Word: soloists
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...mind's ear, and it is no great feat for professionals to be able to "hear" a musical score simply by reading it. But a deaf performer? To hit all the right notes, to play in an ensemble or in front of an orchestra as the featured soloist? Surely this requires the ability not only to hear, but to hear, as well, with a musician's acuity -- doesn...
Consider Evelyn Glennie, a small, vivacious Scotswoman who has been "profoundly deaf" since she was 12. Glennie is a full-time percussion soloist -- the only one in the classical field -- and one of today's brightest young stars on any instrument. "People have the wrong idea about deafness," says Glennie, 28, currently in the midst of an American concert tour that is taking her to Cincinnati, Washington and Cleveland. "They think you live in a world of total silence, but that isn't the way it works...
...sense rather than hear the rumble of a jet plane overhead. Her determination and natural talent, however, were enough to qualify her for London's Royal Academy of Music, where she graduated with honors. Glennie then compounded her professional challenge by setting out as a soloist instead of a rank-and-file orchestral player. Plenty of people make a living playing the piano, violin, flute or cello. But how many live off their skill with the snare drum, the marimba, the xylophone? Beethoven, after all, never wrote a percussion concerto...
...Soloist plays a melancholy theme...
...warm up to a character at once high strung and low key? It takes patience, a virtue that Mark Salzman demonstrated in Iron and Silk, a 1986 account of the author's experiences in China. Now Salzman brings East and West together in The Soloist (Random House; 184 pages; $19), a novel that counterpoints Occidental self-consciousness against Oriental ego transcendence. The dissonance is played out at a murder trial where Reinhart is a juror. There is no doubt that the young man in the dock has killed his Zen instructor. He says he beat him to death after hearing...