Word: critics
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...great victory" at its premiere, Shostakovich's Ninth Symphony was described last week by the Central Committee's Culture and Life as a "playful and fanciful trifle . . . sharp and screaming" and hopelessly lacking in "warm, ideological conviction." It was probably, conceded the young composer's critic charitably, the fault of undue influence by expatriate Russian Composer Stravinsky, "an artist without a fatherland or deep ethical principles." But jilted Genius Shostakovich, hard at work on an opera crammed with ideology, declined an offer to conduct in Boston...
...Arnot Robertson, BBC film critic and prestigious woman novelist (Four Frightened People, Three Came Unarmed), took arms against MGM, which had urged BBC to get rid of her because her criticisms were "... harmful to the film industry." Her counterattack: a suit for "reasonable" damages, and a demand for an unqualified apology...
...took the air. The Paganini Quartet (so named because their cello, viola, and two violins are Stradivarii once owned by the great violinist, Niccolo Paganini) played Beethoven and Debussy at a brisker than usual clip, but the music was warm and dramatic. Wrote the San Francisco Chronicle's critic, Alfred Frankenstein: "Perhaps never before has one heard a string quartet with so rich, mellow and superbly polished a tone...
...proud of its young (42) president, who was only 33 when he got the job; of its flying field and its curricular course in practical aeronautics, soon to be resumed after a wartime lapse; of its seven-year-old, widely respected literary quarterly, The Kenyon Review, edited by Poet-Critic John Crowe Ransom, a member of the college faculty...
...seemed as though the prize jury (a museum director, a critic, an artist) liked a little of everything. The prizewinners included Abraham Rattner's Picassoesque, blazing red and yellow Place of Darkness; Gregorio Prestopino's rock-solid study of a train stalled in a flood; Sydney Laufman's impressionistic Road in the Woods, which looked as though it had been daubed on with dirty cotton; Gladys Rockmore Davis' sugar-sweet ballet painting, Pink Tights. Somehow the jury agreed that an almost unknown Californian named Boris Deutsch deserved the $2,500 first prize-for his ragged, muddy...