Word: sonata
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...brilliant young pianist zipped vivacissimamente through the final movement of Beethoven's "Les Adieux" sonata. Impeccable in white tie and tails, he bowed to the storm of applause that swept Carnegie Hall, dutifully played three encores. Later that night, he could be seen walking down neon-gaudy Broadway. Just five blocks south of the august concert hall, he ducked into a cellar. Within a few minutes Concert Pianist Friedrich Gulda was on the bandstand, amid the smoke and clatter of Broadway's famed Birdland nightclub, playing jazz-cool, glittering and poignant as icicles. Sitting in with the Modern...
...first movement of Beethoven's Sonata Op. 2, No. 3 was marked Allegro con brio, which Gulda interpreted in terms of jet-age speed and atomic-age heat, and every fast movement for the next hour and a half had a breathless here-we-go-again quality. It would have been just another dead-eye Fred taking pleasure in his fingerwork. except that Gulda's pianissimo was sweet as a barrel of honey, his legato glided like a gull, and his perfect shading gave each movement a convincing contour...
Where Sir George Grove in Grove IV was "certain" that Beethoven's romantic "attachments were all honorable," Grove V is more cautious, also concludes that "we need not expend much pity upon Beethoven the thwarted lover." Beethoven's cryptic answer when asked what the Appassionato Sonata meant ("Read Shakespeare's Tempest") is now interpreted as a flip: "Don't ask silly questions." Mendelssohn, who was the No. i darling of Grove IV, with 60 florid pages ("Few instances can be found in history of a man so amply gifted with every good quality of mind...
...Times, as hard to move, in its lordly way, as a glacier, was nevertheless showing signs of change. Managing Editor Turner Catledge has ordered sprightlier heads (sample: JAZZ PIANIST DIGS THE SONATA FORM) and shorter and sharper writing. Said one Catledge memo: "The composing room has an unlimited supply of periods available to terminate short, simple sentences." Where the Times had once wanted only "objectivity'' (i.e., facts) in reporting, now objectivity means facts plus interpretation...
...small, dark-haired woman deposited her mink coat and shawl on a stage table, set up her metronome, covered her shoulders with a sweater, and sat down at the concert grand. For the next two hours she worked from page to page of Beethoven's "Waldstein" Sonata, starting at dead-slow tempo, one hand at a time, working up to half tempo, patiently repeating certain figures again and again, uncovering little melodies hidden in the passagework, testing the spaces between chords for the precise measure of silence. Finally, humming cheerfully to herself, she went back and played...