Word: sonata
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...SONATA RECITAL (2 LPs; Vanguard). Bela Bartok wrote for the piano as though it were a percussion instrument, but when he played it, he could make it sing in the best romantic tradition. This historic album, made at a Library of Congress recital in 1940, is one of the few recordings that survive to attest to Bartok's virtuosity as a performer, long eclipsed by his fame as a composer. With Master Violinist Joseph Szigeti, Bartok gives a bold and dramatic rendition of Beethoven's "Kreutzer" Sonata and plays the Debussy Sonata for Violin and Piano lightly...
...styles of several virtuosos-Arrau, Backhaus, Brailowsky, Casadesus, Janis and Kempff-in a single benefit concert for the U.N. Commission for World Refugees. The program hitches together the warhorses of the piano repertory, but they are played with freshness and excitement. Standouts are Wilhelm Backhaus' definitive "Moonlight" Sonata, Byron Janis' unabashedly grand performance of Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 6, and Wilhelm Kempff's crystalline playing of Schubert's Impromptu in G Major...
...hamhanded man with slicked-back hair and brooding mustache, Michelangeli ambled onstage with the baleful nonchalance of a boxer bent on mayhem. Once he settled at the keyboard, his touch was featherweight light, his attack crisp and restrained through Debussy's liquid Images and Beethoven's soaring Sonata in C Major (Opus 2, No. 3). After two encores and a dozen curtain calls, he unconcernedly ambled offstage to a standing ovation. Typically, following his triumph, he repaired last week to the regenerative quietude of a month-long teaching engagement at Siena's Accademia Musicale Chigiana. Untypically...
...Face." Murray's defense was that the sort of show that would have pleased the critics and Congressmen would have made no dent on the "out-of-school, out-of-work, out-of-luck kids" that the poverty program was all about. "You can't play a sonata or a fugue and hope to reach kids when a majority of them can't even read or add properly. How many critics and politicians bothered to check with our special audience to find their reaction?" Murray had a rebuttal, too, for those who complained that his low-pressure...
...artistic integrity. In 1953, aged 48, he stopped performing. Last week, after twelve years of deeply melancholic self-exile, Horowitz returned to Manhattan's Carnegie Hall. A supremely simple Chopin Ballade and Etude, a crystal fairy palace of Schumann's C-Major Fantasy, a mystical Dostoevskian Scriabin Sonata and Poem-all rolled from his fin gers with the orchestral technique of old, now tempered with a new inner repose. Obviously, he enjoyed himself. His courage clearly was restored...