Word: violining
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...down his fiddle and picked up the baton to conduct the orchestral accompaniment, Conductor Enesco laid down his baton and picked up a fiddle to play the solo. Carnegie Hall's audience and the critical pundits found his fiddling in Bach's Concerto in A Minor for Violin and String Orchestra the last word in intelligent interpretation. Composer Enesco will again play a double part on next week's Philharmonic programs when he conducts his own Rumanian Rhapsody...
Born in Rumania, Enesco studied composition, piano, organ, cello, violin in Vienna, became a violinist in a Viennese Symphony Orchestra. Later he went to Paris, entered the Paris Conservatoire, studied more composition, more violin, composed extensively and had his compositions widely performed. Today, at the age of 56, Enesco is almost as familiar a figure to the Parisians and the Viennese as to the Rumanians, who regard him as their musical patron saint...
...Heure Espagnole and his descriptive orchestral works Bolero, Alborada del Gracioso and Rhapsodic Espagnole are built up of Spanish idioms; his La Valse has a Viennese, his Le Tombeau de Couperin an early 18th-Century flavor. A movement in Ma Mere I'Oye reflects Oriental idioms; a violin sonata is based on American "blues." Though a brilliant orchestrator and a resourceful stylist, he was not a great originator...
Antonio Stradivari, whose life work today represents an estimated value of about $13,000,000, was the finest violin maker in 17th and 18th-Century Cremona (Italy), which was the violin-making capital of the world. He married twice, produced eleven children, waxed wealthy enough to buy wife No. 1 a splendid funeral, lived to be 93, and kept on making finer & finer violins up to the year of his death. Contemporaries described him as a long, spare figure of a man who spent virtually all of his waking hours at a workbench littered with the tools of his craft...
...Violin makers, even chemists and acoustical engineers, have taken Stradivari's instruments apart to see what makes them so good. One theory is that the unusually lustrous and transparent varnish Stradivari used had something to do with the Strad tone. But Antonio Stradivari's secret, like his grave, is still undiscovered. Where those bones are today, and what makes a Strad a Strad, nobody knows...