Word: soloists
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...orchestra, sets the standard that the rest of the players are expected to live up to. He plays all the important violin solos in an orchestral piece, and, indeed, ought to be so familiar with the literature that he can substitute at the last minute for an absent violin soloist...
Though she has played infrequently in the U.S., Lili Kraus has been a celebrated soloist in Europe for more than 30 years. Daughter of an impoverished scissor sharpener, she was born in Budapest, became a prodigy at six, taught adult students at eight, became a full-fledged soloist at 20. In 1940, while on a concert tour of Java, she was stranded by the war and eventually placed in a Japanese forced-labor camp. Denied access to a piano for most of the three years of her imprisonment, she "continued to play organically," deciding that "either...
...orchestra. In his heart, if not in the ear of his audience, he is a full-fledged virtuoso who, says Los Angeles Symphony Conductor Zubin Mehta, "joins a symphony only as a last resort, and then is frustrated." On the campus, however, he can assume the stature of a soloist, play largely what he wants (musicians' tastes rarely agree with those of a symphony audience) the way he wants to (instead of having interpretations dictated by a conductor...
...Polish-immigrant parents, won a piano scholarship at Philadelphia's Curtis Institute, then at 18 went to New York in search of "a room some place where I could develop pianistically the way I felt I wanted to." Instead, almost in spite of himself, he appeared as a soloist with the Boston and NBC symphonies, astonished the New York critics with a masterly debut recital at Carnegie Hall, made a few recordings for Columbia, and embarked on a concert career...
...Conductor Walter Hendl, a judge in the piano competition, agreed that Sokolov was a true Wunderkind, but that Dichter had a more promising future as a soloist. Still, when the Russians broached the idea of dividing the first prize between Sokolov and Dichter, Hendl vetoed it on the grounds that dividing leading prizes weakened their impact. The jury voted, Sokolov won, and the crowd promptly went wild-for Dichter. Five hundred Russians who had stayed until 2 a.m. to hear the results, kept chanting "Bravo Dichter! Bravo Dichter!", and several women wept and pressed flowers into his outstretched hands...