Word: violine
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Beyond the footlights of the concert stage he cavorted like the devil, but oh how Nicolo Paganini could play. Considered the greatest violinist who ever lived, he was electrifying as he hunched his skeletal frame and hawklike features over his magnificent violin, crafted by Giuseppe Guarneri in 1742. "Perpetually conserved" in Italy by the city of Genoa, according to Paganini's will, the prized Guarneri, insured for $800,000, crossed the Atlantic last week, and in the skilled hands of Neapolitan Virtuoso Salvatore Accardo, 40, made its U.S. debut at New York City's Carnegie Hall. "I have...
...usually more intent on dealing in wheat, poultry and oil than nurturing opera singers. Her father, a Pentecostal minister, played a number of instruments by ear, and her mother, a nurse, was also a pianist. Leona inherited their musical gifts, singing in the church choir and dabbling with the violin. As a senior in high school, she once learned an aria from Aida by rote, since she could not read music. To please a teacher, she auditioned for the music department at Oklahoma City University; to her astonishment, she was offered a full scholarship. In those days, she recalls...
...benefit from having its plot laid bare. The author's gift is an ability to convey emotional clarity in simple prose that transforms incongruities into sharp visual impressions. Snowy woods are both Christmas cards and killing grounds; the château is fortress and cultural repository. A violin liberated from beneath the rafters becomes part of an unusual still life when it is casually set against a box of hand grenades...
...tells of an adventure he had in 1960, when he was twelve; he and three friends set out to discover the body of a boy who has been reported missing from a neighboring town in southwestern Maine. He gives his story a sound track at appropriate moments: "Scary violin music started to play in my head." He is crossing a railroad bridge over a river when a train materializes: "The freight's electric horn suddenly spanked the air into a hundred pieces with one long loud blast, making everything you ever saw in a movie or a comicbook...
Rochberg has since refined his neo-tonal style in such works as the String Quartets Nos. 4, 5 and 6, known collectively as the "Concord" Quartets after the ensemble for which they were written, and the Violin Concerto, premiered by Isaac Stern. But his most ambitious rapprochement with the past has come not in instrumental music but in opera. The Confidence Man, with a libretto by Gene Rochberg based on Herman Melville's bleak, cynical novel, is currently on display at the Santa Fe Opera in New Mexico...