Word: pianissimo
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...were there on the podium. When the concert was done, the audience broke into an ovation that Toscanini himself had not often heard. Explained a bass player: "We learned from Toscanini to honor the will of the composer. We simply paid closer attention to the score. When it said pianissimo, we played pianissimo...
...into the phrase again, leaning toward her, hugging his own shoulders, swaying in sorrow. When finally the recording began, Nelli's voice rang through the hall with all the tone and feeling that Toscanini cajoled from her. When the aria came to an end with a final, tense pianissimo, the maestro dropped his hands and the string section rapped their bows on the music racks. Everybody laughed in relief and pleasure. Toscanini himself stepped off the podium and gave Soprano Nelli an affectionate whack on the rump. She turned and threw her arms around him, buried her head...
...number was the opera's famed Casta Diva (Stainless Goddess), which, while not Norma's most difficult number, is hardly a piece to warm up on. She threaded her way carefully but spiritedly through the opera's complicated cadenzas with a generous use of her pearly pianissimo, came dramatically and vocally into her own in the second and third acts and at the end, despite signs of weariness (she began to sing sharp), won a personal ovation. Most thrilling moments: her soaring duets with Mezzo-Soprano Fedora Barbieri...
Composer Monteverdi's Vespers and Magnificat, which includes ten of his 70-odd sacred works, begins with a stately blaring of trumpets and trombones, suddenly quiets to let a Latin choral pianissimo float sweetly through the air. In the movements that follow, Monteverdi sings the praises of God; sometimes, as in excerpts from the Song of Songs, with a distinctly earthy flavor; sometimes with a powerful, jagged emphasis; often, in the vocal solos and duets, with highly ornamental flights of fancy; always with a markedly modern feeling for the accents of individual words. The performance, by the 150-voice...
...Florida's string sections had strength and clarity, its winds played with ease and flexibility. The full 75-piece orchestra could build to a battering climax and-often a lot more difficult-hush to a whispering pianissimo. The program was conventional, except for one of Brazilian Composer Villa-Lobos' torrid Bachianas Brasileiras. But the playing was of the caliber that makes such big-name performers as Helen Traubel, Yehudi Menuhin and Artur Rubinstein, recent soloists with the Florida, glad to return for more...