Word: virtuoso
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...Joseph Szigeti (Columbia, 6 LPs, $23.98). Now 80 and living in Switzerland, Szigeti at his peak was that rare performer fully entitled to be called both a musicians' musician and a violinists' violinist. With Szigeti, the usual egoistic trappings of the virtuoso life took second place to a kind of earthy piety based on prodigious musical insight and a troth-like pledge between him and the composer. Here are some of his finest concerto recordings-notably the Brahms with Hamilton Harty (1928), the Beethoven with Bruno Walter (1932), the Prokofiev First, Mozart Fourth and the Mendelssohn with...
...Korngold (National Philharmonic Orchestra of London, Charles Gerhardt conducting; RCA, $5.98). In the days when almost everyone loved Hollywood for its epic swashbucklers, almost everyone in Hollywood loved Erich Wolfgang Korngold for his epic, swashbuckling film scores. Starting in 1935 with Captain Blood, Korngold pretty much set the pattern-virtuoso tone poems that reinforced character with melodic motif, heightened situation with orchestral effect and commented relentlessly on just about everything taking place on screen. Such gems as The Constant Nymph, Kings Row, Juarez, Anthony Adverse and The Sea Hawk followed...
...recorder virtuoso Frans Brueggen tells his Harvard music seminar, the only workable solution to these difficulties is: go Baroque. Abandon your arid twentieth-century musicology as well as your heroic nineteenth-century slush, and look upon this music with the relative simplicity of a Baroque composer-performer. Obviously easier said than done; but Monday evening both Brueggen and eminent harpsichordist Gustav Leonhardt succeeded admirably in this life-giving approach to the music of a lost tradition...
...throated incantations. As it turns out, Dr. John comes from New Orleans, and his latest ATCO LP, Gumbo, is a personal nostalgia trip, a rollicking pastiche of voodoo, rumba, Dixieland and good old Mardi Gras stomp. If his high skill shows the inventive, assimilative style of a virtuoso studio musician, it is because Dr. John used to be just that under his real name, Mac Rebennack...
...This is the story of a city, a portrait of Rome," Fellini's voice instructs as the credits flash by, "a mixture of strange, contradictory images." If only it were. There are two sequences that are virtuoso feats even by Fellini's elaborate standards: a weird, bloody and cacophonous entrance into a rainy nighttime Rome along a crowded highway, and a boisterous, affectionate re-creation of a night in a music hall during World War II, the audience far more vigorous and creative than the amateur talent passing in review. Fellini is at his best here, which makes...