08 Feb 2012 | 15 Shevat 5772
MusicPublished: 03 February 2012
Anew CD celebrates composers who rebelled against Soviet oppression — Alfred Schnittke, Joseph Achron, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Arvo Part. The album “Sounds of Defiance,” released this week, features star-violinist-to-be Yevgeny Kutic, 26. The piano is played by Timothy Bozarth.
“It is their unyielding faith that provided these composers with a powerful weapon against tyranny — defiance,” Kutik has written.
Kutik’s family fled Soviet-controlled Belarus when he was five after experiencing pressures that impinged on their public, private, and religious lives.
WorldPublished: 20 January 2012
In some ways, the 44-year-old violinist Joshua Bell seems to be a reincarnation of 19th century pianist Franz Liszt. Not just a superb musician, but colorful and glamorous to boot. A showman.
What Bell does not seem to be is another Jascha Heifetz — austere, cold, and remote. Heifetz tried to be perfectly immobile while he played; Bell has been criticized for moving around too much. And can anyone imagine the haughty Heifetz donning a baseball cap and playing for passersby in a subway station in Washington, D.C., just for the fun of it?
Many gifted artists have died all too young, their enormous promise not entirely fulfilled. Among the most famous: the poets Keats and Shelley, composers Mozart and Schubert, singers Fritz Wunderlich and Kathleen Ferrier, and violinists Ginette Neveu and Michael Rabin.
Thursday, Jan. 19, was the 40th anniversary of Rabin’s tragic death at the age of 35. His authorized biography — authorized by his surviving older sister, Francine — was just revised and updated: “Michael Rabin: America’s Virtuoso Violinist,” by Anthony Feinstein, professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto.
