Word: keyboard
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From his home in Bronxville, N.Y., Jerome Kern would call up Hammerstein in Great Neck, L.I.; then he would set the phone on his piano and bang away at the keyboard while the greatest American operetta grew along the wires, as Oscar picked out the pure Kern from the blip-blap-bleep of the Bell System, and made preliminary notes for such Showboat masterpieces...
...that Dirk Bogarde, who plays the 19th century pianist-composer, has learned to waggle his fingers in convincing imitation of a virtuoso in full cadenza. The innovation is not negligible; it eliminates that hoary sham in which the cameraman shoots from behind the piano while the actor at the keyboard moves his arms up and down as if he were washing a pair of socks...
When he won the Leventritt Award last fall, Pianist Malcolm Frager, 24, was hailed as one of the most promising keyboard talents to turn up in many a year. The son of a St. Louis stocking manufacturer, Frager started playing the piano at four, was giving recitals when he was six, has appeared with most front-rank U.S. orchestras. Last week, against a field of twelve finalists, Frager walked off with the $3,000 first prize in Belgium's Queen Elisabeth Concours, becoming the first instrumentalist to win the two toughest competitions in music...
...most Soviet artists, he is also an ardent champion of moderns. He generally insists on playing only one composer at each concert, explains: "Chopin after Beethoven is like watercolors after oil painting.'' At 46, Richter still gives some 120 concerts a season in Russia, labors at the keyboard for as long as ten hours at a stretch, and has been known to sit down for a three-hour practice session immediately after a concert...
...winter, according to Paepcke, could be the time for sport; but the summer was to be reserved for artists and intellectuals. The procession that came was impressive-birdlike Igor Stravinsky, rehearsing his Firebird in jeans he insisted on calling "pantaloons"; the leonine head of Albert Schweitzer bowed over a keyboard; ebullient Mortimer Adler conducting a rapid-fire philosophical discussion while sweating in a sauna (Finnish bath). "The Aspen idea," said Paepcke, "is the cross-fertilization of men's minds...