Word: violin
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Hungarian, szigeti means "insular." All too often that precisely describes the life of the professional performing musician--no more extensive than the routine of performance. But Joseph Szigeti's life takes in the whole sea of adventure in and out of music. And his treasure ship is the violin...
Despite the commitment to improvisation, both Cage and Christian Wolff do limit the performer's freedom. In his Atlas Eclipticalis Cage lays out alternative paths between groups of notes whose duration and number, though not order, are specified; Wolff, in his Duo for piano and violin, details no paths but indicates specific cues to follow. The performers did not display any of the intense fascination or variation of common patterns which mark jazz and are essential to improvisation in general. Even if the performance of the Cage piece had been good--and it certainly was not--no compelling seriousness would...
This is not to say that the works had no appeal. In the Atlas contact microphones mounted on each instrument added an ominous depth to the sound: melody leaped tantalizingly among sharp, bare rad, violin, generated an awesome tension when notes and percussive punctuation until engulfed by electronic bellowings. A fine performance of the Duo by Wolff at the piano and Anthony Condelicate stabs of sound and momentary eruptions broke the frequent stretches of silence. The style grasped my attention because its bareness provoked a wary expectancy of what would be thrust out next...
...refreshing, then to hear a more disciplined piece: Louis Cohen's Formats, a 12-tone piece for violin, clarinet and piano. It began by shrugging its shoulders, then moved through flippancy and somberness before closing with a final shrug. But unfortunately several sustained unions jarred the style, as did a rasping clarinet and a generally crude performance...
Long the world's highest-paid violinist,* Kreisler was famed for both his astonishing musical memory and his aversion to practice: sometimes he would go a whole summer without touching the violin on the theory that "if I played too frequently, I should rub the bloom off the musical imagination." In the mid-1930s, Kreisler astonished the musical world-and embarrassed critics-by confessing that for years he had been palming off a whole series of his own compositions as the works of such classical composers as Vivaldi, Martini, Couperin, Dittersdorf, Pugnani. Explained Kreisler: "I found it inexpedient...