Word: virtuoso
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Back in Bean's Bag (Coleman Hawkins, Clark Terry; Columbia) was intended as an epochal encounter between Hawkins' tenor sax and Terry's virtuoso trumpet. Then something went wrong; the true soloist turns out to be Tommy Flanagan on piano. During Hawk's flights of fancy, a wildly distorted recording balance hides the horn behind the accompaniment...
Valenti's reluctance to play Manhattan recitals is his own mystery-he is a complex virtuoso who talks of feeling unready, being too busy, hurting his hand in Spain some years ago. But when he does play, it is invariably a triumph-both for Valenti and for the friends who have pushed him into it. Friends even help finance his career; the $6,000 instrument he plays is a gift from a twelve-man fan club called "The Friends of Valenti...
...would become a public trust. He labored quietly over his compositions, as first Guggenheim, then Copley, then Fulbright supported him. He wrote a symphony and some chamber music, but the peak of his abstraction came in 1958, when he spent eight months writing a violin concerto. Lacking a virtuoso to play it, he stuffed it away in a steamer trunk...
...Toccata," on paper, looks like a five-finger exercise. Schumann wrote it when he still hoped to be a virtuoso, and proudly claimed it was one of the most difficult pieces ever written for piano. Horowitz, of course, reduces the difficulties of a "semi-quaver" to nothing, and brings out the smooth melody. As for "Arabesque," I heard it for the first time, and wished it were recorded more often. My delight was only slightly lessened when I read the record jacket, which said the piece contained two imaginary characters--the bold Florestan and the tender Eusebius--who represented...
Certifiably Sinful. A versifying virtuoso, Swinburne molded English into exotic patterns, borrowing widely from the classic Greek to the French symbolists. The results, which ranged from strum-strumming stanzas to languorous rhythms, hinted at unimaginable pagan debaucheries, hymned the fashionable cause of freedom against tyranny. But constitutionally, though he sported a manelike shock of red hair, Swinburne was comically ill-equipped to live the Byronic life he longed for. Tadpole tall and squeaky-voiced, he was forever getting drunk on the dessert wine, and more often than not had to be carried home from dinner parties...