Word: sonata
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CESAR FRANCK: SONATA FOR VIOLIN & PIANO (Jascha Heifetz and Arthur Rubinstein; Victor: 6 sides). Polished performance by a perfectly matched pair of virtuosos...
...Moonlight Sonata," now at the Fine Arts, rests securely in the able hands of Ignace Jan Paderewski. The picture, a Pall Mall Production, makes little pretense at being anything but a means of presenting an action close-up of the world's greatest living pianist. At this it succeeds fairly well, though one would like to see more of Paderewski and less of the rest of the picture. Particularly interesting are close-ups of the pianist's hands, as he plays his Minuet in G, and selections from Lizst, Chopin, and Beethoven. The exquisite tone of Paderewski's music survives...
...plot is strictly utilitarian. On a Swedish country estate, where he is stranded when his plane crashes, Paderewski unites two estranged lovers by the "miracle" of Beethoven's "Moonlight" Sonata. Barbara Greene, Marie Tempest, and Charles Farrell do very well in their distinctly subsidiary parts. The picture is well worth the time for anyone at all interested in music...
Moonlight Sonata (Pall Mall) has its soul in Parnassus, its feet in Grub Street. A trite British treatment of cinema's tritest theme, it makes the wobbly point that music hath charms to shoo the city slicker out of the country girl's heart. But what lofts it to the skies for two memorable reels is the piano-playing of 77-year-old Ignace Jan Paderewski, most notable pianist of his time, in cinema a tired old man in a tacky dress suit, a mismanaged...
...Liszt's Second Hungarian Rhapsody, the camera returns again & again to watch his forceful hands. When he has finished, a small child scampers up to him, followed by her parents. He greets them, agrees to play as an encore the first movement of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. Later, over the brandies, one of those inevitable cough & spit drawing-room pundits quizzes the old maestro on what seemed to him an extraordinary departure from concert-hall form-playing the Sonata as an encore. Quietly. Paderewski starts to explain what the Sonata has meant in the lives of the three...