Word: virtuoso
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...years back the innocuous if slightly disturbing cable TV network made classical music headlines when it began to accompany its scrolling local weather reports with recordings of young violin virtuoso Gil Shaham and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra performing Vivaldi's Four Seasons. Sales for the CD and for classical music in general skyrocketed, and Shaham rose to megastar status on the tide of his impeccable, resonant, almost glowing violin playing. At that time, however, Shaham was already a well-respected figure in the music world, having debuted at the age of 10 with the Jerusalem Symphony, attended Juilliard after graduating...
Ferguson remains jazz's greatest, most charismatic trumpet virtuoso, even at age 70. He can still play arabesques at double-high-C, but he now uses his incredible technique and rich tone more expressively. And at a time when jazz ensembles struggle to survive, his small but versatile big band, Big Bop Nouveau, now in its ninth year, plays nearly 200 mostly sold-out gigs annually. Ferguson's stature and nurturing generosity have long attracted talented young musicians, but this exceptional group really cooks with revitalized standards (Just Friends gets a swinging, brassy treatment spiced with a fugue) and exciting...
...club owners passably honest, locking himself in his motel room to go over the accounting ledgers. So now he spent freely to turn his concerts into spectacles, building elaborate stage sets with erupting volcanoes and such. He also tightened up the music and hired the Trinidadian steel-drum virtuoso Robert Greenidge. Eventually he brought in clowns on stilts and a storyteller for the children and sent bands into the parking lot to play for the fans. He launched a newsletter and later a website to sell his merchandise and was among the first stars to land a corporate sponsor, Corona...
...perhaps the most remarkable thing about this passage is that it is not what it would be in a more typical war epic, a virtuoso end in itself. For Spielberg it is something to build on, not build toward, and that says much about his confidence as a filmmaker and the stubborn, instructive earnestness with which he approached Saving Private Ryan. To him, this carnage--his vision of which has moved strong men to run from the screening room and caused the Motion Picture Association of America to give the film an unusual (for the director of E.T. and Raiders...
Sadly, Glimp spent his last three decades squandering his creative energies in a legal battle with Alfred A. Knopf; the artist demanded more royalties, while Knopf contended that he was not Glimp's publisher. At 86, death came peacefully to this proud virtuoso as he slept at the wheel of his sports car and drove into a tree. But wherever there are tiny, neurotic cultists with fruit and incense, Cranford Glimp's art will live...