Word: piano
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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MUSSORGSKY: PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION (London). The usual orchestral transcription of Mussorgsky's piano pieces contains subtle coloring by Ravel, but Leopold Stokowski has orchestrated his own version and recorded it with the New Philharmonia Orchestra in brassy sweeps of sound that have a bold and often wild impact. Quite unlike the bizarre, ornate drawings that inspired Mussorgsky in the first place...
...creature walking onstage at Manhattan's Carnegie Hall looks like one-third each of Woody Allen, Charlie Chaplin and a sparrow. He bobs to the audience, weaves around the piano, pecks the air with his beak, hovers over the piano bench, then alights. "I don't know whether to laugh or cry," mutters an onlooker to her companion. A moment later she knows: when Vladimir Ashkenazy plays, nobody laughs and everybody cries. They cry real tears sometimes, but mostly they cry "Bravo!" and "Encore...
...what people have heard about this 28-year-old bird boy, no first-time listener is ever fully prepared for the major poet who lives in a minor-sized body (5 ft. 6 in., 132 Ibs.). When he played Prokofiev's wildly percussive and majestically colorful Second Piano Concerto last week, even the critics were astounded to hear every note of the labyrinthine cadenza; most pianists usually cut it down to their size. After wading through the cadenza, it seemed hardly difficult at all for Ashkenazy to master the rest of the piece-lightening it with brilliant glissandos...
Singing Tone. They are never likely to cool off. They may wonder when he sits down at the piano, but they stay to pay homage to a singing tone, a clarity of expression and a restrained romanticism that weaves Chopin's Ballades into filigrees of fire, plumbs the mysteries of Beethoven, clarifies the passions of Prokofiev. Even the great Emil Gilels, a Muscovite who prefers to play by the Russian rules, agrees with the fans: "Ashkenazy is small, but the grand piano is not too big for him. He does what he wants with it. Others...
...Bach, Chopin, Scriabin and Granados (Bill Evans Trio with Symphony Orchestra; Verve). It is best, and easy, to forget that Bach had anything to do with the gentle, romantic schmalz called Valse, but this and the other adaptations are pleasant displays of Evans' skilled, introspective and sometimes sentimental piano playing...