Word: aridity
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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These are rich times for American opera. After years of prospecting in the wilderness of arid academic styles and played-out compositional veins, composers may finally have hit an operatic mother lode. Within the past year, the Metropolitan Opera has staged two successful world premieres by Americans, John Corigliano's The Ghosts of Versailles and Philip Glass's The Voyage. This month, through Nov. 24, Lyric Opera of Chicago is striking pay dirt with William Bolcom's McTeague. Eureka...
Consequently, although Basquiat's images look quite vivid and sharp when one first sees them, and though from time to time he could produce an intriguing passage of spiky marks or a brisk clash of blaring color, the work quickly settles into the visual monotony of arid overstylization. Its relentless fortissimo is wearisome. (An exception is some of the works on paper, which attain a delicacy of placement and interval absent from the paintings...
...rather than vulgarize. Pieces are shorter than before but cut deeper -- especially 'News from Hell,' concerning the events in Sarajevo by new contributor Anna Husarska. Yet tradition has not been entirely scrapped: see Roger Angell's valedictory to Fay Vincent, recently decapitated commissioner of baseball. Miraculously, after a long arid spell the cartoons are funny again -- particularly those by Lee Lorenz, Danny Shanahan and Leo Cullum ('This is my husband, Greg, and Greg's jacket from a previous marriage...
...chip on its shoulder towards any centralized authority. And during much of the past 500 years, or ever since Phillip II established Madrid as the Spanish capital, much of Barcelona's ire has been directed towards her sister city sprawling in the middle of the peninsula's arid plains...
Auden had it right about Spain: "That arid square, that fragment nipped off from hot/ Africa, soldered so crudely to inventive Europe." One thinks of this while visiting "Al-Andalus: The Art of Islamic Spain," the new | contribution to the 500th anniversary of Columbus by New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art. For a long time, Spain and North Africa were...