Word: concert
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...strangest musical customs in New York City. Three or four times a year, Charlotte Bergen, a wealthy recluse from Bernardsville, N.J., rents Carnegie Hall and conducts a free concert. She hires the American Symphony Orchestra and various soloists, gets out her 2-ft.-long baton and mounts the podium as maestro for the day-paying some $40,000 for the Mittyesque experience. She has no formal training in conducting. Also she is a frail woman of 81 encumbered with a heavy back brace...
...when Bergen stepped slowly out onstage and gave the downbeat for her latest concert, she was greeted with the respect due a serious musician both by members of the symphony and old fans in the 2,800-member, capacity audience...
...Last Waltz is a rock-concert movie−no more, no less−that could be the best such film ever made. The reasons for its success are simple. Director Martin Scorsese had the good fortune to record a remarkable concert, The Band's final outing at San Francisco's Winterland in 1976, and he had the good sense to record it with care. For once we are spared sloppy home-movie camera work and endless shots of the blissed-out fans: Scorsese and his team of cinematographers use film to enhance the music rather than smother...
Except for a couple of bland turns by Joni Mitchell and Neil Diamond, the concert is one high after another. Hawkins sets the pace with his screaming version of Bo Diddley's Who Do You Love? From there, it's on to Neil Young's Helpless, Paul Butterfield's Mystery Train, Muddy Waters' Mannish Boy and Morrison's downright ecstatic Caravan. The Band's numbers are full of lyric intricacies and haunting musical motifs. When the group joins the Staples to do The Weight on a mysterious sound stage set away from...
...film's superficial interview sections, which probably should have been dispensed with altogether. The only other defect of the movie is the final sequence, which at tempts in vain to turn The Last Waltz into a statement about the end of the rock era. More crudely made concert movies, such as Woodstock and Gimme Shelter, needed sociological ballast to carry them, but this movie does not. In The Last Waltz, the music does...