Word: tone
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...sometimes cannot tell which one is playing a certain passage on an unidentified recording). Both play with the round, richly colored sound characteristic of all oboists who have studied with the Philadelphia Orchestra's famed, longtime Solo Oboist Marcel Tabuteau. Both give the oboe's warmly singing tone a fine quality of darkling brilliance, free of the reediness that afflicts many less gifted players. Both, when the occasion requires, can coax from the oboe inflections that, in the words of one 18th century oboe enthusiast, "go as easie and as soft as the Flute...
...players are scarce and because the instrument is extremely difficult to play, first oboists are often the most highly paid men in the orchestra, sometimes even better paid than the concertmaster. Most oboists make their own reeds, the shape and size of which largely determine the instrument's tone. Harold Gomberg, who has made trips to Europe in search of cane of the proper hardness, grain and color, maintains a studio where he spends dozens of hours a week whittling reeds to size (he uses as many as three reeds in a concert). The trick in oboe playing...
What raises Zhivago above technically better-made novels is that it is charged with moral passion. On the very first page, Pasternak evokes an old Russian ballad that sets the tone of the novel and suggests the elaborate symbolic substructure he has given his book. The ballad, dating from the period when being buried alive was a commonly felt terror, contains the line "Who are they burying? The living! Not him, but her." Thus in the second paragraph of Doctor Zhivago, a funeral procession is described: "Some joined in out of curiosity and asked: 'Who is being buried...
...resources of this chorus are such that even when their singing is not perfect, it is of such high quality that one feels ungrateful in pointing out such faults as intonation problems and a rough tone here and there. The performance in general is so polished that a missed entrance or an orchestral flub is quickly overshadowed by an unexpectedly outstanding passage, such as in Gevaert's "Le Sommeil de L'enfant Jesus" when the chorus' exquisite pianissimo was breathtaking...
...strength of Mills' thesis is also lessened by the iconoclastic, irreverent tone that characterizes his writing. By now, we realize that he dislikes the "Power Elite", but making them into tangible villains often seems to be a perversion of reality...