Word: piano
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...another room, darkened by afternoon shadows, a teenage boy plays the piano. He forgets a note, and has to fight back tears as he explores the cumbersome Braille sheet music with his fingers...
...told, a machine of considerable-and relentlessly moving-parts. Becaud at work stomps his feet to the rhythm of a song, darts to the piano to hammer out a few chords, hangs his chin on an accompanist's shoulder in a quest for greater intensity, even strolls out into the audience to invite a sing-along during some of the merrier numbers. Spotlighted in shameless mauves and chartreuses, caressing the microphone, pushing his husky voice from tenderness to remorse to rage, Becaud makes it seem that singing about love may be the world's oldest profession...
Whoosh. Becaud studied piano and composition, and was making a meager living writing cabaret songs when a friend suggested in 1953 that he ought to sing them as well. "When I told my wife I was going to sing," he recalls, "she said, 'You're not going to do that!' 'Yes, I am,' I said. We laughed for three hours...
Luise Vosgerchian, a lecturer in Music at Harvard, was featured in the Stravinsky Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra, a short and somewhat loosely constructed concerto of three movements. Miss Vosgerchian gave a bold and clear performances. However, the orchestra did not achieve the necessary dynamic discipline: there was no piano comparable to those in the Wagner. The soloist was consequently a little overtaxed in many passages. In every other respect the orchestra accompanied Miss Vosgerchian flexibly and forcefully...
...then the real composer stands up to pound out a refrain on the piano. "It's the slow movement from my jazz octet," Garner muses vaguely, although by the set of his shoulders he looks more like a split end hating himself for goofing a touchdown pass. Anyway, music distracts him from the dialogue, which runs to such sturdy old chestnuts as: "There are names for women like you," and raises the suspicion that the real escaped mental case has holed up somewhere and begun churning out scenarios about amnesia...