Word: violin
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...famed for "the Philadelphia sound." What exactly is that? Very simple, says Ormandy: "It's me! My sound is what it is because I was a violinist. Toscanini was always playing the cello when he conducted, Koussevitzky the double bass, Stokowski the organ." Ormandy plays one big lush violin. His music is coated with the satiny sheen of wall-to-wall strings, a sound that readily lends itself to the works of the romantics-Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Ravel, Debussy, Brahms...
...native Budapest. Father was a dentist who was determined that his son should be a great violinist. So while he drilled away on patients' teeth in the front room, he kept an ear cocked to be sure that young Jeno (Hungarian for Eugene) was grinding away on his violin in the rear. "I hit on the idea of memorizing the music," explains Ormandy, "so that I could read novels as I practiced. It came easy and has been ever since...
...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 and brightly. The most striking performance, however, is the two Hungarians' demonic, clangorous attack on Bartok's own fierce and fantastic Second Sonata...
BEETHOVEN: THE COMPLETE VIOLIN AND PIANO SONATAS (4 LPs; Columbia). Released separately over the past few years, these performances by Violinist Zino Francescatti and Pianist Robert Casadesus are now complete. The earlier sonatas are especially fine, for the French artists are marvelously attuned to the lyricism, elfin wit, and inventive refinements of the young Beethoven. Other violinists may play the works more romantically (David Oistrakh on Philips) or more brilliantly (Jascha Heifetz on RCA Victor), but their pianists do not always live up to them, and the understanding partnership of the two virtuosos in the new series is rewarding...
HAYDN: QUARTETS, OPUS 54 (Westminster). The London-based Allegri String Quartet definitively explores three of the "Tost" quartets, all of which are characterized by the predominant role of the first violin, here brilliantly played by Eli Goren. In the C Major he tirelessly weaves a long garland of arpeggios and trills, then plunges into an adagio of exceptional beauty, tracing a hopeful obbligato above a deep-voiced Hungarian lament...