Word: sonata
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...with passages of his poetry, radio and stage plays. The two have extracted from Beckett's life work the single figure of the Beckett tramp, Fool without his Lear. Now the tramp was confronting his maker in rapt concentration. Intense and difficult listening: this Beckett, like a Bach sonata for unaccompanied violin, is a music compacted of roughnesses and silences, almost demanding of the audience too the explorations and repetitions of rehearsal in order to flower in performance...
...ever the New Thing had a whole man, it was the late John Coltrane. An innovator, his "sheets of sound" technique and long (often 40 minutes) sonata-like solos on sax have revolutionized the jazz world. He was looked up to by other New Thing players as a friend and spiritual leader. "He seemed like a priest, the way he talked," recalls Saxophonist Pharaoh Sanders, a former sideman and now leader of his own group...
Record collectors have long been accustomed to a one-sided search for one particular piece in a maze of two-faced records. Is that Mozart's 40th on the flip side of Haydn's 88th? Is Beethoven's "Waldstein" Sonata on the other side of the Schumann Piano Concerto? Now this petty but annoying problem is all but solved. More and more companies are offering omnibus collections of great composers in one volume, uniformly boxed and carefully indexed...
BRUCKNER found in his religious orthodoxy the same resonance of tradition and invitation to humanism, the same sustenance of spiritual and intellectual resolution, which he found in classical sonata form. His music proceeds with the deliberateness, comprehensiveness, mystical assurance, and formal clarity of the Mass. His symphonies are celebratory but never indulge in an easy rapture of tonal staleness or facile dramaturgy. Mahler learned much from Bruckner, primarily thematic linking of unprecedented subtlety among movements, the proliferation of material in the second thematic group, the immediate juxtaposition of radically differing elements (here Mahler extended Bruckner's simpler process of motto...
...rest of the program matched Madame Carmirelli's Romantic tastes. It included a modern Italian violin sonata and a piano-violin sonata by Ferruccio Busoni. The Busoni piece went smoothly, with thematic-seeming material floating by with all of the grace of the turn of the century. Someone once said of Busoni that "he was hopelessly ahead of his time when he was writing and is now hopelessly Romantic." That adequately describes his sonata. It probably says a lot about the program and the performance at the concert as well...