Word: piano
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Recently he sat at his dressing room piano after a rehearsal at the Met and sketched a bravado musical self-portrait with his favorite Strauss works. He struck a theme from Don Juan: an image for the dark, liquid eyes, flaring nostrils and smoldering visage that prompted one of his many female admirers to compare him to "an untamed animal-sensual and earthy." Then Don Quixote: a reflection of his penchant for tilting in public at sacred cultural institutions. Then Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks: the insouciant wink-and-nudge of a joker who likes to imitate other people...
...from his concerto. Then we all sat and waited for the judges' decision. The way I saw it, two of the pianists could readily have been eliminated. James Richman's performance of the Mendelssohn Concerto in G Minor lacked the necessary technical expertise. The Mendelssohn is one of those piano showpieces with lots of runs and arpeggios and few solid musical ideas. Success depends on virtousity--something which Richman, for all his vigor and musicality, simply did not have...
...John Dalley agreed with a nod. "Fine," said the old man, "let's try it." And Artur Rubinstein, a month short of his 81st birthday, led three members of the Guarneri Quartet, whose average age was 36, back to the microphones for another try at Brahms's Piano Quartet in G Minor...
...form of nine Carnegie Hall recitals in seven weeks. Those few pianists half his age with the stamina for such a task would likely spend months in agonizing preparation for the ordeal; Rubinstein walked away from the whole problem, instead took down from a dusty shelf the three Brahms Piano Quartets that he had not played publicly or privately for over a decade, and got them back into his fingers and heart for the recording sessions. Why this, rather than brushing up on the concert programs? "It was like coming back to old friends," he explained during the session...
...arguing and agreeing as four equal colleagues. Rubinstein "discovered" the Guarneri last year, when he heard tapes of the quartet's first studio session. "There was an immediate chemical reaction," says RCA Victor Producer Max Wilcox. So far, one result of that chemistry has been released, the Brahms Piano Quintet. The Schumann Piano Quintet will be issued soon. Were the quartet members awed by a collaboration involving a 50-year age gap? "At first we were, naturally," remembers Tree. "But the first time we came to Rubinstein's house and started to work he immediately...