Word: keyboard
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Camouflaging his stubborn shyness with a businesslike air, he sat and examined the keyboard closely whenever the New York Philharmonic-Symphony played without him. As his entrances approached, he grew tense, and his body began to sway and jerk to the rhythm. But there was nothing jerky about his playing. From his crashing fanfares to his softly rippling passagework, his performance had the strength and luster of blue steel. When the music ended, there was a moment of silence before the crowd recovered itself enough to start cheering...
Tatum for Fancies. Such mastery of the keyboard did not come easily to Oscar Peterson. His father, a music-loving porter on the Canadian Pacific Railway, sat him on a piano stool when he was five and told him to start practicing. From then on, whenever Papa Peterson left on his railroad trips, he laid out practice schedules. If the practicing was not done on his return, Oscar "caught hell." Oscar began to get professional engagements in his mid-teens, but his father never let applause and paychecks go to his son's head: "You're not going...
Peterson found his own style only after studying others'. His first hero was Teddy Powell. Then he focused on Nat "King" Cole. Eventually, in 1939, he heard Art Tatum, the man Oscar calls "the greatest living instrumentalist of them all." Tatum's flying keyboard fancies knocked the budding Peterson completely off balance: "I couldn't play a note after hearing Art that first time. I gave up the piano for three weeks...
...distraction. "I'm fascinated by it,"he says. With a leave of absence from his chores at Tanglewood promised for this summer, he thinks he may go back to Europe and write a "real big opera." He is quite sure he could resist the distraction of podium and keyboard, , if only because it is harder to,,make flying trips now that the Bernstein menage includes wife, child and governess. The only trouble is, he says, "when you're conducting, you itch to compose, and when you're composing, you itch to conduct...
Zabaleta rippled out a notable program anyhow. Instead of the usual keyboard music arranged for the harp, he played nothing that was not written specifically for his instrument. Instead of misty sound effects and undulating glissandos that have become a trademark of harp performances, he played clean-cut melody and counterpoint. High point: Hindemith's Sonata (1939), with its ear-twisting harmonies and Celtic echoes...