Word: violine
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...especially, have an impressive, lyrical sound. Even the loudest sections were done musically, sounding solid and intense rather than percussive. And the concluding pianissimo section was sung, breathtakingly well. Unfortunately, the effect was ruined by an awful sound at the very end that turned out to be a sustained violin "harmonic" (a very high note in which the string, instead of being pressed down, is merely touched so that it vibrates in sections). It didn't work. The sound was squeaky, scratchy, and of questionable tonality--so bad that it made my back teeth feel funny...
Anything Handy. Offstage, Ghiaurov behaves like a kind of Bulgarian Jackie Gleason, mugging, joking, erupting into great rumbling gales of ho-ho-ho laugh ter. At parties, given a few drinks, he will invariably perform on any instrument that is handy - flute, clarinet, trombone, piano, harmonica, violin, all of which he learned to play as a child in Bulgaria. Son of a farm hand, he was raised in Velingrad, a mineral-bath resort high in the Rhodope Mountains. As a teenager, Ghiaurov had no interest in singing, gained fame in local circles as an actor and star athlete with...
...Harvard Radcliffe Orchestra baptized itself Friday night in a sensuous swamp--Strauss' Don Juan, Berg's Violin Concerto, and Berlioz' Symphonie Fantastique--and emerged after two hours smelling very sweet...
...sizeable technical problems and to sustain an ardorous abandon as well. Aside from a little fakery in the strings, and a few errors in prominent solo passages, the HRO came significantly close. Yannatos paced the piece convincingly and generally got all the contrasts he was looking for. The violins were most exuberant, accenting the opening theme just right, and the woodwinds--especially the flutes and those juicy clarinets--phrased things well in the many interchanges. It is too bad, then, that several instruments failed at critical moments: the tranquille violin solo going sour, wrong notes spoiling a cello phrase...
Alban Berg's fine scores, expressively terse and textually dense, always pose the initial problem of hearing all that is essential. In the Violin Concerto, this dilemma assumes near-fatal proportions. The solo instrument is integrated into a large Wagnerian orchestra, which it must dominate with music marked mezzo-piano (or softer) seventy-five per cent of the time! Now Berg was no fool; the orchestra's dynamics are determined accordingly. But no orchestra can or will play continually softly, and the HRO proved no exception. The resulting acoustical imbalance seriously challenged the considerable prowess of violinist Charles Castleman...