Word: sonata
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...teacher Nadia Boulanger noted, to "see better and hear more than we do." In the present, excellent Angel recording, there are few traces of the deadly strain under which Lipatti played. His Bach Partita No. 1 is as coolly articulated and elegant as a jeweled clock, and his Mozart Sonata No. 8 in A Minor (K. 310) seems the reflection of an absorbed and unruffled musical mind. Only an occasional slurred passage in the Chopin waltzes hints at the ordeal at the keyboard...
Gross did some of his best playing of the afternoon in the next work, Beethoven's Pathetique Sonata. The first movement was crisp and sure, although now and then the tempo wavered; the second was free of the excess of sentiment by which it is so often destroyed; the third was just right...
...precisely this problem of balance that tripped up Bavicchi in his Sonata No. 2 for 'Cello and Piano. When the 'cello was playing on the top string, all was well; but again and again the piano writing totally smothered the less penetrating middle strings. The scherzo was stylistically consistent; but the other three movements were episodic and eclectic, the slow movement even starting with homage to Bloch's 'cello rhapsody Schelomo. Bavicchi anchored the first movement on recurrences of a sustained 'cello note punctuated by sharp jabs on the piano, which functioned like the trombone theme in Sibelius' Seventh Symphony...
England's Piano Sonata, like the Crawford piece, was in two movements, a scheme more composers might well experiment with. England unified each movement through consistent application of one device: the first movement, rather rhapsodic in character, exploited the ornament known as the inverted double mordent; the second, clearly structured, utilized a repeated-note pattern...
...students decided to end the concert with a tribute to their teacher in the form of Professor Piston's own Sonata for Flute and Piano, performed by flutist William Grass and pianist Tan Crone. Piston is one of those rare men who can teach as well through example as through words. This sonata, a relatively early work (1930), showed Piston to be already an impeccable craftsmen. All three movements were skilfully wrought in traditional shapes of almost Mozartean clarity, albeit on a mainly contrapuntal basis. The performance, however, was no more than adequate; Mr. Grass was definitely not "The Incredible...