Word: virtuosos
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Sounds rather like a Soviet football team: the Moscow Virtuosos. But what an all-star lineup. These Virtuozy Moskvy are 25 top musicians, organized into a chamber orchestra 18 months ago by Violinist Vladimir Spivakov, 35. World-renowned virtuoso himself, Spivakov alternates between bow and baton to direct his skillful charges with intensity and impishness: "Let's not be bulldozers," he will grin as the tempo speeds up during rehearsal of a Vivaldi passage. The virtuozy were the hit of Moscow's Russian Winter Festival and will play for Olympic audiences this summer. Spivakov would like to bring...
...solitary virtuoso, Picasso would from now on depend wholly on himself and his feelings. There would be no more collaborations, as with Braque. The corollary was that Picasso gave feeling itself an extraordinary, self-regarding intensity, so that the most vivid images of braggadocio and rage, castration fear and sexual appetite in modern art still belong to the Spaniard. This frankness?allied with Picasso's power of metamorphosis, which linked every image together in a ravenous, animistic vitality?is without parallel among other artists and explains his importance to a movement he never joined, surrealism...
...joyous gluttony of our other great obese director, Orson Welles--a loquacious whale who would swallow the world. In Hitchcock's films, food was often associated with guilt; it was a sign of indulgence. Hitchcock was a perverse brat buried in mounds of stolid grey flesh--our naughtiest virtuoso...
...kind of warm, richly singing sound that is characteristic of a violin. Which makes sense, since Ormandy was trained as a violinist. His father, a music-loving dentist in Budapest, wanted him to be a famous virtuoso like the Hungarian Jenö Hubay. Little Eugene obliged by making his debut at seven and touring Europe in his teens. But at 21, he was lured to the U.S. and then stranded by bungling promoters. Alone in New York, he was literally down to his last nickel when he landed a job in the orchestra that played between movies at the Capitol...
...most of his life since then, he has given everything to the orchestra. Several years ago, he even gave it his two violins ("not great ones like Isaac Stern's, but good ones"). It was a fitting gesture. Ormandy is a virtuoso, all right; but his father's hopes notwithstanding, it is the orchestra that has turned out to be his true instrument...