Word: violine
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...violin is Yehudi Menuhin's first concern, but not his only one. The 63-year-old virtuoso is an outspoken opponent of energy waste and pollution: to help eliminate both, he is currently test-riding a battery-powered bicycle. Meanwhile at the 31st Frankfurt Book Fair last week, Menuhin received the booksellers' peace prize of $14,000 as "a man who understands music as a medium for peace." Using the medium as a measure of his appreciation, Menuhin rewarded his audience with the chaconne from Bach's Partita in D Minor...
...minds on bills and backaches rather than on Telemann partitas. With no investment in a ticket, they find it easiest to review a performance with their feet: they keep on walking. Hence a by-God spontaneous response is the street musicians' sweetest reward. A Seattle group called Brandywine (violin, hammer dulcimer, guitar, bass) will always cherish the moment during the Fat Tuesday celebration when its galloping rendition of the William Tell Overture so inflamed a woman bystander that she bounded up onto a horse behind a mounted policeman. Hi-ho, Rossini...
Krzysztof Penderecki: Violin Concerto (Isaac Stern, Minnesota Orchestra, Stanislaw Skrowaczewski conductor, Columbia). Stern could easily coast along on the war horses of the repertory, so more power to him for continuing to stretch himself in challenging new works. This somber single-movement piece, composed for him in 1976, is less abstract, more late Romantic, than the experiments in shifting sonorities that made Penderecki's name in the 1960s. Over brooding drumbeats and pedal tones, Stern gets a virtuoso workout in involuted runs and dissonant double-and triple-stops. But what stays in the mind is the sustained, eerie high...
Bach: Six Sonatas for Clavier and Violin (Violinist Henryk Szeryng, Harpsichordist Helmut Walcha, Philips; 2 LPs). Several virtuosos have recorded these crystallizations of the baroque sonata style (Oistrakh, Menuhin, Laredo), but none can beat the suave brilliance of this set. Szeryng plays with an impassioned aristocrat's clarity, grace and brio. Walcha, a virtuoso in his own right, is appropriately brought to the fore by Philips' bright tonal presence...
...young citizens carry portable radios. The conspirator Cinna comes in from the rainstorm with a wet umbrella; he carries a businessman's attache case, which when opened turns out to contain knives for the murder (one recalls the old-time gangsters who used to conceal machine guns inside violin cases). The conspirators wear three-piece business suits. The conspiracy is hatched in a cocktail lounge; Artemidorus, the rhetoric teacher, who will try to warn Caesar of the plot, has become a journalist who eavesdrops and takes notes in a reporter's pad. The Soothsayer is a blind man hawking copies...