Word: virtuoso
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...grim little line of musical specialists: the one-armed pianists. Pieces for one hand used to be merely pleasant musical oddities, but forsome pianists they became necessities. In World War I a Viennese pianist named Paul Wittgenstein lost his right arm, but stubbornly refused to abandon his virtuoso career. He commissioned and performed Ravel's Concerto for Left Hand, two works by Richard Strauss, and Benjamin Britten's Diversions on a Theme. Wittgenstein (now 68 and a teacher in Manhattan) also commissioned-but never understood or played-the Prokofiev concerto that was premièred last week...
...longer seemed aggressively modern, as it had to Wittgenstein, but more like an old friend. The whole piece is sprayed with crotchety harmonies, but it always makes the kind of leeway towards a safe harmonic port that is part of Prokofiev's charm. The solo part is no virtuoso standout, contains no smashing chords; it is a kind of foreground commentary on the music as it unreels. But Pianist Rapp played it lovingly and expertly. "Right after the war, with so many disabled veterans around, I found genuine sympathy among audiences," he says. "Today it has become much more...
...poor man's French horn. It sounded wild and slightly clumsy, as indeed this instrument should, but it did swing after a fashion; it smeared its way up into the attic, noodled around insinuatingly in its middle register, and grunted low down. Then, when it seemed as if Virtuoso Elliott had done everything, he picked up a vibraphone stick in one hand and the mellophone in the other and played the tune on both simultaneously...
...final work, Rameau's third Concert en trio, Brown fittingly used a wooden cross flute actually owned by Johann Quantz, the greatest Baroque flute virtuoso, and lent by the Boston Fine Arts Museum from its Mason Collection of Instruments. Its tone is uniquely mellow and velvety, and well points up the fact that in the arts there is no progress, but only change. No gain is made without an equal loss...
...trick of sharply contrasting light and shadow, to make light itself the most dramatic element in the picture. Rembrandt's painting, Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem, done when the artist was only 24, already shows both Rembrandt's love of Biblical subjects and the virtuoso control of light that gives his oils the intensity of molten gold...