Word: pizzicato
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...Carnegie Hall for a rehearsal with Conductor-Violinist Alexander ("Sasha") Schneider. "It's not warm enough," said Schneider after a few bars, and he was not referring to Carnegie's central heating. That afternoon, they were all downtown at The New School rehearsing chamber music. "Your pizzicato sounds terribly dry," complained Violinist Felix Galimir to a group in one classroom. In another room Cellist Mischa Schneider (Alexander's brother) exhorted, "Sing, sing, sing...
...Pizzicato passages, stratospheric glissandi, cadenza after cadenza-the balding, blue-eyed violinist tackled each without hesitation and butchered each in turn, always about a quarter-tone off pitch. Eventually, the concertmaster mercifully took the solo play away from the wounded virtuoso. The Aspen, Colo., audience was delighted by the shenanigans. They had, after all, paid as much as $50 to see and hear Jack Benny's violin act which, like his familiar monologues, is a masterpiece of comic tim ing. Benny, 75, and his fiddle have raised well over $5,000,000 at similar benefits, and this one netted...
...music was Michael Friedmann's Leuchten, a "work in progress" for four players. I hope the work progresses considerably because in its present pseudo-Webernian condition it seems unimaginative in the extreme and generally unredeemable. Janice Hamer's String Trio, while stronger, suffers from repetitive alternation between cantilena and pizzicato writing...
...Forms I and a second open-form work called Novara (1962), his long fingers fluttered, his hands twirled, his palms undulated in an assortment of uniquely personal and specific hand signals. Clenched fists brought forth hard, crashing sounds. He touched index finger to thumb to produce tiny streams of pizzicato noises. Occasionally a player would press down a trumpet valve without blowing, and let it go just for the click. Or another would blow through a trombone to achieve a breathy effect. There were prolonged single notes and furious tonal scurryings up and down the scale. Yet the Peabody Contemporary...
After his final pizzicato plink, he walked over to shake hands with the bassists in the orchestra. But Karr the revolutionary was hardly making peace with the old guard. "In ten years, orchestral bassists will really hate me," he says cheerfully, "and I hope they will. It's the only way they'll change...