Word: virtuosos
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...distinctive, Olympian style. His huge stevedore's hands address the keys with the utmost confidence, and though the wrong notes sometimes fall thick and fast, there is never any question of who is in command -- or what the point of the performance really is. Richter has never been a virtuoso on the order of Vladimir Horowitz or Lazar Berman, a later Soviet firebrand with a crackling technique and not much else. Instead, he is a musician first and a pianist second. Hearing him play, one has the sense that if he could, he would communicate his message by telepathy, directly...
...Donald Rumsfeld, Gerald Ford's Secretary of Defense; and Congresswoman Pat Schroeder was an undeclared candidate in 1988. Given this pattern of presidential ambition among the '74 selectees, we should not be surprised if Robert Gottlieb, the former editor of the New Yorker, or Saul Steinberg, the onetime greenmail virtuoso, begins showing up at lunch counters in New Hampshire next year, chatting with the citizenry...
With the same close acuity for both detail and the grand sweep of the virtuoso, the film quietly captures these escapist tendencies of Gould, whether in his music or in the private spaces of his life. In one stunningly bizarre scene we see Gould approaching us across the snow-clad tundra. The distance and the alienation of his character from us the audience--humanity--is painful, almost violent. The ice and loneliness of the geography are a fitting metaphor for Gould's life as an artist...
...inability to accomodate and assimilate into the musical world as just another fabulous virtuoso underscores the torture of his life. Paradoxically enough, we see him craving the comforts of friendship and stability just as fiercely as he seeks solitude...
...mother's homey aphorisms ("Choose carefully which works to learn, and never let them go; they will always be your friends") to debating the merits of competing pianists. Even though he was going back on tour, Cliburn seemed if anything less interested in the life of a traveling virtuoso than he had in years past. That is partly owing to his nerves. "I have the same feeling today as the first time I played in public," he said...