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| | Classical Net - Composers - Levant |
 | | For Oscar Levant, his own music has been silenced by his presumed character: the acerbic crank on the Jack Paar Show; the Broadway showman and Hollywood star; the author of preposterously acute and funny books; the radio and television ringmaster; the concert pianist and Gershwin specialist. |
 | | At the Fifth Avenue High School he came under the wing of instructor Oscar Demmler, a mentor who would take his students to the recitals of Paderewski, the concerts of Stokowski, and invite Oscar to accompany him in violin and piano repertoire, all this by the age of twelve. |
 | | Oscar Levant was to live another fifteen years, addicted and repeatedly hospitalized, fitfully active in radio and television, writing The Memoirs Of An Amnesiac and The Unimportance of Being Oscar, increasingly reclusive, and passing away in Beverly Hills on 14 August 1972. |
| www.classical.net /music/comp.lst/acc/levant.html (2977 words) |
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