Word: bravura
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...ballet is a bravura double pas de deux using four of the company's top dancers. The dramatic Brazilian prima ballerina Marcia Haydee is partnered with the ebullient American Richard Cragun. Joyce Cuoco, who was discovered at Radio City Music Hall, dances with Egon Madsen from Denmark. They appear on an empty, side-lit stage in salmon-pink Lycra leotards shining like a second and highly sensual mermaid skin. Hans Werner Henze's Third Symphony, in turn compressed, then explosive, provides the cerebral score...
...even wait to complete this book before trying to reconstruct himself. In My Life as a Man, he switches persona in mid-volume. The result is superb as a performance and uneven as a book (or rather, two books). It leads, finally, to some questions. Does a kind of bravura restlessness now not only characterize Roth but constitute the heart of his talent? Has his own range of style-an actor's gift, a writer's curse-got the better...
Ballet audiences being what they are, bravura showpieces for male dancers normally bring down the house. The audience response to Nebrada's Percussion for Six-Men seemed a trifle restrained, perhaps because this abstract exercise in display of technique called upon the dancers to go about their leaping trickery with more than a touch too much of preening narcissism. A case in point: one soloist performs a legato variation delicately poised on tippytoe. The display might have been aesthetically more attractive had he been a girl, or had the performance taken place at the Continental Baths...
...Anna Bolena. I Puritani was the last opera Bellini wrote before he died in 1835 at age 33. Its graceful and ornate vocal writing actually suits Sills' light voice better than Donizetti's heavyweight scores. This is music to float jewels on. Sills' succession of bravura displays in the mad scene ("Qui la voce sua soave ") is like a string of emeralds, each deeper and more lustrous in color. She enters from a high rear balcony, floats dreamily down a long ramp, chats nuttily with her father ("Who are you?"), begs for her lover's return...
...Opera orchestra for the Dorian, is a survivor of the original unit) have entailed a search for players of a very special type. Each, like exuberant Clarinetist Jerry Kirkbride, must be of soloist caliber yet have the temperament that prizes subtle, intimate musical expression over the splashy sound and bravura display of solo and orchestral work. Each, whether he is naturally lighthearted, like Flutist Karl ("Fritz") Kraber, or intensely dedicated, like Oboist Charles Kuskin, must have the empathy to take a tempo from a nod or a cue from a raised eyebrow...