Word: pianos
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...selling drugs if they feel they have the opportunity to share their views with a trusted adult. One way many savvy parents bond with their kids is by turning off the radio and drawing them into conversation during those long drives from school to sports practice or to a piano recital. A study by the Surface Transportation Policy Project shows that the typical mom spends more than an hour a day chauffeuring kids...
With some 400 recordings of Beethoven's five piano concertos currently listed, even Ludwig's biggest fans must have trouble getting excited about new ones. Except when they are played by Alfred Brendel, an artist whose interpretive mastery of the composer continues to ripen. In his latest release, Beethoven: The 5 Piano Concertos (Philips Classics), Brendel teams with conductor Sir Simon Rattle and the Vienna Philharmonic in exhilarating performances that blend vitality, expressive breadth and, particularly in the five slow movements, spellbinding beauty...
...late sonatas and many of Liszt's once derided works is widely credited with enhancing the reputations of even these great composers. But it is to Beethoven's works that Brendel has returned most often. In the process he has become the most inspired interpreter of Beethoven's piano music since Artur Schnabel (1882-1951). In addition to the many concert cycles of the 32 sonatas he has played on both sides of the Atlantic, Brendel has recorded both the sonatas and the concertos in each decade since the 1960s...
Take, for instance, the cadenza in the first movement of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 1. Other pianists too often drift from the Classical period provenance of the concerto, when cadenzas were improvised, and play the cadenza with a near seamless bravura that is more suited to the concertos of the Romantic composers, thereby losing its sense of extemporaneous drama--and obscuring many of Beethoven's boldest, and funniest, inspirations. Not Brendel, whose subtle emphases, infinitesimal pauses and canny modulations of tempo, color and dynamics create an air of spontaneous adventure. He reclaims the cadenza's magnificent audacity and evokes...
Brendel began taking piano lessons when he was six, but he was not a prodigy. He didn't have a steady teacher, or attend a prestigious music conservatory, or possess the kind of breathtaking technical virtuosity that instantly seduces listeners. "After my 16th birthday, I did not have a teacher," he says. "I only went to two or three master classes. So it was a slower development, but it was my own...I'm used to trying to find things out for myself...