Word: violinistic
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Joseph Stalin, it appeared (not dialectics), was really calling the pitch in Soviet music. New York Herald Tribune Musicritic Virgil Thomson quoted an ex-violinist of the Moscow State Symphony: "Anyone acquainted with the . . . 'musical mixed salad' . . . tastes of Stalin will recognize a remarkable similarity between his personal predilections and the officially sponsored concepts." What was it like to play for the boss? "If he likes a performance, he smiles . . . When a performance does not please him, [he] turns his back . . . There can be no greater blow...
...string quartet was without a name, and about to disband. Its leader, First Violinist Jacques Gordon, had been ordered by his doctor to retire. Then Mrs. Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, the nation's No. 1 patroness of music, came to the rescue. She put up money for enough additional concerts to make the quartet's summer season possible. For one of the few times in her life, Mrs. Coolidge then asked a sentimental favor in return: would the quartet please call itself the Berkshire Quartet? It was the name which Mrs. Coolidge had given to the first string quartet...
...stadium concerts, she got too close to the mike, which turned her tone into a shrill whine. But midway through Tchaikovsky's Concerto in D, audience and critics alike knew they were listening to as powerful and fiery fiddling as they had heard all season. They let famed Violinist Erica Morini know...
...past, most critics have reached into the most convenient pigeonhole to describe Erica Morini: "The greatest woman violinist . . ." Others could excuse her sex but not forget it: "A great violinist-regardless of sex." But now, after 20 years of hearing her play, most were willing to take Erica as she wants to be taken-as a fiddler...
...resigned to it. One of the first times she played in public, for Austria's Emperor Karl, the Emperor was agreeably surprised-not because she was a girl, but because she was only eight. He gave her a doll. The first time she was tagged as a "woman violinist," she says, was in the U.S. Now, at 40, Erica says, "I hate that label. It's obvious I'm a woman, but what does that have to do with it?" She is well aware that few women have made their mark in the arts, and that they...