Word: sonata
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...sort of classical jam session. Thomas Schippers, who conducted the Spoleto Messiah, stopped by to play piano duets with a series regular, John Browning. Last week Browning backed up U.S. Conductor Robert La Marchina (Traviata), who was up early for the sake of a tuneful Rachmaninoff piano-cello sonata. What's more, the musicians' enthusiasm for the series seems to be shared by an Italian concert public long uninterested in chamber music. "One of the most original and happily realized formulas of the festival," glowed Rome's II Giornale d'ltalia. The Italian radio network helpfully...
...program the two friends chose was full of beauty and hazards: Mozart's Sonata for Two Pianos, Schumann's Andante and Variations, the Chopin Rondo for Two Pianos, and the fiendishly difficult Bartok Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion. Through ten days of rehearsals at the Moscow Conservatory, neither could do much but marvel at the other's playing. "I would like to play Mozart as well as Malcolm," Ashkenazy said, drawing a blush from Frager...
...everyone from Verdi to Garbo had taken a whack at Dumas' story since it first appeared in 1848. He redistilled it in his own mind into a prologue and four concentrated scenes. Still he could not decide on the music. Then he heard Liszt's B-minor sonata. To most classicists, the piece is sadly second-rate, but it was the answer to Ashton's yearning. He assigned the orchestration to Humphrey Searle, got Cecil Beaton to do the sets, and plunged into the choreography...
...Luise Vosgerchian in the Two Pieces for Piano by David Johnson and three movements from the Five Pieces for Piano of William Valente. These two works contrast in the same manner as the string pieces: Valente absorbs himself with motivic variation, Johnson with stormy declamation. A third work, the Sonata for Violin and Piano of James Walker, is close to Johnson, if with more reserve, for both possess a nostalgia like the piano (not the better-known music) of Aaron Copland. Finally, the sentimental harmony and florid lines of the traditional song style appear in the Three Songs of James...
...through all the rest of his career, he never abandoned his own highly idiomatic voice: Ravel envied him for knowing how to speak "his own folklore." And if the Sept Répons was born of his faith in God, as his friends believe, then his Sonata may well be nothing more than a strange man's tribute to the likes of Benny Goodman...