Word: pianos
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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With the arrival of Chopin and Liszt, romanticism came to full flower. Chopin, who at the peak of his career weighed only 97 Ibs., was an artist of delicate expression: he taught the piano to breathe. Liszt taught it to belch fire. A saturnine dandy with flowing shoulder-length blond hair and a dress coat aglitter with medals, he combined virtuosity with showmanship, worked himself into such a lather that he would sometimes faint. Women hurled their jewels on the stage and fought over the green doeskin gloves that he deliberately left on the piano...
...woman," he says. His bearing becomes regal, his face is masked in concentration. His back erect, he kneads his fingers, bows his head for a moment's thought, and then eases into the keyboard. In driving home a run of climactic chords, he rises higher and higher off the piano bench as though he were intent on physically overwhelming the music. In more lyrical moods, his arms and hands move with a kind of gracefully looping symmetry, and always his eyes stare into space. "I like to look up over the piano so I can listen and follow the lines...
...heart, he sings his way into the poetic soul of the music. He can take a diminuendo passage and without spoiling the line, make it grow progressively softer while articulating each note straight to the back row of the hall. That a piece of percussive machinery like the piano can be made to produce such distinctions in tone is nothing short of miraculous...
...short for his legs; yet he has the arms and hands of a man twice his size. His biceps are as big as a shotputter's, and his fist looks like the business end of a sledge hammer. His fingers, whose tips are cushioned from years of "cleaning the piano's teeth," are spatula-shaped; the all-important little finger is as long as the index finger, which is just a shade shorter than the middle finger. Thus, with the extension of his long thumbs, he can encompass a twelve-note spread on the keyboard. Most pianists are happy...
...performance. Besides, he says, "I want to live?live passionately. So I don't believe in all this nonsense of tying oneself to the keyboard all day." While most musicians practice for five of six hours every day, he will go for days without looking at a piano. Some younger pianists, he says, in their note-niggling pursuit of perfection, end up "taking a performance out of their pocket instead of out of their heart." This lack of involvement, he feels, extends to the audience as well, a result of being raised on note-perfect stereo recordings. Says Rubinstein...