Word: criticism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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After she won a Fulbright scholarship to study in Italy, she got her big break in 1956 when she won the title role in an Italian TV production of Butterfly. Overnight Italy claimed her. "A voice of the sweetness and brilliance of our heavens!" wrote the Carriere della Sera critic. Voted one of Italy's ten most beautiful women, Soprano Moffo was soon singing in major European opera houses, was signed by the Chicago Lyric Opera in 1957. She had turned down two previous offers from the Met on the ground that the proposed schedule demanded too much...
...York Philharmonic under Guest Conductor Thomas Schippers presented Samuel Barber's rarely performed Knoxville: Summer of 1915, set to the prose poem by James Agee, novelist and film critic who died in 1955. Conductor Schippers provided a well-balanced performance, nicely graduated to Soprano Leontyne Price's clear and controlled reading of the text. If the piece itself had a weakness, it was the tendency to overly luxuriant melody, at odds with the simplicity and the subtle rhythm of the language. Example: the line "he has coiled the hose'' had Soprano Price soaring dramatically over...
...magnificent production of a truly splendid play," Richard Watts of the Post called it "a fine drama" with "stunning performances" and Walter Kerr of the Herald Tribune felt he stood before "a sober and handsome monument" that was "enormously impressive" and, of course, "sheer theatre." Exclaimed John Mason Brown, Critic Emeritus of the Saturday Review (and Harvard, '23): "Never such greatness in the theatre--not since Mourning Becomes Electra, Green Pastures, or Our Town...
...most moving critical tribute was yet to come. The great newspaper strike was on in New York at the time, and early the morning after, all those involved in the production appeared on NBC's Dave Garroway Show to hear the reviews read to the world for the first time over the airways. "I knew about the audience," Mr. MacLeish reported later. "But I guess the first time I was really knocked over was then." In a tense hush, Garroway read aloud the considered judgement of the dean of theatrical journalists and single most commercially powerful critic in New York...
Renouncing Babbitry for Babel, Gertrude Stein was a kind of saint to some and a stunt to others. She belongs not to the ages, but an age-the '20s. Fresh from his last safari (Dylan Thomas in America), Poet-Critic John Malcolm Brinnin goes in search of this Abominable Snowoman of modern letters. What he brings back is not startling, but it is a biographically complete if critically indulgent account of the concentric odyssey of Gertrude Stein, of whom it might be said: in her beginning was her end, because she was all middle...