Word: schonberger
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...Young Lord. In his new role, Sir Rudolf was an absolute lamb: early to rehearsals, a dear at taking direction and patience itself while his flowing gray wig was being glued on his bald head. But all the divas he has put down must have loved Critic Harold Schonberg's New York Times review: "In future performances Sir Rudolf will doubtless know what to do with his hands and feet...
...symbiotic relationship: Oscar and his hosts dined out on remarks like that. Levant swiftly became a fixture at Beverly Hills parties: the lap dog with rabies. Though he continued to play and compose (he once studied with Arnold Schonberg), Levant's musicianship was never taken very seriously -except, of course, by Oscar. His classical composition had a sweet, derivative aura, reminiscent of movie scores. (He wrote several, including a mini-opera for Charlie Chan at the Opera.) His pianistic enthusiasm was showy but, except for Gershwin's music, Levant tended to pound the instrument like the back...
...responsible was Metropolitan Editor Arthur Gelb, who spotted an offbeat story in the monthly magazine of Manhattan's Museum of Natural History; the article concluded that wolves howled not to frighten people but to communicate with other wolves. Gelb assigned Schonberg to write a professional critique of the calls of the wild. After listening to nearly an hour's worth of howling, Schonberg issued his straight-faced findings, complete with notational diagram...
...Schonberg further observed that "when one wolf starts howling, like Franco Corelli in Verdi's 'Di quella pira' from 11 Trovatore, the rest of the wolves join in, as in the choral sections of 'Di quella pira.' " He found that the best wolf virtuosos "start pianissimo, swell to a messa di voce to the sixth above, hold it sweetly and purely, then perhaps embellish to the upper partial before going down to a pianissimo and trailing off on an inconclusive microtonality near the tonic." Although some wolves have a range of more than an octave...
Story finished, Schonberg treated startled staffers in the Times city room to a few tenor and bass wolf howls of his own. Not bad,Gelb noted...