Word: quartet
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...surprise, the festival's standout was the Dave Brubeck Quartet. Blending classical and jazz traditions with a masterful touch, Milhaud-trained Pianist Brubeck (TIME cover, Nov. 8, 1954) and his mates (Eugene Wright on bass, Joe Morello on drums, Paul Desmond on alto sax) made each number sound like a theme and variations. The quartet usually started with well-known tunes (These Foolish Things, St. Louis Blues), then varied the tempo (from 4/4 to 5/4 and back to 3/4) as it injected its own sometimes loud, sometimes soft designs. The solo lead flew like a badminton bird from...
...Weber: Serenade for Strings (The Galimir String Quartet with David Walter, contrabassist; Epic, mono and stereo). A sinewy, appealing excursion into atonality by one of the foremost U.S. members of the club. For three movements, Composer Weber has his strings weaving melancholy, attenuated fretworks of sound, giving way in the fourth movement to a darkly swelling choir and in the finale to a spasmodically defiant march. Fascinating, if a trifle low in body heat...
This week Guide's noiseless cash registers are ringing up drinks and entrance fees to a brisk rhythm, the music of Vibraphonist Cal Tjader and his jazz quartet (quickly convertible to a bongo-congo Latin quintet with the addition of a crack drummer named "Mongo"). Says Owner Guido: "We give the customers good jazz. The musicians we don't bother. We never walked around with big cigars and said, 'I'm Mister Black Hawk and won't you sit at my table, musician?' They can look right across the room when they play...
...reserved seats," runs a paltry three hours and fifteen minutes in its deft and buoyant revival by the Group 20 Players. In order to make this enormous masterwork fit such a brief compass, the usual expedient is to cut the dream scene in hell, a glorious ideological quartet for voices, specifically designed by the author as a detachable interlude. The reigning powers at Group 20 have decided to leave in the hell scene, and to take in compensation frequent cuts and tucks and darts and snatches throughout the play, which necessarily means eliminating some of the best stuff...
...first movement is a paragon of spaciousness and dignity, recalling the mood of the opening of his F-major "Razoumovsky" Quartet. From the solo piano sentence with which the work begins, it was apparent that Mr. Simonds had lost none of his old mastery. This opening culminates is a series of six staccato chords, which in most performances come crashing forth like so many sledgehammer blows. Under Simonds' hands these chords came out firm but restrained, and sent me scurrying home later to see how the composer had marked them. Sure enough, the chords are designated forte, not fortissimo...