Word: bartok
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...BARTOK: SONATA FOR TWO PIANOS AND PERCUSSION; BRAHMS: "HAYDN" VARIATIONS (CBS). Conductor Georg Solti hits the keyboard, joining Pianist Murray Perahia in a rousing pair of masterworks for two pianos...
...electric guitars, and the Chinese-American Lucia Hwong brings a cross-cultural sensibility to bear on her wistful New Age musings. But although Davis' orchestral music may contain improvisatory sections reminiscent of jazz, it is carefully controlled and expertly planned. Imagine Ellington's lush, massed sonorities propelled by Bartok's vigorous whiplash rhythms and overlaid with the seductive percussive haze of the Balinese gamelan orchestra, and you will have an idea of what both the Concerto and Notes from the Underground sound like...
...face had a cartoon-like directness: big mustache, Magic Marker eyebrows, oversize cigar. Yet few TV entertainers were a more intriguing set of contradictions than Ernie Kovacs. A boisterous cutup who relished tacky props and low-down slapstick, yet a closet highbrow who orchestrated comedy to Bartok and Beethoven. A talk-show pioneer, yet the creator of a classic half an hour that included not a single line of dialogue. A TV "star" who never had a network series that lasted more than two seasons, yet who influenced video comedy for the next two decades, from Laugh-In to David...
...subtitle, America's Magic Mountain, refers to Thomas Mann's novel of a sanatorium as microcosm. Fair enough; this lively history reflects a galaxy of medical and literary incidents. The cast is worth the entrance fee: W. Somerset Maugham and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walker Percy and Bela Bartok, and even Gerald and Sara Murphy, the '20s couple who decided that living well was the best revenge. They all had one thing in common: tuberculosis, and the refuge in upstate New York offered the promise of recovery. Sometimes it was illusory. Bartok flourished at Saranac but later succumbed to the disease...
...Pulitzer Prize for Music and should have won. The concerto, although on a smaller, less ambitious scale, is typically eclectic in its welding of disparate musical materials into a distinctive, stylish whole. There is a vigorous first movement, which tips its hat to the opening of the Bartok Second Violin Concerto, a haunting, elegaic slow movement inspired by a mournful tune Bolcom heard whistled on the New York City subway and a riotous finale that is an homage to the late jazz fiddler Joe Venuti. Bright and accessible, the concerto is steeped in a popular idiom. "You don't have...