Word: keyboard
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Vladimir Ashkenazy Plays Rachmaninoff, Liszt, Prokofiev (Angel). Russia's newest cultural export plays with ice-edged articulation and singing tone. The 21 -year-old pianist is at his best in Rachmaninoff's Variations on a Theme of Corelli, in which the keyboard sound swells and fades with the fitful ease of sunlight playing across water...
...chord" piano whose keys are numbered (for the melody) as well as aligned with lights above the keyboard (for the chords). Special scores, without musical notation, consist merely of numbers and colored dots; the player presses the keys in accordance with the dots and numbers, and the result is music, at least theoretically. Anybody, the company claims, can play at once after a single reading of the instruction book. Price...
...yellow hair, might suggest a choir boy-which he has been. He is exuberantly gregarious, unsophisticated and, on the surface at least, totally untempera-mental. Former Cincinnati Symphony Conductor Thor Johnson recalls that once, in an orchestral tutti during the rehearsal of a concerto, Van rose from the keyboard and walked out. "I called a halt to the music," says Johnson, "and wondered what we could have done to upset the kid." Just then Van looked back over his shoulder from the wings and drawled: "Go right ahead. Ah'm just goin' to the slot machine...
Exaltation. The Russians dote on the image of agonized exaltation that Van presents at the keyboard. He usually stares before him, his head tilted back at a 45-degree angle, his body leaning far back from the keys. In lyric passages he shakes his head from side to side in a kind of slow frenzy at the grip of the music upon him. In the more fiery passages he crouches close over the keys, his face scowling, his elbows jutting far behind him, like the legs of a praying mantis. When the orchestra is playing alone, he eyes the conductor...
...terms of the award, Van made his debut with the New York Philharmonic and four other major orchestras. Raved Louis Biancolli of the New York World-Telegram & Sun: "This is one of the most genuine and refreshing keyboard talents to come out of the West-or anywhere else-in a long time." In his first post-Leventritt season (1955-56) Van played 30 concerts, appeared with such major orchestras as the Cleveland, the Buffalo Philharmonic, the Denver Symphony and the Detroit Symphony...