Word: sonata
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...program opened with the Beethoven Sonata in B-flat, op. 22, in the beginning of which the performer's nervousness was noticeable. But by the time the exposition of the first movement was repeated, things were under control, and there followed a structurally clairvoyant performance, emphasizing both the subtle interrelationships and the marked contrasts inherent in the composer's material. In the second movement, I felt that so many gentle hesitations before sforzandi and cadences, in conjunction with a tempo leaning toward the slow side, tended to restrict the flow. However, these elements of rubato, although not to my taste...
Last week Ponti began a recital at London's Queen Elizabeth Hall with a Beethoven sonata at 7:50 p.m. By 8:20 he had flung himself into one of the fiercest challenges in the entire piano literature: both books of Brahms' Variations on a Theme by Paganini. He continued with Chopin's powerful Sonata in B Minor, another sonata by Scriabin, a wrist-cracking Etude for the Left Hand by Blumenfeld, and finally Stravinsky's Three Scenes from Petrouchka, a piece that bristles with so many notes that much of it is written on three...
...Mozart: Sonata No. 9; Haydn: Sonata No. 34 and Andante and Variations in F Minor (Wanda Landowska: Victrola). These three tender, highly personal performances-not at the harpsichord, but at the piano-were recorded in the last three years of Landowska's life. Haydn's Andante and Variations is especially endearing for its full measure of romantic freedom...
...tradition. Hofmann never officially released a commercial studio recording after 1924. In May 1935, however, when he was still at peak form, Hofmann made some test recordings for Victor, now released for the first time. The sound is uneven, but the first movement of Chopin's B-Minor Sonata is a matchless example of the controlled give and take he brought to large-scale works. The Chopin-Liszt Maiden's Wish shows how delicate he could be at painting musical miniatures...
...TOLSTOY found in Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata a novel of homicidal sexuality: others find in it only the noblest aspirations of their own souls. In these higher voltages of the spirit one is creating at levels both above and below the consciously worded thought or the consciously planned act. The totality of him goes forth and exerts itself on the totality of other personalities. They will respond at that level to which they are attuned. Perhaps this is what we mean when we say that we are not influenced by what a man says, or even by what he does...