Word: pianos
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Leonard Bernstein finished reading Poet W. H. Auden's The Age of Anxiety, "a baroque eclogue" in a Third Avenue bar (TIME, July 21, 1947), he felt a "compulsion" to compose a symphony based on it. For two years, on his busy rounds of baton waving and piano playing, he scribbled away from Taos to Tel Aviv, "in planes, in hotel lobbies." Last week Lennie's Symphony No. 2 for Piano and Orchestra was ready...
...Third Avenue bar. Nearly 30 minutes later, it got to a huge, orgiastic orchestral climax, then resolved into a thoughtful epilogue. Overall, listeners heard more melody and less dissonance than they had come prepared to hear. Standout movement: a rhythmically terrific apotheosis of jazz, with Lennie himself at the piano, backed by bass fiddler and percussion...
Fine is highly esteemed by Koussevitzky and has been closely associated with him as a student of conducting at Tanglewood. Not long ago, Koussevitzky called him in unexpectedly to play the piano solo in the Martinu Concerto Grosso. During the rehearsal, Fine, who was reading the work for the first time, made a mistake. Koussevitzky mistook his grimace for a smile and stopped the Orchestra. In the thick Russian accents which defy reproduction, the Conductor announced, "When we make a mistake in this Orchestra, we don't laugh; we weep!" Koussevitzky was so impressed with the epigram that after...
...Yorker Samuel Barber's Stravinskyesque Capricorn Concerto, American week finally got around to its triumph. Maurice Ravel had once told George Gershwin, "Don't you ever try to imitate the Europeans . . . It's better to write good Gershwin than bad Ravel." And after hearing some piano preludes, songs from Porgy and Bess and An American in Paris, topped off by a rousing Rhapsody in Blue, Cannes connoisseurs found good Gershwin good enough for them. They let Conductor Horenstein & Co. know it with six noisy curtain calls. Concluded old Cannes Critic Edouard Berthier: "When you write that kind...
After a stint at business school and two years of law school, gregarious, piano-playing Jimmy Walker set out to write songs for a living. He had only one big hit, Will You Love Me in December as You Do in May?, but he made a million friends in Manhattan. In 1912, Jimmy married his sweetheart, Janet ("Allie") Allen, to a medley of "Here Comes the Bride" and Witt You Love Me in December? All his life a 10 o'clock scholar, Jimmy was more than two hours late for the wedding. Two years later, after having served...