Word: virtuosos
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Taylor himself does not claim to have discovered a masterpiece. "It's not Hamlet," he says. "It's a kind of virtuoso piece, a kind of early Mozart piece." Early Salieri would be more like it, but Taylor, who wears an earring rather like the one in Shakespeare's portrait, is learning quickly that all the scholarly world's a stage and all the scholars merely players. "I've always regarded this hoo-ha as slightly absurd," he says, "and once it is over, I shall go back to being as ordinary as dirt." --By Otto Friedrich. Reported by Steven...
...COVER: Virtuoso Vladimir Horowitz returns in triumph to his homeland 56 "I had to go back to Russia before I died," explains the 81-year-old pianist, and in a spellbinding performance shown on TV in the West, he infuses his playing with a fire and precision not heard in years. It is a journey that stirs memories even as it writes a coda to his extraordinary life. The visit helps begin a dazzling set of cultural exchanges. See MUSIC...
...Brelis, reporting Horowitz's triumphant and poignant return to Moscow capped 20 hours of interviews and conversation with the virtuoso and his wife Wanda. It was by far the longest stretch of time Horowitz has ever agreed to spend with a journalist. "I usually cover wars, politics and disasters," says Brelis, "so this was a very different kind of assignment. Horowitz was pleased that I was not a musician. 'We can discuss politics,' he said. And we did. He has a remarkable, nimble mind. The hours with him and Wanda were like reliving not only the history of music...
...doing it his way," says Horowitz. "On the first night, Beecham came in second." The pianist finished several bars ahead of the orchestra. The audience erupted in a frenzy. In the New York Times, Music Critic Olin Downes captured the intensity of the moment. "A whirlwind of virtuoso interpretation," he wrote, adding, "Mr. Horowitz has amazing technique, amazing strength, irresistible youth and temperament." At the next performance, Beecham got a measure of revenge, cutting short the ovation with a short speech while Horowitz cooled his heels...
Watercolor is tricky stuff, an amateur's but really a virtuoso's medium. It is the most light-filled of all ways of painting, but its luminosity depends on the white of the paper shining through thin washes of pigment. One has to work from light to dark, not (as with oils) from dark to light. It is hospitable to accident (Homer's seas, skies and Adirondack hills are full of chance blots and free mergings of color) but disaster-prone as well. One slip, and the veil of atmosphere turns into a mud puddle, a garish swamp. The stuff...