Leo Smit was a remarkable musician; deeply knowledgeable and endowed with a prodigious ability at the piano. A master class with Smit represented a combination of learning things you never thought you'd know about music with the sheer joy of basking in his great musicianship. Smit was connected at the highest levels of the American musical scene; he was a close friend to Stravinsky, Copland, Bernstein, Stokowski, Lukas Foss, and countless others. Yet he never enjoyed a glittering concert career as a pianist. Smit received ...
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Leo Smit was a remarkable musician; deeply knowledgeable and endowed with a prodigious ability at the piano. A master class with Smit represented a combination of learning things you never thought you'd know about music with the sheer joy of basking in his great musicianship. Smit was connected at the highest levels of the American musical scene; he was a close friend to Stravinsky, Copland, Bernstein, Stokowski, Lukas Foss, and countless others. Yet he never enjoyed a glittering concert career as a pianist. Smit received most of the top honors composers are eligible for in the United States at one time or another, but as a composer he felt sidelined by the wide adoption of serial techniques in the 1950s and its resultant marginalization of the tonally based, neo-classic idiom in which he worked so naturally and well. Toward the end of his life, Smit got a second wind as a composer, and within the three short years between 1988 and 1991, he composed an astounding 76 settings from poems of Emily...
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