Word: pianos
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...based on Oliver Sacks' best-selling book about neurological disorders. On a recent tour of North America with his 10- piece chamber orchestra, the Michael Nyman Band, the 50-year-old composer drew hip audiences and packed houses for programs of his recent works, highlighted by The Piano Concerto, a concert version of the film score...
...wrote last year's most memorable and original movie score -- for Jane Campion's The Piano -- was not even nominated for an Academy Award. That says a lot about the Oscars, but it also says something about Michael Nyman, a composer who has never quite received his due. Whether writing for films or turning out concertos, string quartets, ballets and chamber operas, the English critic turned composer is a cult figure on both sides of the Atlantic who yearns for wider acceptance. "I've had to contend with a certain amount of envy and puffy-nosed disapproval," he says...
...Wife for a Hat, for example, Nyman used a Schumann song, Ich grolle nicht, as the musical foundation of the opera to illustrate the eponymous victim's visual agnosia: unable to synthesize visual images, the man relied on Schumann's music to help him apprehend the world. In The Piano, Scottish folk tunes suffused the keyboard reveries that gave the mute heroine Ada her soaringly distinctive if wildly anachronistic voice: the result was a blend of rigorous Minimalism, frank Romanticism and the listener-friendly ecstasies of New Age music...
...often said, as a way of orienting anyone coming to him fresh, that Powell did for the piano what Charlie Parker did for the saxophone. Together, and with no small assist from Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie, they took a hand in fearlessly turning jazz inside itself, then inside out, as they created bebop. But Powell found distinctive melodic nuances on his keyboard. He wasn't as witty and romantic as Nat Cole or as exuberant a geometrician as Art Tatum, both non-beboppers. But he could find a secret, personal vibrancy on a standard like Jerome Kern's Yesterdays...
...musicians would come by and take the boy out so everyone could admire his chops. At 10 he could play Fats Waller and Art Tatum. While he was still in his teens, Powell fell in with Thelonious Monk, who after a time would even let Bud take over the piano for an evening's final set. Powell made his first recordings with trumpeter Cootie Williams' orchestra...