Word: pianos
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...reverie on an art form whose possibilities were still being explored. The stars are not the fabled animators but the conceptual artists whose work they drew on. Here is Mickey way back when he was a rodent outlaw; drenching pastels of fairyland by Sylvia Holland; a surreal grand piano with a fierce trail of tyrannical music hovering above it--by an unknown artist. These pictures really move...
...Over the past 175 years, a dashing, Byronic image was eagerly sought after by many of the important figures in composition and performance. Franz Liszt, devastatingly handsome, was the most famous lover in Europe as well the greatest pianist; women fought over the cigar butts he left on the piano after a concert. Leopold Stokowski, the great conductor who shook Mickey Mouse's hand in Fantasia, used to ensure that the lighting at his concerts highlighted his aquiline countenance and halo of long hair. In short, sex has always sold. What's new is that it is women...
...spirit of dance is clearly present in the sonata, in which the saxophone and piano trade off short, melodic phrases and nervous, jagged notes. In the third movement, the lyrical quality of the dance music comes to the fore, with longer, even languorous saxophone solos that seem reminiscent of the mellow, probing style of a Grover Washington, Jr. or David Sanborn...
WHEN EARL WILD PERFORMS, the Golden Age of the keyboard suddenly reappears. Like the great romantic showmen who flourished before World War II, Wild revels in the sensuality and sheer kineticism of the piano, reminding his listeners that it is the only instrument capable of emulating both the tender nuances of vocal music and the thunderous range of the orchestra. When Wild plays, the pallid noodling that often passes for pianism these days vanishes: one hears the grand echoes of Paderewski, Rachmaninoff and Josef Hofmann...
...mastery is perhaps most evident in his recording of the Godowsky piece--a work only the greatest virtuosos will dare--on his 1964 Vanguard album The Virtuoso Piano. Wild commands its many contrapuntal voices, shifting chromatic harmonies and labyrinthine technical complexities. "When the ears become more important than the fingers, then you have something," he explains. And audiences are just wild about...