Word: virtuoso
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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While preparing for a concert series at Los Angeles' Pilgrimage Theater, aging (60) but unbowed Violin Virtuoso Jascha Heifetz commented bitingly to the press on his seeming lack of interest in modern compositions. "Yes, I play them occasionally," said he. "And for two reasons. First, to discourage the composers from writing any more, and secondly, to remind myself how much I appreciate Beethoven...
...dance season; the usually reserved audience stopped the show with applause twice in the first act. Less concerned with literary plot than most Western versions, the Kirov Swan Lake offered superb dancing executed at unusually slow tempi. Star of the evening was Inna Zubkovskaya, who put on such a virtuoso display that the audience scarcely noticed that the company omitted the thirty-two fouettés that are a feature of the third act in most performances. With Zubkovskaya. Irina Kolpakova, who danced Princess Aurora in Sleeping Beauty, and Danseur Noble Vladilen Semenov, the company proved that it has lead...
...Eaton, for instance, favors dissonant jumps from one end of the keyboard to the other, violently plucks at the piano's innards to get a harp effect. Smith has developed a technique of aiming his clarinet directly at the piano strings to create weird and ghostly harmonics. A virtuoso on his instrument. Smith also likes to push his clarinet above top C or to engage in a series of strangely manipulated double and triple stoppings. The piece most startling to audiences is a concoction by Smith in which he improvises against a background tape recording of an electronically scrambled...
...pickin' scruggs." This technique, which moved one astigmatic observer to compare Scruggs's achievement on the banjo to Paganini's on the violin, involves a clawlike motion with thumb and two fingers that serves to transform the banjo player from a plunk-plunking accompanist into a virtuoso soloist. Nobody has heard anything to equal it, says one folk expert, since the glorious days of Fisher Hendley and his Aristocratic Pigs, famed hillbillies of the early...
...style. On the other hand, dry, clear weather of the kind that prevailed the evening he played with the Boston Symphony in Carnegie Hall last week is just what Janis needs. With the temperature in the 405, the moon radiant and the barometer steady, Janis played with feeling and virtuoso flair through Liszt's Piano Concertos Nos. 1 and 2. His piano sound positively glittered...