Word: burtonizing
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
CORRESPONDENTS: Joelle Attinger (Chief), Paul A. Witteman (Deputy), Suzanne Davis (Deputy, Administration); Chief Political Correspondent: Michael Kramer Washington Contributing Editor: Hugh Sidey Senior Correspondents: David Aikman, Jonathan Beaty, Sandra Burton, Richard Hornik, J. Madeleine Nash, Richard N. Ostling, Bruce van Voorst, Jack E. White Washington: Dan Goodgame, Ann Blackman, James Carney, Michael Duffy, Julie Johnson, J.F.O. McAllister, Jay Peterzell, Suneel Ratan, Elaine Shannon, Ann M. Simmons, Dick Thompson, Mark Thompson, Adam Zagorin, Melissa August New York: Janice C. Simpson, Edward Barnes, Massimo Calabresi, John F. Dickerson Boston: Sam Allis Chicago: Jon D. Hull, Elizabeth Taylor, Wendy Cole Detroit: William McWhirter...
...Burton, a British television director who had known and worked with Lenny -- to use the inevitable diminutive -- since 1959, had full access to the Bernstein family archives. He marshals his narrative's facts impressively, but, alas, he provides little perspective or commentary on a man whose character cries out for both...
...Burton, however, is content to merely enumerate the events along the way of this amazing odyssey. From time to time, the author permits himself the liberty of an observation -- referring to a 1940 letter from Bernstein to fellow gay composer David Diamond, in which Bernstein claims he has forsaken sex for art, Burton notes, "There is something uncharacteristically hysterical about his self-pitying tone" -- but such analytical moments are lost in the flood of numbing chronological detail...
...sophisticated evaluation of Bernstein's music is also missing from Leonard Bernstein. Burton usually cannot find his own words to describe a piece, so most of the critical burden is borne by contemporary reviewers whom the author quotes without qualification. To describe Bernstein's neurotic, distasteful 1983 opera A Quiet Place, Burton relies on an early statement of the composer's: "If I can write one real moving American opera that any American can understand (and one that is, notwithstanding, a serious musical work) I shall be a very happy man." Writes Burton: "It had taken him 35 years...
...credit, Burton faces up to Bernstein's manipulative and relentless sexual predations without sensationalizing them, as Joan Peyser did in her 1987 biography, Bernstein. But here too he withholds judgments: the spectacle of Bernstein and his daughter Jamie both falling in love nearly simultaneously with the German pianist Justus Frantz surely calls for amplification. The moving finger, though, having writ, moves on -- to the 1973 Norton Lectures at Harvard...