Word: rachmaninoff
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Late at night a college radio station discourses brilliantly on Rachmaninoff's piano technique. Whole regions, with accents and traditions and communities of their own, come in over the air, echoes of reality in the netherworld...
...should make its concluding march a shout of triumph. Better were three movements from Olivier Messiaen's dazzling Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant Jesus, in which Feltsman temporarily relaxed his inhibitions to project the music's ferocious rhythms and clashing polytonal harmonies. Best of all were the encores. In Rachmaninoff's Prelude in G-Sharp Minor, he caressed the delicate, almost impressionistic filigree, and he unleashed an impressively big sound on Beethoven's Six Variations in D Major, Opus 76, whose lumbering melody Beethoven used later for the "Turkish March" in The Ruins of Athens...
What if George Gershwin had lived longer? He saw his first hit song, Swanee, sell more than a million copies, wrote for Broadway and symphony orchestras and performed Rhapsody in Blue to the applause of Rachmaninoff and Stokowski, all before his 30th birthday. He was planning further classical compositions when he died of a brain tumor at the age of 38 in 1937. Would Gershwin's later music have made its way into the standard American repertory along with the works of Aaron Copland and Samuel Barber? Or would he have been considered an overreacher whose notes never quite shook...
Beethoven and Schubert and the last great classical composers and the first greats of the Romantic era. The Romantics include Schumann, Chopin, Liszt, Mendelssohn, Dvorak, Moussorgsky, Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, many of whom were inspired more by small forms like songs or preludes than by symphonies and concertos, which pair a solo instrument and an orchestra. The classical and Romantic repertoire forms the backbone of the music played most often in concert halls...
Cellist Yo Yo Ma, at the ripe old age of thirty-some-odd years, is already considered one of the greats of the century. Leonard Bernstein, an acclaimed Mahler conductor, recently inaugurated a cycle of that composer's symphonies. Conductor Andre Previn's Rachmaninoff, it is widely said, is the most sumptuous and melancholy. And the list goes...