Word: violiniste
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
That, to put it mildly, is something of an exaggeration. A talented Jew can rise to great eminence in Soviet society, as have Violinist David Oistrakh and Ballerina Maya Plisetskaya, but the ordinary Jew is subject to rigid quotas that often bar him from universities and good jobs. Teaching Judaism and Hebrew is illegal; Yiddish culture is severely restricted. In the streets, Russia's traditional anti-Semitism has never really died. "We may not be victims of physical genocide," says Mikhail Zand, a distinguished philologist who recently managed to get out of Russia and settle in Israel...
...Victory overture is when there's musketfire and everybody plays "The Bear Came Over the Mountain." We can just see old Beethoven, deaf as a coffee table, pounding his staff out of tune with the music, having a swell time, and musing over a new piece for that young violinist Kreutzer. Everyone has his bad days. You'll probably want to see The Touch, Ingmar Bergman's first English language motion picture, for yourself: go to an early show with your best friend and a bag of leechee nuts...
...seemed to be music-criticism time in Russia-with special emphasis on the backhanded compliment. U.S. Violinist Yehudi Menuhin, in Moscow for a congress of the International Music Council, said that he thought Soviet music was moving toward a "certain measure of sophistication." It used to be that "only one approach was tolerated," explained Menuhin. "But now they are beginning to see that there may be two or more approaches to anything. That is what I mean by sophistication." Also in Moscow, Russian Poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko commented on the sound of the great Duke Ellington, whose band has been packing...
...accompaniment for Acis was spirited yet discrete. The eight-piece ensemble of flute, two oboes, strings, and harpsichord was led by first-violinist Stanley Ritchie. Except for the "Happy we" chorus which was far too fast, tempi tended to lapse into a tempo ordinario, a common pitfall of Handel's music...
Mary's parents were firmly upper-class. In Venice they forced her to put on white gloves, to act the role of the young aristocrat, and to speak Italian instead of her German dialect. Life with the indulgent poet and the aloof, implacable violinist was made out of what her village parents would consider frivolity. In the village farmhouse there had been only two books: The Life of Christ and The Lives of the Saints. At the center of Pound's villa library in Venice, among all the books in all the many languages, there was huge, wood-bound Ovid...