Word: virtuoso
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Mozart: Sonata in B Flat, K. 570 (Ralph Kirkpatrick, pianist; Bartok). A virtuoso performance on a reconstructed 18th century piano. Kirkpatrick coaxes fine-grained inflections out of the instrument's wiry pianissimos, makes its loud notes sound almost like those of a solid modern piano...
John Krizna's sharpness made the Mazurka one of the evening's high-points. Usually a fine virtuoso, Krizna is too flashy to be a good supporting partner. Yet his Drummer divertissement in the Graduation Ball was a disappointment--probably because he had to twirl drum sticks as well as execute some complicated steps. The ballet itself was unusually gay and frivolous due to the excellence of the cast. Throughout the entire performance, they projected themselves well and always danced as a group...
Italian Novelist Alberto Moravia is a virtuoso who makes each of his books an experiment in a different literary manner. In The Woman of Rome, it was gritty realism; in The Conformist, political allegory; in Conjugal Love, a fine-threaded analysis of human passion. An earlier Moravia novel now published in the U.S. for the first time, The Fancy Dress Party, shows him in still another manner; it seems a deliberate attempt to recreate that gay mixture of political satire and opera bouffe which make Stendhal's Charterhouse of Parma a masterpiece...
...Knows the Score? The professor of 50 years ago, said Wood, was "a versatile soloist of the clinic." His successor today is far different: "No longer a virtuoso, he has become the conductor of an orchestra composed of experts in an ever-increasing number of sub-specialities . . . He displays the talents of his various experts by allowing them in turn to carry the melody...
...most mercifully be described as undistinguished. Not only was the technique (especially of violist Joseph Schaaf) inadequate, but also the conception of the music seemed stilted. Instead of employing the straightforward, relaxed interpretation that the work calls for, the ensemble tried to make it sound like a Nineteenth Century virtuoso piece. They failed...