Word: sonata
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...planned ahead and taken your sleeping pills hours before you want to nod off. For insomnia suffers, the problem with most prescription sleeping aids is that they take a long time to work and a long time to wear off. That's changed with FDA approval of Sonata, a new prescription sleeping pill. People who used Sonata in clinical trials were usually snoozing within 30 minutes of taking the drug, and reported little grogginess upon waking. Drug maker American Home Products sees Sonata as a direct competitor to the current leading treatment for insomnia, Monsanto's Ambien...
...downside, at least to some, is Sonata's brevity. Because the drug has a relatively short "half-life" (the time it takes for the substance to pass out of your body), it's effective in getting you to sleep ?- but not in keeping you there. Studies show that users get about four hours of sometimes fitful sleep using Sonata. The slower-to-work Ambien knocks you out for up to eight hours once it takes effect, but leaves you feeling groggy and hungover in the morning. The stakes for both companies are high: Ambien last year had U.S. sales...
...barnburning virtuosity in the big contrary-motion sweeps, so much that he lifted himself off the bench. The ending, mostly reminiscent of the G minor Ballade, included a final two chords that were so well executed as to seem prophetic. The second half of the program was a Schumann sonata in which all of the details were in place. The F-sharp Minor sonata Op. 11 is a sprawling piece of juvenilia that requires a tight vision of elements that don't necessarily relate organically to each other, as is the case with the greater master-piece, the Fantasy...
There followed a "Moonlight" Sonata that sounded, in the honest estimation of one concertgoer, like Perahia "had to go to the bathroom." This rendition was hasty and short on detail, but Perahia wisely observed the printed note values for the dotted first theme, which these days tends to degenerate into rubato soup. The capital offenses were in the finale, where often his left hand growled indistinctly or pounded an ostinato where it should have been a more sensitive accompanist, and once he even wandered into a thicket of wrong notes. It made one grateful and Perahia did not have access...
...second half of the recital comprised Perahia's magisterial reading of the Schubert C Minor Sonata D. 958. This interpretation was worlds away from the famous hair-sizzling live recording made in Budapest in 1958 (coincidence?) by Sviatoslav Richter-The tempi were less "hell" and more "high water." The beginning of the first movement, phrased to remind us of Beethoven's 32 variations in the same key was the first of many well-executed musical decisions that kept the audience rapt for the entirety of this very long sonata. Peheria was rewarded with three encores...