Word: bartokian
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Bellow's Henderson is a man of vast comic incongruity. Kirchner's hero (even though splendidly performed by Bass Ara Berberian) is a one-dimensional klutz. The pity is that there is so much good music in Lily - the Bartokian orchestral evocation of the jungle, the sweet, pristine chants of the natives, the often amusing coloratura chirping of Lily (Susan Belling...
...Smiling Phases, it is a hard-chugging blues-rock outfit with a fillip of modern jazz. In Blues-Part II, it is a modern jazz combo with a streak of contemporary classical dissonance. In Variations on a Theme by Erik Satie, it is a chamber ensemble with pastoral flutes, Bartokian brass and a buzz of electronic sound effects...
Both soloist and conductor Yannatos inadequately articulated the Bartokian transitions between tempo energico and tempo rubato. This was especially noticeable in the last movement, which as a result sounded perfunctory and rather episodic. The orchestra's strings and winds usually produced an opaque sound lacking inner luster, but the brass sonorously performed those resplendent tutti passages which hint of the later Concerto for Orchestra...
Baldwin's Piano Quartet (1957) was a single, balanced movement in C-sharp. Solidly constructed, it had many varied sonorities and not a few Bartokian turns. I was a bit disturbed by the unrelievedly grim and anguished cerebration that the music betrays. I also question the wisdom of starting a quartet with such a lengthy duet for violin and 'cello (which almost guarantees that the flute, being cold, will enter out of tune) and of inserting such a long piano solo in the middle: both the players and the audience will feel cheated. I must single out Lawrence Lesser...
...writing a slow movement (which often trips up even the best-established composers). Frederic Rzewski '58's Sonata for Violin and Piano was most successful in the fast outer movements. The first movement, in a modified sonata-form with a bit too much stop-and-go, adopted a Bartokian brutality and approach to dissonance; and the finale dared to end softly with an effective pizzicato and staccato section. Rzewski failed to realize, however, that the bottom range of the violin is easily covered up by too heavy a piano accompaniment. And his piano texture tended to fall into two extremes...