert stage 18 years later, Alkan inexplicably refused to play any of his important works. So did his illegitimate son, Elie Miriam Delaborde, himself a distinguished pianist, who inherited his father's idiosyncrasies: he roomed with two apes and traveled with 121 cockatoos...