Word: tovey
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...included the inevitable word "giant," fancies se as rediscovered Mahler, where in fact she only reestablished her own tanuous appreciation of great music. The best biography was written in 1913, two years after his death; the finest single essay was written in 1939 by the excellent English critic Donald Tovey; and all of the great Mahler conductors are either dead, such as Mengelberg, Furtwangler, and Walter, or, like Klemperer and Horenstein, extremely old. Since we live in a cultural ochlocracy, political beatitude aside, it is little wonder that this great nation should recognize Mahler's genius fifty years after that...
...innovations. Before Sophocles, Antigone was supported in her act by other young maidens; and she was defying, not Creon and his guards, but the corporate decree of the entire Theban Senate. Sophocles had the inspired idea of placing Antigone in glorious isolation; and, as Sir Donald F. Tovey said in a quite different context, "Nothing in human life and history is much more thrilling or of more ancient and universal experience than the antithesis of the individual and the crowd." It was Sophocles, too, who had Antigone affianced to Creon's son Haemon. Other changes, too, were rung in antiquity...
Brahms' Symphony No. 3 in F, Donald Francis Tovey has demonstrated, is not only the composer's most romantic and picturesque work, but also his most technically challenging one. That the HRO even attempted to play the piece shows to my mind considerable bravura; that they also performed it--and performed it well--is really quite phenomenal...
Bach's Magnificat in D, for Tovey, his "most comprehensively representative work," has proved itself an arduous undertaking for almost every choral group. Bach himself conceived the Song of the Virgin as an intricately subtle and profoundly joyous cantata, and he wrote for it instrumental parts that are as demanding as they are various and voice parts that combine a considerable amount of colortura with an unusually high tessitura. Under Elliot Forbe's direction, most of the intricacies were blurred, and the joy appeared in frequent flashes...
...music between 1685 and 1759 were annihilated except the work of Bach and Handel, the ordinary music lover would miss nothing." So wrote Edinburgh University's famed Musicologist Sir Donald Francis Tovey before World War II. and at the time many a music lover would have agreed. The baroque music of the late 17th and early 18th centuries appealed only to a few long-hair devotees, and it was the rare chamber music group that included works of Italian baroque composers...