Word: ayrton
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Bavicchi's Sonata for violin and Piano (1956) received a well-nigh definitive performance at the hands of Ayrton Pinto and Jacqueline Young. The three movement work is admirably written from the stand point of idiomatic instrumental technique. But the outside movements, despite their fast tempo and apparent busyness, indulged in series of effects and cliches, with a resulting lack of cohesion; the finale seemed to be a chain of rousing stretta-like conclusions without a beginning or a middle. Slow movements are normally a major stumbling block for modern composers, even the established ones, but here Bavicchi had much...
Pablo Picasso has been the most controversial artist of the 20th Century. He has been praised to heaven (Mexican Painter Diego Rivera: "I have never believed in God, but I believe in Picasso") and damned to hell (British Critic Michael Ayrton: "He is the archangel Lucifer"). He has also been the century's most protean artist, moving vigorously from one new style and outlook to another. Latterly, though still attracting attention, he has produced less & less consternation, largely because the world has got more used...
...Ayrton's best work concerns "the greatest human tragedy, the failure to communicate." In Mirror Image, a young man stares at a silent girl whose unhappy face is reflected in a mirror over his shoulder...
...Mute, a sad-eyed man holds out his hands in silent frustration. In The Indomitable Bather, Ayrton catches the humor and pathos of a more familiar subject, "a small boy who finds it bloody cold in the water, but his passionate desire to stay there is greater than the physical discomfort. He feels violently about it, but doesn't say anything, just stands there shivering to death, poor little blighter...
Sympathy aside, Ayrton patterns his pictures as rigidly as a tile floor. "There's an abstract under every Ayrton," he says. But his abstractions are well disguised. "I refuse to accept formal equivalents of a triangle for a breast, or two dots for an eye. I have no desire to gouge a hole through a woman's figure. Trouble is I'm so progressive I'm reactionary...