Word: piano
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...care who knows it. When she jetted to Manhattan from Vienna last month, riding alongside her was the nearly life-size bust of Mozart that accompanies her wherever she goes. She came to do him honor in the best way she knows how: by playing all 25 of his piano concertos in nine consecutive concerts, the first time such a feat has been undertaken...
Behind her were two years of preparation-eight hours a day devoted to her maxim that "a work of art must be broken into a thousand pieces if it is to survive in the eternal." She bought a piano that had been built in Mozart's time, played it repeatedly to test its limitations, concluded that because of its fragile construction the composer expected his music to be played with a softer touch than is customary among modern pianists. Says she: "I eat, I talk, I clean my teeth, but always in the back of my head...
...beguilingly simple melodies with a rippling grace and ease; in No. 9 she engaged the Mozart Chamber Orchestra in a lighthearted dialogue that rang with all the gusto of a back-porch gossip fest. And her reading of the passionate No. 20, the most popular of Mozart's piano works, was clean refinement and intense drama. It was impeccable Mozart throughout, original without being eccentric, introspective without being pedantic. At concert's end, the sellout crowd in Manhattan's Town Hall applauded like baseball fans who had just shared in winning the first game of the World...
...traditional song-styles of the amateur review -- the sinister tango, the unintelligible patter song, the rock'n'roll parody. The melodies were just not striking enough to break out from their cliches and be heard. Tight, overly simple little tunes, accompanied by only a piano, drums, and a brief, aborted oboe (last year's show had the advantage of a charming flute and steady bass behind the songs), they were too thin to matter much. One song, "What Sort of Man," written by Sharon Stokes, started to move towards a little more richness and subtletly, but ended two minutes...
...interpreted by the expert, Freud's vision was never one of scientific "fact," but a fascinating mythology. The mythology can work successfully as part of treatment. But in the hands of amateurs, only a grotesquely distorted version remains, with its talk about stamp collecting as anal and piano playing as masturbatory. "That belongs to an earlier period," says Critic Alfred Kazin. "By now, people know that the passions are real but not that readily symbolized. There is very little philosophy per se in this country, and Americans have been left high and dry by the evaporation of religion...