Word: quartets
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...conducts an orchestra, is he a prima donna of the podium. Frequently, in fact, he is not even on the podium, preferring to lead unobtrusively from within the ranks with a toss of his head and a wave of his bow. Nor, as an intermittent member of the Budapest Quartet for more than 35 years, has he ever sawed away on anything but the No. 2 violin part. In short, he has made a career of playing second fiddle-and to all but his enthusiastic admirers he remains the dim background figure that second fiddlers are supposed...
...indefatigable organizer of concerts, he has created such benign features of New York City musical life as the free outdoor performances in Greenwich Village and the offbeat chamber series at Manhattan's New School. A restless exponent of widening the repertory, he once formed a Schneider String Quartet expressly to perform all 83 of Haydn's quartets. He has been musical godfather to numerous younger musicians, among them Pianist Peter Serkin, Violinist Jaime Laredo, and the Guarneri Quartet...
...inveterate prankster who used to break up his staid colleagues in the Budapest Quartet by inserting pictures of nude women between the pages of their scores. He is also an accomplished chef. One source of friction in his brief marriage to Actress Geraldine Page (1954-57) seems to have been her insistence on eating peanut-butter sandwiches; few would fault Sasha there...
Later, he emigrated to Germany with his cellist brother Mischa, who also was to become a member of the Budapest Quartet. Before starting his classical career in opera orchestras, Schneider earned money for violin lessons by playing in cafés. As a result, to this day he can dash off dozens of waltzes and gypsy airs from memory...
...That is what I miss." The self-indulgent style of some of the youngsters coming up in today's foundation-fed music world appalls him. "If they wear sunglasses, long hair and have dirty fingernails, how can I see how their soul is, or hear it in their quartet...