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CELPIP Practice Reading: Reading for Information ID: #63099 Easy Oscar Peterson: a Montreal pianist, composer and teacher

Read the following passage.

A. Oscar Peterson was born on August 15, 1925, in Little Burgundy, a neighbourhood of Montreal. His father, a porter with the Canadian Pacific Railway, believed in musical education, so each of his children learned the piano. Oscar started at the age of five and also learned the trumpet, but an illness that affected his lungs ended his trumpet playing, and after that he focused on the piano alone. His older sister Daisy was his first teacher. At 14, he won a national talent contest for amateurs, and this led to his own weekly radio show.

B. In 1949, the producer Norman Granz heard Peterson on the radio, playing live from the Alberta Lounge in Montreal, and later became his manager. On September 18 of that year, Granz brought him onto the stage at Carnegie Hall in New York as a surprise guest at a Jazz at the Philharmonic concert. Peterson was 24, and that night began his international career. He later worked with stars such as Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie and Count Basie. Not everyone admired his flawless technique, though. Some felt his playing was too clean to be jazz, and in 1969 a French reviewer wrote that he lacked a deep sense of the blues.

C. Peterson was also a composer. In 1962 he wrote Hymn to Freedom, a piece that people around the world soon took up as an anthem of the civil rights movement; Harriette Hamilton wrote words for it. His Canadiana Suite, from 1963, has eight movements that describe different regions of Canada. Teaching mattered to him too. In 1960 he opened the Advanced School of Contemporary Music in Toronto, and in the 1980s he taught at York University, where he became chancellor in 1991.

D. In May 1993, while performing at the Blue Note club in New York, Peterson had a stroke that weakened his left hand. After about 14 months of therapy, he gave his first comeback performance at his daughter's elementary school. In later years, arthritis made him perform less often. He died at his family home in Mississauga, Ontario, on December 23, 2007. Today a statue of him, unveiled in 2010, stands at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, and in 2022 the Royal Canadian Mint issued a circulation coin in his honour.

E. Not given in any of the above paragraphs.

Decide which paragraph, A to D, has the information given in each statement below. Select E if the information is not given in any of the paragraphs.

- 1.
A sculpture of the pianist can be seen in Ottawa.

- 2.
An older sibling was the one who pushed him to enter the national competition.

- 3.
A chest sickness made him give up one of the two instruments he was learning.

- 4.
He set up a school for music students in Toronto.

- 5.
As a young teenager, he beat other non-professional players in a nationwide competition.

- 6.
He recorded with Ella Fitzgerald more often than with any other singer.

- 7.
One of his pieces became a song for the fight for equal rights.

- 8.
At the famous New York concert hall, the audience did not expect him to appear.

- 9.
Some listeners felt his style was so neat that it did not sound like real jazz.

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