Word: sonata
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...Monday night Ursula Oppens '65 and Geoffrey T. Hellman '65 will take part in a demonstration class taught by pianist Leonard Shure. Afterwards, Shure, who has performed with major orchestras including the Boston Symphony, will play Beethoven's Sonata Opus...
...Angel re-recording of Liszt's sonata in B minor (COLH 72), carried out by the unbelievably agile fingers and arms of Vladimir Horowitz, has filled a huge hole in the record catalogue. The release is part of Angel's "Great recordings of the Century" series, and is taken from a 78 rpm recorded in 1932, when Horowitz was at his best. Though the stereo addict will wince at an occasional impurity in sound, Horowitz's performance is superb. The Angel version far surpasses the few recordings of Liszt's sonata available earlier...
Cramped by tradition, Liszt insisted on writing a full-length sonata without sonata form, without movements, and with no more than a bare minimum of thematic material. The stuff of his piece is virtually over in the first fifteen measures: the introduction, a meditative, decending scale in the piano's lower registers, then the main theme, crashing, acrobatic octaves followed by a tiny march, again down...
These themes appear in every conceivable mood during the sonata. The leaping octaves turn into a simple song, the march is played at half speed, decorated with trills, and, near the end, the two halves of the main theme are juxtaposed in a fugue. Of the four or five pianists I've heard perform this work, Horowitz is the only one who masters Liszt's runs of octaves and sixths enough to make the composer's intentions clear throughout. No matter how intricate the notes on top are, the lower levels are never blurred. In Liszt's day, probably...
...program which Adams House presented on Wednesday night seemed at the start totally miscellaneous. The Beethoven Violin Sonata, Op.96, opened it, the Schoenberg String Trio, Op. 45 followed, and the second half plunged into the electronic music of Cage, Mache and Schaeffer. But all the pieces closely complemented each other, for the modern works were all intent upon evoking a sense of enigmatic direction, of thoughtful uncertainty, and the Beethoven at least approached them by using an unusual formal scheme. Listening to all this raised the important question of what should determine taste within so free a style...