Word: angeles
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...François is a spacious work of musical architecture, a cathedral in sound that generates a sense of timelessness or, more precisely, of time suspended. It unfolds at a stately pace, illustrating episodes from the life of the saint (the preaching to the birds, the visitation by an angel, the receiving of the stigmata), animated by the whole range of Messiaen's musical vocabulary. Strong, sharply defined motifs are derived from such disparate sources as bird song (the composer is a lifelong ornithologist and notated some of his avian themes at Assisi), plain chant and the whole-tone...
...fifth scene, an angel (Soprano Christiane Eda-Pierre) visits the saint (Bass-Baritone José Van Dam) as he is praying. "You speak with God through music," the angel sings, no doubt voicing Messiaen's own conception of his artistic role. "He will reply to you through music. Let the secrets, the secrets of glory open." As the angel begins to play a heavenly viol, an Ondes Martenot sounds a deceptively ingenuous melody. At once oddly angular but celestially serene, it floats above a soft C major chord in the strings and a wordless chorus. The moment...
...figure of rank awe, and the rhythm of that poetry is Pacino's. Most of the large cast is fine; Michelle Pfeiffer is better. The cool, druggy Wasp woman who does not fit into Tony's world, Pfeiffer's Elvira is funny and pathetic, a street angel ready at any whim to float away on another cocaine cloud...
DIED. Mother Pasqualina Lehnert, 89, austere German nun who, as the de facto secretary, housekeeper and confidante of Pope Pius XII, was called the Pope's Guardian Angel; of a brain hemorrhage; in Vienna. Mother Pasqualina met Archbishop Eugenio Pacelli in 1918 when he was papal nuncio in Munich, moved with him to the Vatican and, after he was elected Pope in 1939, became the channel through which outsiders had to pass to gain access to the ascetic, withdrawn Pontiff...
...space as he lavishes on his recipe for the perfect dry martini. Perhaps he is not being coy when he avers that his real life was in dreams, so many of which surfaced as blunt, seductive imagery in films from L'Age d'Or to The Exterminating Angel...