the three careers of Vida Chenoweth

That is Vida Chenoweth; the picture was taken when she was in the second of her three careers. Her first career was as a pioneer of the marimba as an instrument for classical music. Chenoweth may have been the first person to play the marimba in concert at Carnegie Hall, in 1959, when she performed the world premiere of Robert Kurka’s Concerto for Marimba. (Kurka was a highly promising composer who had died two years earlier, of leukemia, at the age of 39.) Reviewing the performance for the New York Herald Tribune, Jay S. Harrison wrote, Mr. Kurka located innumerable means of displaying the marimba at its best, and his concerto is everywhere lively and zestful. It is mostly diatonic, filled with smart and leaping tunes, and it exploits the agility of its soloist to the utmost. Fortunately, Miss Chenoweth is a real-life virtuoso who, no matter what the demands made on her, missed not a note and managed, further, to wring every possible shade of sonority from the wooden keys laid out…