Word: sergei
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Twenty-seven years ago a lean, gloomy Russian with a long face and convict haircut heard his Prelude in C-sharp Minor crash across the U. S. on a thousand pianos and make him famous. Long before that time Sergei Vassilievitch Rachmaninoff had been charming Europe with his brooding, regretful compositions, bewildering concertgoers with his speed and skill on the piano. But one ambition, to write a great symphony, he had not achieved. His First Symphony, in 1897, fell so flat that he needed a hypnotist to restore his nerve. His Second, in 1908, fared better, was praised...
Against scenery by Sergei Soudeikine which looks vaguely edible, Forbidden Melody unfolds a tangled tale of intrigue and counter-intrigue revolving about the return of King Carol of Rumania to his throne. No one impersonating buck-toothed Carol appears, however, and there is no trace of his red-headed familiar, Magda Lupescu. Sample gag: "Will you pardon me?" "Why certainly-what have you done...
...Rimsky's daughter's wedding Stravinsky wrote Fen d' Artifice, a fantasy so colorful that Sergei Diaghilev promptly commissioned him to write for the Russian Ballet. Fame came quickly with The Firebird (1910), Petrouchka (1911) and Le Sacre du Printemps (1913) which caused such a furor at the Paris premiere that the dancers, unable to hear the music, followed the beat of the frenzied Vaslav Nijinsky, shouting to them from the wings while Stravinsky kept a tight grip on the dancer's coat collar. Of Nijinsky, now interned in a Swiss insane asylum, Stravinsky writes...
Simultaneously last week in Boston and in Philadelphia batons flicked into the air, releasing the music that marked the overture to the 1936-37 season. In Boston, Beacon Hillers, not content merely to clap their gloved hands, stood in deference to Conductor Sergei Koussevitzky who gravely bowed his thanks, peaked the afternoon with a peerless performance of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony...
...determined, businesslike manner commanded attention for two Bach transcriptions, arranged by Lucien Cailliet, a jolly bespectacled Frenchman, known by Philadelphians as one of their regular clarinetists. After Cailliet's Bach came Mozart's Fourth Violin Concerto with Fritz Kreisler as soloist, forerunning such headliners as Josef Hofmann, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Kirsten Flagstad, Vladimir Horowitz, Mischa Levitzki, Jascha Heifetz, Lawrence Tibbett, Artur Schnabel, all sure bait for customers not altogether sure of a youthful new conductor. Fritz Kreisler's spell was sure, while Ormandy kept courteously to the background for the 61-year-old fiddler who, according...