Word: violinist
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...critics ever earned their bite as honestly as Sargeant. A child prodigy, he conducted a symphony orchestra at age ten, later spent six years as a violinist and horn player with several orchestras under a succession of conductors: Walter Damrosch, Willem Mengelberg, Wilhelm Furtwangler, Arturo Toscanini, Otto Klemperer, Bruno Walter and Clemens Krauss. Sargeant also composed music for modern dance groups and orchestrated Broadway shows, turned to critical writing at the Brooklyn Eagle, TIME, LIFE, and, in 1949, The New Yorker. Last week, at 68, Sargeant announced that at this season's end he will give up his aisle...
Nicolo Paganini could. According to 19th century writers, Paganini was the greatest violinist who ever lived. His fingers were like steel snakes, his bow arm a saber that sawed through unheard-of technical difficulties. During one performance, swore a Viennese listener, old Lucifer himself appeared beside Paganini, guiding his fingers. His lustrous tone sounded uncannily like the human voice-and no wonder, declared some darkly, for Paganini made his own strings out of human intestines...
...quartets, variations and five full-scale violin concertos. The pieces hardly challenged Beethoven's, but they were competently constructed crowd pleasers that bristled with the kind of technical bravura in which Paganini gloried-vertiginous runs and arpeggios, contrapuntal double and even triple stops, a fuller range than any violinist had ever attempted of harmonic overtones (the higher-pitched vibrations of given notes, produced by depressing the strings only slightly...
Jetting to Hell. When Paganini died in 1840, many of these compositions -including the third violin concerto -were tucked away in a bank vault in Milan under the care of the violinist's heirs. Other violinists have been trying to get at them ever since. By last year, all the concertos except the third had been released. It was still held by the Paganini family. Last Christmas, Philips Records, aided by Violinist Henryk Szeryng, finally obtained it after ten years of delicate negotiations...
Last month, at the international music congress in Moscow, U.S. Violinist Yehudi Menuhin voiced a daring wish. "May we yet live to see the day," said Menuhin. "when every human being can dwell where his heart calls, whatever his creed." That is no more than is guaranteed under Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, of which the Soviet Union is a signatory. But it is more than Moscow dares grant its citizens, and so not a word of Menuhin's speech was printed in the Soviet press...