Word: prestissimo
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...tenor to record 10 arias in a Milan hotel room for 100 pounds. The singer was Enrico Caruso, and the album, a huge hit, gave rise to the classical recording industry. In The Life and Death of Classical Music the smart, crusty, blustery critic Norman Lebrecht frog-marches readers, prestissimo, through the glory days of Toscanini and Glenn Gould to the bloated collapse of the early 2000s, brought on by inflated contracts, corporate mismanagement, mindless rerecordings of the warhorses and a welter of weak-minded classical-lite crossover acts. The book ends with a list of the 100 best classical...
...Then, it was as if Ligeti put the situation on hold for several years. He wrote “Capriccio—Presto con Slancio,” the second movement of the piece, in 1953. With an invigorating prestissimo, Lipkind delivered the love-struck composer’s return to reality with notes that flew so quickly from the bow, it was as if a rustling wind blew into the room and ran with the scale...
...offer in her painstaking book. Today she is one of the glories of the New York City Ballet, a sunny allegro virtuoso. In his introduction, British Critic Clement Crisp likens her style to bravura pianism or flawless coloratura. As Ashley documents it, however, her career was not a prestissimo ascent. It took a decade of intense, disciplined practice to perfect her astounding technique and years onstage to learn how to present herself effectively. In the early pages, the author-dancer shows just how lost a youngster can be, even in the country's best ballet training ground...
...Chorus was the joy of the evening, especially the soprano, singing with considerable excellence in the Andante Maestoso and the final Prestissimo sections. Only the Chorus adumbrated some sense of the Oppolinian sweep and profundity of Beethoven's greatst testament...
...opening Sonata, that of Opus 109, Mr. Fischer first demonstrated his strengths and weaknesses. After a somewhat uncertain beginning, probably the result of nervousness, he succeeded in conveying the dolce, expressivo tone of the first movement. The second section, however, seemed rather too prestissimo for his fingers, and the opening of the final slow movement lacked the needed singing quality. The final minutes of the work more than made up for this lack, though, and Mr. Fischer's playing of the final variation, with its incredibly long (and beautiful) trills and arpeggio passages, was nothing less than spell-binding. With...