Word: virtuosos
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...times are changing, and not a moment too soon. "The violin is being looked at again as a great singing instrument," says Virtuoso Isaac Stern, 65. "It is no longer being beaten, plucked, forced and squeezed." Perhaps as a result, the American orchestral scene has lately been a festival of new violin concertos...
...challenging concertos by Stanislaw Skrowaczewski and Richard Wernick. In New York City in February, Elmar Oliveira gave the first performance of a lyrical new work by Hugh Aitken, while in Montreal, Stern contributed the North American premiere of French Composer Henri Dutilleux's impressionistic concerto. The same month Virtuoso Shlomo Mintz played Marc Neikrug's neoromantic concerto for the second time, having presented its world premiere in 1984. And this week Sergiu Luca will give the American premiere of William Bolcom's frisky new concerto in Pittsburgh (he introduced it in 1984 in Saarbrucken, West Germany...
What makes the play memorable, though, is the virtuoso acting of Ben Evett as Ariel and Kerrick Johnson as Caliban, the sorceror Prospero's two slaves. Ariel and Caliban are pivotal figures, representing the opposing realms of Air and Earth that lie at the heart of Shakespeare's thematic dilemma. And in this production, Evett and Johnson can hardly do wrong, expertly treading the line between man and spirit that make these two of Shakespeare's more difficult roles...
...charismatic front man. His piano playing, though inimitable, was hardly virtuoso stuff. But William ("Count") Basie had one supreme gift: he knew how to meld a dozen or more idiosyncratic instrumentalists into a single, pulsing organism with a voice of its own, which was always somehow his voice. The bluesy, stomping bands he led from the mid-1930s until his death in 1984, at age 79, were among the best in jazz history. Not that Basie makes any such claims in Good Morning Blues. On the page as in life, he is a modest man, given to understatement...
LISZT: Sonata in B Minor; Two Legends; The Blessing of God in Solitude. Francois-Rene Duchable, piano (Erato; LP or CD). Franz Liszt, the archetypal piano virtuoso, wrote only one sonata for his instrument, but what a sonata it is! Bril liant, bombastic, tender, devilishly diffi cult, structurally innovative, the nearly half-hour work is the summa of romantic piano technique, and every modern pianist must test his mettle with it to claim Liszt's mantle. Most opt for a straightforward, flashy approach, hoping to conquer the piece by sheer dexterity. Duchable, a young Frenchman with an especially rich tone...