Word: rachmaninoff
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...hammer-handed but unmistakably talented pianist of 19 when he first crashed on to the U.S. music scene in a concert with the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1941. In rapid order, he won three important awards, gathered a devoted following and dazzled the critics with his performances. "Playing of Rachmaninoff dimensions," cheered the Times's Olin Downes. ''Complete mastery, with prodigious strength and swiftness." Kapell appeared with 20 major orchestras, and his bouncing plume of black hair became familiar to concert audiences across...
...time passed, the critics developed a more exacting tone. Kapell's real forte, they ruled, was the moderns, e.g.. his favorite Prokofiev and Khachaturian, and such technically demanding romantics as Rachmaninoff. With other music, they sometimes complained, he lacked "tonal sensuousness." But without hesitation, they placed him among the top young pianists of his time. Pianist Kapell looked for new fields to conquer, took himself as far afield as Europe. South America, Israel, Australia...
Since then, a distinguished company of piano players, from Paderewski and Rachmaninoff to Fats Waller and Jimmy Durante, have hailed their decision. In Carnegie Hall this week, an S.R.O. crowd met to hail some more. On stage stood ten Steinway concert grands, and to their keyboards came squads of concert pianists (among them: Alexander Brailowsky, Robert Casadesus) to crash out in triumphant unison The Star-Spangled Banner, Chopin's Polonaise in A Major, and The Stars and Stripes Forever. It was the most emphatic way anybody could think of to celebrate the zooth anniversary of the U.S. House...
...once thought of a performer's career. But he was supporting himself as a music critic and ghostwriter by the time he was 20. In the early '30s, he covered modernist concerts for the tabloid Mirror while the more austere dailies were filling their columns with Rachmaninoff. Except for spells of teaching (at Mills and Brooklyn Colleges) and study (with Darius Milhaud and Nadia Boulanger), he has been at it ever since, is now the Herald Trib's most influential critic next to Critic-Composer (Four Saints in Three Acts) Virgil Thomson. On his days...
...program will consist of nine pieces, including works by Rachmaninoff, Ravel, Sarasate, Lale, Rossini, and Saint-Saens...