Word: scherzo
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Winner Argerich the ordeal was withering. Midway in a concert last week, a doctor was summoned backstage for Argerich, who was suffering from insomnia and near exhaustion. Nevertheless, she came onstage and swept through Chopin's Scherzo in C-Sharp Minor with a fleet and fiery abandon that left the audience gasping. Though a slight, delicate girl, she played with an almost masculine power and assertiveness. For more introspective passages, she tempered her mercurial attack with a limpid, poetic tone and subtlety of phrasing that won her the added honor as best interpreter of Chopin's mazurkas...
...this quintet, written in 1940 shortly after the Sixth Symphony and like it a resolution of the torment expressed in the Fifth. Its many lightly inflected moods flow peacefully together with classical clarity, interrupted in the middle by a short, funny honky-tonk of a Scherzo. The Melos Ensemble of London plays it with quiet understanding; it presents as well a sparkling, icy Prokofiev Quintet dated Paris...
Clad in brown, gold, red and white tights, the dancers moved across a starkly lit stage that was virtually bare of scenery. In the first movement they awaken timidly from fetal positions, groping skittishly through the anguish of birth and early life. The playfully exuberant dancing in the scherzo abruptly shifts to an anti-racist theme in the third movement, in which racially mixed couples court and embrace, reject and reconcile. In the triumphant final movement, the entire troupe joyously marches and swirls about the stage while the chorus sings "Alle Menschen werden Brüder [All men become brothers...
...says gleefully, referring to Berlioz' rarely performed Symphonie Funèbre et Triomphale, a work for 180 musicians that will require the West Point Band as well as the Philharmonic, Leon Kirchner's Second Piano Concerto, and the American première of Bartok's Scherzo for Piano and Orchestra. "Then I have something for the New York snobs-an all-Mendelssohn program. This is really the height of snobbishness, the wonderful answer to the question of just what do the snobs need...
...Mahler in this strong, youthful performance of the panoramic five-movement work sometimes called "The Giant." There are none of the songs that Mahler put in some of his other symphonies, but the instruments alone, as he used them, have eloquence to spare. Bernstein handles the long, playful scherzo with easy humor, changes moods in lightning flashes, and tears at the vitals of the dramatic sections. A milestone in the Mahler revival...