Word: violine
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...when your hands are wobbling, but when your feet start wobbling, too . . ." On that nervous note, the teen-age Bolivian violinist walked onto the stage of the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels to play before the world's toughest violin jury* in the finals of the famed Queen Elisabeth of Belgium International Music Competition. With his boyishly chubby face creased in an intent frown, he fiddled his way through the Sibelius Concerto in D Minor, Bartok's Rumanian Dances, and Darius Milhaud's Royal Concerto. Two days later, the world's most prestigious violin prize...
Sadly enough, George Stevens' movie version of The Diary of Anne Frank is not up to the play. Perhaps he watered down the original impact to let sleeping animosities lie. But whatever his reasons for saccharine-coating the pill, (with tender smiles, violin music and so forth), Stevens turned out a slightly flabby film...
...premiere of his Sonata for Piano; Brooklyn College's Josef Alexander offered his Songs for Eve; Hall Overton, composition teacher, presented his String Quartet. To round it off and set a frame of reference, Princeton's well-known Composer Roger Sessions was there with his Sonata for Violin...
...with the Questions. Predictably, Sessions' piece was the most substantial -a difficult "and blazing work, brilliantly played by Violinist Polikoff himself. By contrast, Alexander's Songs for Eve was a plodding and undramatic vocal presentation of texts by Archibald MacLeish around which four accompanying instruments (violin, cello, English horn, harp) weave contrasting sonorities in a striking instrumental texture. Calabro's Sonata and Overton's Quartet were both professional jobs, but more interesting in their smoothly machined parts than in their bland conclusions...
Even the greatly reduced string ensemble in Bach's C-minor concerto (no. 1) for violin and oboe often failed to express the grace and flexibility in this lovely music. The soloists were the winners of the orchestra's concerto contest: John Austin played a rather discreet fiddle, which was occasionally overwhelmed by the powerful oboe playing of Carl Schlaikjer; nevertheless both parts were very well done. The other competition winned was E. S. Stewart, whose Variations on a Melody won the contest for undergraduate compositions...