Monday, March 3, 2014

Tuesday Turbo Boost

Itzhak Perlman, hijacked from one of his albums for YouTube,




Leila Josefiwicz, 1991.


If you listen to both of these performances you will note that about a minute of the Praeludium is missing from Leila's video. I seriously doubt that she played it that way, and I think it was dropped on the cutting room floor to abbreviate the piece for the unwashed masses. Anyhow, watch her anyway, to see the energy that a violinist must put into a piece like this. Leila was only thirteen years old when this was recorded in 1991. Fritz Kreisler had a successful career going in America when the Great War began, and he belonged to a regiment in his native Austria. What would you do? He went home and fought Russians until he was mustered out due to illness. That was OK until the Lusitania was torpedoed, and then he became an evil Hun in the eyes of America. His friend John McCormick stuck by him, and eventually his fans came back.

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