Word: critics
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Musicians, like other artists, occasionally regard themselves as pioneers whose wagon train to the mountains of truth and beauty is encircled by whooping savages : the critics. Last week New York Philharmonic Wagon Master Leonard Bernstein, whose hide has been punctured by as many arrows as any, leveled his Winchester at a particular pesky redskin. Asked what he thought of music critics by Reporter Martin Agronsky on NBC-TV's Look Here show, Bernstein replied: "I have come to take them not very seriously any more. When you do get mad at a critic is when he is a self...
Then, without mentioning his name. Bernstein singed the war bonnet of New York Herald Tribune Critic Paul Henry Lang, 56, professor of musicology at Columbia University, who had scolded Maria Meneghini Callas and Tenor Daniele Barioni for singing flat in their first-act duet in La Traviata (TIME, Feb. 17). The pitch was dropping so fast at one point, Critic Lang had written, that it seemed as if the singers were about to land in the conductor's lap. Bernstein's complaint about this display of "great authority and chilling wit": Barioni was indeed...
...ideally suited to the menacing, feline tension of her carefully calculated movements. Her opening-night performance was received with warm applause and scattered smart-aleck brays of "Little, go home!" By the second performance, she had her audience cheering after both her big first-act arias. Concluded one influential critic: "The debut came perhaps a bit too early, but it might well be the beginning of a great stage career...
Vienna-born Critic Keller, 38, a violinist and teacher, wrote verbal criticism exclusively for years before he decided that words failed him. They simply created "unbearable divisions," he says, "between music critics and music lovers." His Mozart analysis was hailed by word-bound, cliche-tied British critics as "a most important departure." Keller is now working on an analysis of Beethoven's String Quartet, Opus 95. Says he: "Most of what passes for musical criticism today is sheer bunk; I think functional analysis will bring about the twilight of the twaddle." He is not disturbed by the thought that...
Died. Charles Langbridge Morgan, 64, English author of mystic-tinged novels (The Fountain, Sparkenbroke) and plays (The River Line, The Burning Glass), essayist (Liberties of the Mind) and longtime London Times drama critic (1926-39); of a bronchial ailment; in London...