Word: besse
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
George Gershwin's "Porgy and Bess" is first of all an exceptionally poignant story set to some of the finest music America has produced. Such famous songs as "Summertime" and the rhythmic death chants admirably depict the spirit of America's most colorful minority, the Negro. The love story of the lame beggar, Porgy, and his sultry Bess is the main theme, which is surrounded with the life in Catfish Row, its joys and sorrows, its day to day gayety and the sudden tragedies springing from a storm at sea or a crap-game brawl. In the first scene...
While Queen Bess and other principals hold the forestage, for instance, village supers clad in sackcloth creep among the trees, unable to make themselves heard through the wind as they chant: "Digging and delving, hedging and ditching, we pass. . . . Summer and winter, autumn and spring return. . . . All passes but we, all changes . . . but we remain forever the same. . . ." They remind you of Evelyn Waugh; yet in Mrs. Woolf's many-planed perspective they are also in truth the nameless human swarm...
...Robin Hood Dell one night last summer, before the Philadelphia Orchestra and Conductor Alexander Smallens, she had never sung with an orchestra. She had not been rehearsed for this concert. She had just been handed an unfamiliar arrangement of two songs from George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess. Someone had stepped on her gown and ripped it. But the chunky, dignified, dark brown Negro soprano let loose a voice for which everyone, including Conductor Smallens, predicted a future. Last week, 26-year-old Soprano Lewis made her second big-time concert appearance. For a publicity sounding board...
...poets fail, the prosers have at least the virtues of detail and traction. Sir James Barrie, Edna Ferber, Bess Streeter Aldrich, Theodore Roosevelt, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, John Galsworthy, John Donne, Abraham Lincoln, Pearl Buck, Eve Curie and some score of others all contribute their tones of voice. Few of them have much of value to say, and only two of them-Donne and Curie-say it with any nobility; but at least they mesh with their material...
Other bolters-of-the-week: Walter N. Rothschild, director of Abraham & Straus, huge Brooklyn department store; the Oregon Journal, traditionally Democratic Portland paper; Bess Streeter Aldrich, best-selling novelist and Hollywood scenarist; former Democratic Governor Charles H. Martin of Oregon, former Democratic Governor William A. Comstock of Michigan, Roman Catholic Bishop Joseph Schrembs of Cleveland...