Word: rachmaninoff
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...over 30 years he was constantly on stage, playing Liszt, Rachmaninoff and Chopin so often that he could no longer hear the notes, even while his fingers gave virtuoso performances. He grew ever more fearful of the audiences that forever insisted he encore with his tour-de-force arrangement of Stars and Stripes Forever. Pianist Vladimir Horowitz began to feel like a stunt man, and even worse, to doubt his own artistic integrity. In 1953, aged 48, he stopped performing. Last week, after twelve years of deeply melancholic self-exile, Horowitz returned to Manhattan's Carnegie Hall. A supremely...
RUSSIAN ART SONGS (Vanguard). The soprano is Russian-born Netania Devrath, whose pure and sunlit voice is best suited to songs of springtime and skylarks by Rimsky-Korsakov and Rachmaninoff; but also it can be darkened with sorrow, as in Tchaikovsky's laments (Was I Not a Blade of Grass; To Forget So Soon...
...RACHMANINOFF: SECOND PIANO CONCERTO (Columbia). In 1947 an 18-year-old student with a penchant for Rachmaninoff was chosen to play the Second Piano Concerto with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Gary Graffman has never stopped reworking the ultraromantic piece and by now, as shown by this rich and seasoned performance, his formidable steel fingers are entirely in the service of the Russian's melancholy rhapsodies. With the New York Philharmonic, under Bernstein...
...face is a pliant mask of dismay and disdain. One never knows whether he regards his props-the microphone, the piano, the piano bench-as allies or enemies. Flailing away at Rachmaninoff, he skids clean off the piano bench, pulls out a neon-blue seat belt, fastens it with frosty dignity, and resumes his musical flight. He also keeps up a running gag with a treacherous watch that tells the day, month, year and altitude ("Today it is the 39th of February, 1216 B.C., and we are flying at an altitude of four feet below sea level...
...PROKOFIEV: PIANO CONCERTO NO. 3. (Kyril Kondrashin conducting the Moscow Philharmonic; Mercury). Byron Janis blasts off like a rocket with the orchestra ablaze behind him, and even when they get back to earth, they are still incandescent. The First Rachmaninoff Concerto on the other side is equally brilliant. A harmonious international collaboration, the record was made with U.S. equipment in Bolshoi Hall and won the French Oscar, a Grand Prix du Disque...