Word: commissar
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
After a concert at U.C.L.A.'s first International Music Festival, frail, limping Igor Stravinsky, 78, was greeted by the Soviet delegation. Although one of the visitors had been a Stalinist cultural commissar when Stravinsky was blasted as a "decadent bourgeois," the meeting became a chattering, congenial gabfest, and the famed composer was invited to make his first visit to his native land since he left in 1914. Stravinsky tentatively accepted, but as his wife explained, "He is worried that he will become too emo tional when he returns to Russia...
...walloping them with a variety of drumsticks. Offstage, Argentine Composer Mauricio Kagel tape-recorded snatches of the performance, played them back while Tudor and friend banged on. After more such pyrotechnics, Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire sounded almost romantic. At concert's end Keleman waited nervously for the commissar's reaction. Schoenberg, said Vucinic, was merely a "hybrid"-a musical petit bourgeois. "I prefer the outright revolutionary techniques," Keleman sighed with relief. Before the festival ended, the surprising official response had started the hottest rumor in the Yugoslav musical world: the Communist Party itself may commission an electronic...
...chamber works by France's Parrenin Quartet, an opera by Germany's Werner Egk. The tone of the festival reflected Tito's promise of a free hand, but Chief Organizer Milko Keleman, 37, an instructor in composition at Zagreb Conservatory, was understandably anxious when Cultural Relations Commissar Drago Vucinic showed up for a concert of electronic works played by the Cologne Ensemble for New Music...
...AMERICAN COMMISSAR (477 pp.)-Sandor Voros-Chilton...
...famed 1945 essay, The Yogi and the Commissar, Author Arthur Koestler contrasted their ways of coping with the world-the commissar trying to change his environment, the yogi trying to change himself. Having qualified as an expert on the commissar's way of doing things (he resigned from the Communist Party in 1938), Hungarian-born Author Koestler, 55, journeyed to India and Japan last year to investigate the yogi's. He came back with a cargo of provocative conclusions that are causing controversy in Britain around his new book, The Lotus and the Robot, to be published...