Word: pianos
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Wearing gloves, Margaret Neas plays the piano in the lobby bar of the Hilton Hotel every night, Monday through Friday, from 6 to 10-longer if the crowd stays lively. To her regulars she is "a legend, the most respected woman in Birmingham...
Margaret Neas studied piano at the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore. She taught, played concerts and composed until an agent suggested supper clubs. "It's the most fun thing in the world," she says. "It's like a party every night." Her son Marc, in the room tonight, recalls, "Her agent said, 'You need a gimmick.' And she said, 'Well, I'll play in gloves.' I remember watching TV with her while she mended her gloves. Now she says it's hard to play without them...
...BRAHMS: Piano Concerto No. 1 (Pianist Emanuel Ax, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, James Levine, conductor; RCA). The culmination of Brahms' early style, the D minor concerto began life as a sonata for two pianos; ever the perfectionist, Brahms transformed it into a symphony before finally discovering that what the music really wanted to be was a piano concerto. This rawboned yet ardently romantic piece gets a grand reading from Ax and Levine. But they never get so concerned with profundity that they forget that it is, after all, the work of a 25-year-old still finding his way. Particularly...
...with the arbiters of art in Joseph's court. He is a slave to fashion and passion. His genius continues to consume him, like a virus he is unable or unwilling to shake; at the first performance of The Magic Flute he faints dead away at the piano. Portrait of the artist as a great man: while his wife and father bicker over money in the next room, Mozart slumps over a billiard table, takes a swig of wine and fleshes out Ah tutti contenti from The Marriage of Figaro, creating music of domestic ecstasy out of the discord...
...remembered by movie fans as the prime nerd in National Lampoon's Animal House, must stride on-screen as a fop manqué, pinwheeling his arrogance, before the audience can find the obsession at the core of his genius. Hulce prepared for the role by practicing piano four hours a day. "After that," he says, "all I felt like doing was dancing and drinking all night-just like Mozart." In a daring, powerful performance, this boy with the map of White Water, Wis., stamped on his face soon convinces the viewer that he is the pagan saint of classical...