Word: chopin
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...George Balanchine's New York City Ballet, for which he made a string of masterpieces--among them The Cage, Afternoon of a Faun, The Goldberg Variations and, above all, Dances at a Gathering, an hour-long garland of sometimes sentimental, sometimes intensely romantic dances set to music of Chopin--that secured his standing as America's first great native-born ballet choreographer...
...Awakening, Kate Chopin...
Also on hand are performances of works the artists never recorded commercially, such as Fritz Reiner's elegant, pastoral reading of Brahms' Symphony No. 2 and the lyrical and propulsive performance of Chopin's Concerto No. 1 by Bruno Walter and Arthur Rubinstein, who, under contract to different labels, were never permitted to record together. There are David Oistrakh and Dimitri Mitropoulos in their nonpareil, rivetingly intense U.S. debut of Shostakovich's First Violin Concerto, and memorable farewells like the thrilling immolation scene from Wagner's Gotterdammerung in 1952 with Walter and Kirsten Flagstad in her last appearance with...
Benfey often dives so deep into such detail that the reappearance of Degas is a jolt: Degas, again? The cogent explanations of Degas' paintings interspersed through the text transcend this discontinuity. New Criticism be damned, Benfey glories in tying the fiction of Cable and Chopin and the art of Degas to their personal lives. Whether connecting Degas' cousins to various figures in his paintings or noting how Degas' artistic preoccupation with the unfamiliar presence of African-Americans seeped into his work, Benfey perceptively joins life...
...help us know this Degas any better. What Benfey instead introduces with his dense detail is a city peculiarly conducive to creativity. By turns menacing and nurturing, the New Orleans of the 1870s lurks behind every knotty relationship and every political machination of Degas' relatives, behind every story of Chopin's or Cable's and behind many of Degas' works...