Word: sonata
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Last week at Manhattan's Town Hall, the kitchen strayed into the parlor. For days, white-haired, wispy Composer Bela Bartok, famed Hungarian modernist, had rehearsed the first performance of a Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion Instruments. He and his pretty, blue-eyed wife, Ditta Pasztory, played the piano parts. New York Philharmonic Tympanist Solly Goodman and Cymbal & Gong Virtuoso Henry Denecke, surrounded by seven drums, two pairs of cymbals, a triangle and a xylophone (some of them played with their feet), had grown as skittish as a couple of prima donnas. But by the time they...
...Europe last month with hardly a change of underwear. While he and Mme. Bartok raced in a bus from Geneva to Lisbon, their baggage got sidetracked and missed the boat. In the music roll under Bela Bartok's arm was the manuscript of his Kitchen Sonata...
...days life for St. Petersburg's upper crust was a wild melee of tempestuous music and passionate romance. From these Director Dreville has compounded "Kreutzer Sonata." As in Tolstoy's story the characters are carefree debauchees who tinkle champagne glasses to Beethoven's music. Thus Jean Yonnel, as Dimitri Pozdnycheff the irrestible rake, makes eyes at his creditor's wife while that gentleman removes the furniture, and reforms by going home to make love to the country lasses. American tabloid readers can fill in the rest of the plot: true love, questioned virtue, and a scheming horse-faced violinist...
Many of the little tricks of the French movies, photomontage and queer camera angles, have been abandoned by Hollywood. But there is something refreshing in a technique which plays romantic drama against a landscape of dreams and by emphasizing facial close-ups rather than sweeping panoramas, "Kreutzer Sonata" makes simplicity a virtue. March of Time's famous study of American Youth and a backstage view of the Paris Ballet complete the program...
With this scheme, moreover, Sibelius is able to pack climaxes of Wagnerian scope into a symphony a half an hour long. Bruckner had great conceptions, but his ideas meander baldly around and get lost in the involvements of the sonata form. Wagner, in order to work out his climaxes fully, had to extend them endlessly. But Sibelius's method is the essence of compactness, entailing none of the delays, enforced hesitations, and bridge-passage gaps of standard symphonic form, but allowing the composer to start on as low a level as he wishes, and move swiftly and cleanly...