Word: piccolos
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...virtues of hearing the compositions of such Baroque uber-studs as they would have been heard once upon a time. For this, the unaccustomed ear might have been a little challenged upon hearing the more delicate and subdued tonal color of Wispelwey's early eighteenth-century cello and violincello piccolo (small cello...
Where the imbalance enters is in an irritating secondary theme, scored for piccolo. That theme is William Vollmann, whom the author finds boundlessly fascinating. He can't stay out of his own novels, and he capers in and out of them, representing himself typically as William the Blind, a very clever, very naughty historical voyeur. The first volumes of the Seven Dreams cycle are successful novels despite Vollmann's frequent first-person kibitzing. His new book, The Rifles (Viking; 411 pages; $22.95), is an exasperating hash of fiction, op-ed attitudinizing, men's magazine heroics, cut-and-paste history...
...Preservation Hall -- neither, in fact, did his father have any real contact with that world. The closest Wynton came to performing jazz in those years was working with Branford in a funk band called the Creators. Wynton used most of his pay -- $75 a gig -- to buy the small piccolo trumpets he needed to play baroque music...
...suite of 18 sections comprising nearly 4,000 bars of music, with a performance time of more than two hours. By jazz standards, the forces required to perform it are almost Mahlerian: a 31-member band with full complements of brass and saxes, plus such normally nonswinging instruments as piccolo and contrabass clarinet. The work was played once in the composer's lifetime, but in a truncated form that left him despairing and furious. The score was put aside, abandoned...
Myriad details emerge: the skittering piccolo, singing out over the thundering trombones at the end of the Fantastique finale; the raw, plaintive solo of the cor anglais in the slow movement, forlornly wailing in response to the ominous, muffled strokes of the timpani; the four harps forming a powerful voice in the whirling waltz. Berlioz -- and such contemporaries as Weber, Schumann, Mendelssohn and even early Wagner -- can, and should, never be heard the same way again...