Word: virtuoso
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...against the greater mass of the orchestra. Pianist Robert Freeman chose another chestnut, Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. This piece, with its viscous melody in the middle, is a musical hodge-podge. It serves mostly as a showpiece for pianists, and Freeman gave it a truly virtuoso performance. He showed a wily mastery of the keyboard that partially hid the banality of the music...
...Kremlin's haste to rewrite Soviet history, another seamy little sequence in the Communist past turned up like a bug under a mattress: a belated charge that Stalin practiced and tolerated antiSemitism. Khrushchev, in his virtuoso weep session, had told party leaders about Stalin's fanatical hatred of Jews in his last days, but so far no public mention had been made of the purge of Jewish intellectuals in the '30s, and the later postwar purge, coinciding with the establishment of Israel, and supposedly due to fear of Zionist influence in Russia and the satellite states...
...Under Glass (Starlite LP). Just about the most virtuoso vocal quartet on records, singing a dozen far-out arrangements of those oldies. Some of the music, e.g., Through the Years, is strictly barbershop, of the brush-cut variety. More, e.g., Birth of the Blues, I'm Beginning to See the Light, has a beguiling touch of lunacy...
This is the first record of a much publicized young man named Glenn Gould. He is a pianist with a fabulous technique, and his playing of Bach is truly virtuoso. Strangely enough, his one weak point is precisely where the piano should have the advantage over the harpsichord, in the ability to "sing" a melody. Gould never succeeds in achieving a cantabile style, but seems like a pianist imitating the sound of a harpsichord. While this record does not displace Ralph Kirkpatrick's superlative harpsichord performance, it is the best piano version of a masterpiece...
Godfrey, CBS television's star ukulele virtuoso, has told Sailstad that he "would be very pleased to be present at the Smoker...