Word: criticism
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...Santa Fe Opera last week, two important premieres demonstrated just how potent eclecticism can be. John Eaton's The Tempest, with a libretto after Shakespeare by Music Critic Andrew Porter of The New Yorker, is a rich blend of Renaissance music, jazz and electronics that is surrounded by an uncompromisingly modernist microtonal framework. Another happily eclectic work, Hans Werner Henze's The English Cat, takes an anthropomorphic tale by English Playwright Edward Bond, based on Balzac, and sets it to music that freely ranges from kitschy consonance to acerbic dissonance. Both operas have the kind of unquestioned stylistic integrity that...
...five smartest guys in the world," says one Justice official proudly. He is also the author of scholarly books on the history of bribery and the Catholic Church's teaching on contraception, though this clearly counts less than the fact that he is an articulate critic of abortion. "This is the most self-conscious ideological selection process since the first Roosevelt Administration," contends Sheldon Goldman, a University of Massachusetts professor who has closely examined the Reagan nominations. Conservative supporters of the President do not deny it. Patrick McGuigan of the Free Congress Research and Education Foundation claims that the only...
World's Fair is not a happy book. The dreariness of the '30s and the strains of family life appear to have had a bad effect on Edgar's style. He is either too terse or verbosely academic, as if the boy grew up to be a literary critic rather than a novelist. Evocations of his time and place are frequently bloated with pretentious prose: "In my own consciousness I was not a child. When I was alone, not subject to the demands of the world, I had the opportunity to be the aware sentient being I knew myself...
...what gifted children barely survive in order to write about them with inspired resentment. Loving memoirs tend to rank second only to corporate histories of tool-and-die companies as the kind of book any reader can put down. In the face of this, Wilfrid Sheed, a witty, acerbic critic and novelist (Office Politics, Transatlantic Blues), has managed to compose a mellow family chronicle that turns literary and psychological tradition on its head. This is more than a memoir; it is an occasion...
...collection of essays with some recipes. The London-based food writer has gathered 35 years of provocative thoughts about French, Italian and other Mediterranean cooking, along with perceptive, literate pieces on English cuisine, all of which have appeared in assorted publications. To those who suggest that food critics spend too much time carping, David answers, "Does a theatre critic offer his readers indiscriminate praise of every play . . . he has seen during the week . . .? To be attacked for declining to say, whether in private or in public, that in the world of gastronomy, French, English, or any other, all was always...