Word: solo
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Great Ideas of Western Mann (Herbie Mann's Californians; Riverside). Flutist Mann abandons his favorite instrument for one of the least likely of solo instruments-the bass clarinet. The fudge-thick sound has a wistful, funky charm, but often Soloist Mann evokes a fat man in a conga line...
...Oompah! Oom-pah!" muttered the tympanist as he lashed about in a semicircle, flailing out a solo on his five kettledrums. Then he took a cue from Conductor Howard Mitchell, launched a new flight that moved him to rumble out a profound "Ye-e-a-ah!" For all its appearance of a tribal dance the occasion was a regular concert of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington. The piece, entitled Concerto for Five Kettledrums and Orchestra, was an answer to a tympanist's dream: being liberated from his exile at the rear of the orchestra and placed out front...
...technical problems, he discovered, were sizable. Examples: how to pass rapidly from one drum, fortissimo, to another, without the resonance of the first canceling out the pitch of the second (part of the solution was to use a medium-padded drumstick); how to allow the tympanist enough time between solo passages for retuning (the hot concert-hall lights tend to raise drum pitch, while the audience's body moisture in the air lowers...
...Theater, the Philadelphia Orchestra, Louis Armstrong) and Italy's Festival of Two Worlds, organized by Gian Carlo Menotti (three new ballets by Choreographer Jerome Robbins, a new production of Verdi's Macbeth conducted by the Met's Thomas Schippers). At many other festivals and in countless solo appearances around the world, the U.S. will display an impressive roster of artists. Among them...
...applause. As played by the Boston's first-rate Violist Joseph de Pasquale, the concerto unfolded as a simple, strongly exuberant piece with clear orchestral coloration and precise balance. In its climactic third movement, there was plenty of agitation, some gay syncopation, and an enticing dialogue between the solo viola and the orchestra. All in all, another reason to be grateful that Walter Piston got off that streetcar and turned to composing...