Ezio Pinza
How many Classical Music Artist can you name, who have had successful film or other careers?
Watching a film on TV this morning entitled “Strictly Dishonorable”, starring Ezio Pinza and Janet Leigh(yes, lovers, and what a glaring age gap).
What impresses me most about the film is Pinza’s performance: amazingly convincing.
He was such a great basso, and had such a wonderful operatic career, it seems remarkable to me that he could come over in a a different medium so well.
How many of the great classical music artists – singers or instrumentalists – who can you think of, that achieved noteable success in another arena?
Alberich
Composer Charles Ives was a very successful insurance executive. He was very good at finding creative ways to structure life-insurance policies for wealthy people and laid the foundation for what became modern estate-planning.
Borodin was a noted chemist.
Cesar Cui was a general in the Russian military, a professor and the author of several textbooks on military fortifications.
Rimsky-Korsakov spent the early part of his life as an officer in the Russian navy before becoming a professor of composition.
Ernest Chausson was a lawyer, but how successful he would have been as a lawyer and as a composer will never be fully known since he accidently killed himself on a runaway bicycle.
Oscar Levant was a successful composer/pianist that appeared in numerous movies and became an early talk-show host.
Musician, composer, teacher.
Ezio Pinza – Some Enchanted Evening (best sound quality)
