Word: virtuoso
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Like some Michelangelo who carves peach pits, or a Shakespeare whose medium is the haiku, Harmonica Virtuoso Larry Adler has found that there are grave drawbacks to being the best of a rare breed. His tongue-twisting technique and feathery phrasing have dazzled concert audiences for more than a quarter-century; but purists still dismiss his performances of classical music as gimmickry, akin to playing horn concertos on a length of garden hose. Now and then, such composers as Ralph Vaughan Williams and Darius Milhaud have written pieces for him, but the repertory for harmonica remains woefully thin; most...
Half-Inch Accuracy. Surveyor's virtuoso performance was still to come. Noticing a clod of soil dug out of one of its trenches, the craft closed its claw on the clump, biting off about two cubic inches of soil. Carefully clutching its prize, Surveyor maneuvered it into position and then dropped it on one of its footpads, much like a child dropping a handful of sand on its shoe...
BEETHOVEN: CELLO SONATAS NOS. 3 and 5 (Angel). From the beauty of tone and sensitivity of interpretation, listeners would scarcely suspect that the cellist is only 22, the pianist 27. Jacqueline du Pré, a child prodigy in England and recent student of the Russian virtuoso Mstislav Rostropovitch, handles her cello as gloriously as any master three times her age; Los Angeles-born Stephen Bishop, former student of Myra Hess, makes an impressive partner...
...Last week in Manhattan's Carnegie Hall, Mstislav Rostropovich and the London Symphony Orchestra performed his Variations for Cello and Orchestra, a work that Rostropovich asked him to compose two years ago to enlarge the meager repertory of the cello. "He paid me the compliment-unusual for a virtuoso-of asking me to compose for the instrument and not for the player," says Piston...
...this novel. In Powell's war, only the rotters flourish-notably Kenneth Widmerpool, whose humorless egomania and bounderish one-upmanship have won him critical status as one of the great comic creations of modern English fiction. He is now on the make as a staff major, a virtuoso of bumf, and he chews poor Jenkins' ear in a war of total paper...